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rfredekenter.bsky.social
RobertFredeKenter
@rfredekenter.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1.2K following 500 posts
Writer visual artist publisher. Now Available IN THE BLUEPRINT OF HER IRIS (Ice Floe Press, 2025), FATHER TECTONIC (ETHELZINE Press,2025). In tons of journals incl Winged Moon, Otoliths, Storms Journal, Pissoir, Cable Street, ballast, Acropolis, Grain, ARC
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rfredekenter.bsky.social
From @pissoir.bsky.social one of 3 poems published in their latest issue / a @salopress.bsky.social production.
excerpt of my prose poem "Year's End, London, 2018" "It was a season where/we all suffer through notions strung together on wrist/pendants, dreaming vivid textiles woven into blankets, /fraying. The children were experiencing heartache, loss, and/ trauma. "
October 28, 2025 at 10:59 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
My mother’s family came to N. America to escape autocrats, dictators, pogroms, fascism(s). That she would appreciate NO KINGS Day falls on her birthday today, I have no doubt. Happy Birthday Helen🕯️/& a mother poem of mine published
@blackboughpoetry.bsky.social first anthology, 2nd
#SilverBranches.
TIDAL Tide of blunt force pain recedes So simple this territory of remission What to ask of the preternatural light at shore an icon of driftwood This is how I float towards my mother Picture of my mother as a young girl in Halifax, N.S.
October 18, 2025 at 6:55 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Author Note: I put these fragments together as a stanza in a poem, visual sequence of juxtapositions, breath, beats & musical tone, exploring links between history, gender rights, housing, impact & reach of capitalism/dystopia
#hybrid #vispo #poetry #resist #excerpt
icefloepress.net/acts-of-resi...
A poem erasure in yellow and rust-red with text -- evoking factories, brick walls, industrial piping etc. text include: "three-month waiting period workers must have a work permit upon arrival similar to health inspections of housing typically carried protections It is Man A glitch collage of motherboards and city blocks, using various elements, microscopic and enlarged with the text "disseminate" fractured. grey, black, ruby red, forest green, royal blue, pink, yellow are some of the fragments of colour blocks and glitch elements. An excerpt from a erasure/redaction sculpture including wood, tiny rectangular stamps, circled words and asemic drawing... from the obituary of a Canadian immigrant woman who was written of as being "introverted", "deeply" "born", "volunteered" "from "her family" primarily a monochrome drone piece inside the larger work.
October 14, 2025 at 9:15 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
DESIRE PARTY (a visual poem) (2021/2025) (c) Robert Frede Kenter

#asemic #glitch #vispo #fields #rectangles #art
Black and white collage of various abstracted elements: bodies, faces, landscapes) a visual poem called DESIRE PARTY, created in 2021 & completed in 2025. 12 scenes from a nightmare. (C) Robert Frede Kenter.
October 11, 2025 at 1:09 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Flower Quartet (2025) (c) Robert Frede Kenter
#images #series #quartet #vispo #visualpoem #magic #colour #dreamgalaxy #artofBsky #patterns #eco #repetition #myth
Four flowers (same flower) for colour schemes pale pink, green-beige, shades of blue, shades of red, four rectangular blocks on page centred, descending order or any direction you wish to view them. visual poem with mythic overtones by Robert Frede Kenter (c) 2025.
October 10, 2025 at 1:40 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
L.A (2023) (c) Robert Frede Kenter #photo #photoart #image #LosAngeles #photographsofbluesky #street #queer #lgbtqia
@icefloepress.bsky.social @mjseyesopened.bsky.social
Photo by Robert Frede Kenter (2023) Los Angeles. A white low rise industrial-loft building/ storefront/ mural of red leaves, a fish, flowers. Caption red ink, "When you're queer, you're family"
October 3, 2025 at 8:01 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
In the Blueprint of Her Iris available for pre-order at Ice Floe Press website. Help support @icefloepress.bsky.social & acquire a copy of what writer/translator/memoirist @jpiudik.bsky.social calls "a third space where we luxuriate in the brilliant energy born of conversation between text & image"
Cover of In the Blueprint of Her Iris. A cosmic galaxy of shards of glass and ephemeral outerspace clouds with a floating flower petal. Designed by Robert Frede Kenter. Available from Ice Floe Press now.
September 8, 2025 at 1:10 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
from a @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social Introduce yourself Swansea style. Blessings to @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social & the crew keeping it alive & real in dark times. #poetry #showcase (poem from my early pamphlet OFFICE CRIME). #PoetsOfBluesky #poetrycommunity
I TRIED SO HARD TO PLEASE YOU I'd always run from beauty the way you fled the rain. But now I want you back like the echoing refrain of the restaurant song. You'll only drift so far before you come back to me. The doctor disrobed you with their theories. You were so confused, it was dreadful, like a marionette without strings. (pale blue paper / blue-black ink) Author photo Robert Frede Kenter BIO: Robert Frede Kenter, born Hamilton, Ontario (the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas) is a widely published writer, visual artist & publisher of Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net) A 4-time Pushcart Prize & BOTN nominee, Robert studied performance & art at Antioch College (Ohio) & experimental theatre in NYC with Wooster Group & Talking Band. Recently in journals ballast, winged moon, ABR, wasteland, heterodox haiku, storms journal, black bough (Silver Branches series), Cable Street, Watch Your Head, Pissoir, Anthropocene, Feral, Burning House, Otoliths and many more. Select anthologies: Capitalism is a Death Cult (Sunday Mornings), Speaking in Tongues (Steel Incisors), Interpoem #1 & 2 (Sedserio), Glisk and Glimmer (Sidhe Press). Select books: Father Tectonic (Ethel Zine, 2025), Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press, 2019). Soc media X: @frede_kenter, IG: icefloe22, r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, Bluesky: @rfredekenter.bsky.social‬.
September 5, 2025 at 1:06 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Magic Bullet Ray Gun Partisan (c) 2025 Robert Frede Kenter (excerpt from a forthcoming collaborative collection).
@icefloepress.bsky.social
#collage #glitch #visualpoem #colors #rectangles #asemic #glitch #bleed #vispo
A glitch color field constructed collage vispo work: on left dark red, orange, green, purple fusing rectangles a landscape of color bleeds on yellow background / on the right a swirling abstract of cloud-asemic markings in black white and tones of receding pink. An excerpt from a forthcoming collaborative collection.
September 4, 2025 at 10:47 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Closing out 31 days reading 4 @sealeychallenge.bsky.social & participation in @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social drive w/ #sameerproject to raise money for Gazan people. A (2012) long poem by political/lyrical/visionary Paris-based seminal Syrian poet, Adonis (now 95). If you haven't read his work - do.🔥
Cover of Concerto al-Quds (Concerto for Jerusalem) by Adonis. trans. by Khaled Mattawa. Yale University Press (2017). Cover art by Adonis. Cover is white with red rectangle at bottom, art is a drawing (untitled) by the poet, (an expressionist abstract map with writing). from Heavenly Summary (opening poem) Barefoot, knock on her door. A prophet will open, and teach you how to march, and how to bow. A stage play directed by the all-wise, the almighty. And the Lord does this for the sake of all his children. "Here I am, a silhouette of al-Quds," cried a three-headed dummy on the stage, then exited. from AFFLICTIONS. A. Questions - Why is every atom of Palestine's ash an open wound? How does this wound/create life with the implements of death? - Is Palestine's history an autumn that has migrated beyond the season? - Why does the face of humanity wrinkle in the language of Arab leaders? And why is/this language clogged with trains that run only on dead-end tracks that never end? /And why are those tracks built by leaders who wage battle on trees and water? from Second Image Along the road there is only gold that uproots the mind, or silver that erects prison towers in air, light, and water. Law is a slave to everything except itself. Lying is the master of the universe; honor has no code. And oh how horrid your suffering, dear Sincerity!
September 1, 2025 at 5:15 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
For Day30 @sealeychallenge.bsky.social Laurie Sheck's poems shapeshift selves, where history, science & revisited myth & nature are reimagined as converging of sense/imagination. Visionary erudite longpoems & suites. A remarkable sensibility. @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social @lauriesheck.bsky.social .
Cover of Black Series poems by Laurie Sheck. A black cover with two wood/print flowers one umber the other beige on a rope like twisted stem. Published 2001, Knopf. No Printout Sundown, and the hills grow vague as if giving a secret kindness to themselves now that our human eyes can't scrutinize their properties or pillage them for solace. And it seems I am dissolving as I watch, I who am nothing more than nothing now... as the hard and cunning edges break apart, the sharp currency of day eroding, finally governed by such softness, my beggar-eyes scanning, looking for a channel that's not there. I feel the turns and counter-turns of air, a rustling as of cloth, voice-scrap, rave of wind. There's the flick of a lit match, fitful webbings of headlights up the road. A voice saying Buy one get one free. Light pulses on and off in nearby windows the way a meandering grief pauses at one place and then another as if to sip from them awhile before it pushes further on, no printout disfiguring its leaving. Branches multiply in air, gather past the window. In this, my printless feet, my eyes unambushed and unambushing, my hands...Hills, the layered darks now take you. Or have you become the ark that enwraps you, as once a girl becomes a tree, her leaves swaying in that freedom, her sudden facelessness her joy. From The Mannequins Backlit and leaning towards the street, the mannequins look almost curious, as if wondering how it feels to be complicit with the ebb and flow of light, how a face can't discern itself; its territories shift and are shadowed, a shore that wavers, its conduct ever conscripting, raw and soft with trespass. From Seaweeds We didn't know what it meant to be so savagely self-sealed. This is the relentless dream, this the admission ticket that can't be give back./As there are cardinal points that can't be change, machines that are/programmed/to do just one thing, and one thing only, as there are xeroxes of other xeroxes, lighter or darker but basically the same, as there are screens unaltered by the wishes that move through them, and scenes that can't rescind their harsh configurations,
August 31, 2025 at 10:49 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Truly remarkable book-length poem by a fav writer, Ishion Hutchinson. School of Instructions. WWI anti-war anti-imperialist, post-colonial, a hallucinatory, spectral TourDeForce. Innumerable facility in forms @sealeychallenge.bsky.social @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social My Day 29 @fsgbooks.bsky.social
Dark Green Cover with violet lettering. Ishion Hutchinson's School of Instructions. A Poem. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux (2023). Excerpt from section 1. No-man's-land-Everyman's mud. And the smoking flax mud. Dysentery mud. Septic sore mud. Hogpen mud. Nephritis mud. Constipated mud. Faith mud. Sandfly fever mud. Rat mud. Sheol mud. Ir-ha-cheres mud. Ague mud. Asquith mud. Parade mud. Scabies mud. Mumps mud. Memra mud. Pneumonia mud. Mene mene tekel upharsin mud. Civil war mud. And darkness and worms will be their dwelling place mud. Yaws mud. Gog mud. Magog mud. God mud. Canaan the unseen, as promised, saw mud. from XIII Water lacked faith. He knew. Lack of water in the long marches carved during the night between KULEH and JERICHO was severe and faithless. His grandmother sprinkled rosewater on his white shirt and khaki trouser to iron them. The extreme heat and dust of the JORDAN VALLEY could not be driven back and there in the place of the first baptism many fell to polydipsia. XXXV The moon smote him by day. His face was a mist of water above his Britannica where he read "The island teemed with agoutis peccaries, opossums racoons alligators iguanas and armadilloes" creatures evaporating off the pages and from the hills and gullies heavy with sunlight where he now set his eyes lunar and remote and full of years lightly borne with the breeze of history. The first week of the new term Godspeed had asthma and was given a shot of unfiltered rum in molasses water and put to lay like a pasha in his grandmother's bed. On the third day, a ghost brushed the blades of the basil and he looked through the backdoor at her sunlit wash heap. He could count even the invisible stones of the pile. His grandmother was there and wasn't there. He began to count and count the screes.
August 30, 2025 at 4:49 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Lake side (2025) (c) Robert Frede Kenter
#diptych #art #vispo #image #forest #photobased
August 29, 2025 at 11:19 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Day 28 new (2025) book by P.E.I. poet, fisherman & artist, Chris Bailey. Taut, humorous, vernacular staccato poems. Memory-narratives: sons/fathers, illness, working-class life, environmental resonances, bleak landscapes, rural/urban divides @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social @sealeychallenge.bsky.social
Cover of FORECAST: PRETTY BLEAK by Chris Bailey. M & S (2025) Wood paneling, a nautical clock, simple clear photo, evocative of the poems, the settings. from the long poem (a series of individual short poems) ONLY REPLACEMENT WILL DO (12 numbered sections) an excerpt: They fire up their fresh-got Champion generators bought with cash from flat wallets and filled with gas got waiting hours, on foot, in line in Stratford. CBC tells of broke telephone poles, high-voltage on the road. Do not drive over or under downed powerlines. Do not touch trees that touch them. Do not blame those that failed for their preventable and predictable failures. Thank them for taking from the money you make pulling and dragging your littoral life away, and spinning it into roundabout pavement, new rinks, their own raises, as they tell you. Tighten your belts As they say, Be patient, as they say. Be kind. Your Mother Calls An uncle is in the Dying Room with cancer in his spine. One last ambulance ride down along the southside to make final visits easier for his wife. It's too bad, you say, It's too bad about all that. Well it's done now. There's nothing a person can do. Then she asks how you're doing. You speak in forecast: rain and lightning along escarpment ridge. Wind roaring from the north before hauling around west, and the temperature is falling. from WE TALKED ABOUT THIS (pt 22) a 30 pt poem sequence excerpt. My father feeds rock eel to two large eagles atop the sandpile on the run's north side. Something'll get a fucking bite anyway, he says, as we hear lobster's left to rot on purpose, insurance money, you see. Cleaner than arson, trucks run up west to the hammermill. More dumped on the Paddy Road, where there used to be a school, where my father and I cut lumber for firewood,
August 29, 2025 at 10:33 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Today @sealeychallenge.bsky.social My Day27. Intense visceral poems of anger, pain, rage. Horror poems body image, male aggression, entrapment, rebellion. Juliet Cook's Your Mouth Moving Backwards @the-ethelzine.bsky.social Every Ethel is a gem; check out their website! @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social
Cover of YOUR MOUTH IS MOVING BACKWARDS by Juliet Cook. Visceral intense horror collage matching the book's vivid & powerful texts. Design and production Sara Lefsyk (2023) Intense tomato red background with collage of glitch rectangles, an eye, a mouth/teeth/opening/parts of a doll face etc. Sewn elements like body stitches from MY TEETH HAVE BEEN LOOSE FOR YEARS I wanted to turn that doll's head around and snap it before it crawled from my midriff up to my pillowcase, attempting to smother me into demolition It dressed like a bloody tooth fairy It wanted to knock me out, remove my teeth with a pickaxe, sell them at the black market Micro poem from the series FLESH WORLD Your dollhouse is full of dead spiders nefariously nesting inside your rotten baby shoe. from I'll Eat You He bangs his own head, cracks a mirror and breaks space for more creatures to work their way inside your silently screaming brain.
August 29, 2025 at 12:33 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
For Day26 @sealeychallenge.bsky.social A hybrid work, a 'reading' of a #Sartre childhood memoir. A meta-work on reading/writing, the act of re-(creating) interior spaces of pleasure/memory in texts, reading, authorship @rachelartsmith.bsky.social Penteract Press (2022) @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social
Collage cover read(writ)ing words. A Meandering Material Dialogue Rachel Smith w/HMRCollective Penteract Press (2020). collage is of scraps & ephemera of rectangles, (orange, red, pink), triangles, pendants (yellow and green) text fragments (hand) squiggles. etc. It is arduous to separate the productive activities of reading, writing, and making. Reading frequently involves doodling, tangential distractions, note taking, or mentally constructing ideas all of which begin the blurring of any boundaries. Writing is soaked in phrases from previous and concurrent reading. Making is a material production of the thoughts while reading or writing. The visible process in these pages is a collaborative activity, as sense is collectively sought. The assemblage of fragments explores how sense might be de-con-structed, developing a generative method as an amalgamation of theory and practice. A mix of redaction and erasure, visual poetry, numbered poetic text on the pleasure of memory, reading, books, grandparents, childhood, etc. with handwriting at bottom right. A marked up, poem collage, with lines, squiggles, text, disintegrating lines of meaning and theory, as if notes from/ on what Smith is reading transformed into a poem/diary full page vispo. Meditative and inspiring.
August 27, 2025 at 10:51 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Day 24 @sealeychallenge.bsky.social reading luminous prayersong of a book w/prismatic poems /new spirituals, anti-oppressive testament, political visions/family, self & struggle. A deeply resonant volume by brilliant Lucille Clifton @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social (1993) @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social
Luminous Painted cover The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton Copper Canyon (1993) seeker of visions what does this mean to see walking men wrapped in the color of death, to hear from their tongues such difficult syllables? are they the spirits of our hope or the pale ghosts of our future? who will believe the red road will not run on forever? who will believe a tribe of ice might live and we might not? columbus day '91 Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. - Albert Camus nothing about the moment just after the ball fits itself into the bottom of the hill and the world is suspended and i become king of this country all imps and imposters watching me, waiting me, and i decide, i decide whether or not i will allow this myth to live. i slide myself down. demons restoke the fire. i push my shoulder into the round world and taste in my mouth how sweet power is, the story gods never tell. june 20 i will be born in one week to a frowned forehead of a woman and a man whose fingers will itch to enter me. she will crochet a dress for me of silver and he will carry me into it. they will do for each other all that they can but it will not be enough. none of us know that we will not smile again for years, that she will not live long. in one week i will emerge face first into their temporary joy.
August 25, 2025 at 10:43 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Day 24 @sealeychallenge.bsky.social UNRAVEL by Tolu Oloruntoba @toluini.bsky.social Nigerian-Canadian poet, one of finest contemporary poets. Ancient to future colliding histories, visions, science, self, myths & apocalypse. Vivid, precise, a syntax complex & original. @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social
Cover UNRAVEL by Tolu Oloruntoba (2025) M & S publishers. Cover image "Portrait of Amenemhat III" white cover, red lettering. from COLOR THEORY Beach houses are the calcium levees of the excess dead; the resourceful have found use for so many bones. That they are sunk now like Archimedes means that oceans must rise. The new marsh of color-coded pickets will forbid sleep, even with lockjaw skin on the duvet of morning. A penumbra, an afterimage of tarp, and cardboard cities, lingers around the opulence. After the pulse that repeals electricity, some of us will still have IKEA train tracks for wood, and crayons for candles. ARMADA We're not going anywhere. If we were, the towers we build against heaven, idling like rockets receiving coolant, or fuel, would've taken us to new worlds. Towers must be the answer; the reason God famously said: Let us bust their union. Our Babel is fading into the American we all speak now in unclear silos, subdued by the reptilian screams of expresso machines. Cometh now a new Nimrod: to captain our ships, to find God for us on an evening stroll elsewhere. And as them some questions. from PARA-AMBULANT Dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin will be motorcycle helmet foams, adrenaline and cortisol the fossil fuel in the fireplace of doing Occupy till I return. And If you wake on a greenhouse spacecraft losing life support, and older crew cannot tell you why you're there or where you're going, before they die, and your successors themselves hold promises of generations of crew asking the same why you can never know, but you look at the photo - and geotropisms of the singular ark terraformed for us, and the tug between that craft and the heavier stars, and the impulse towards gregariousness, and the legacy of destructive/agents that might, in spite of themselves, construct a flightplan defiance/of the statistical nothing outside, managers who, in their worship of/morale, would query the portholds,/and seeing only the raven-void/winged parsecs past, say there's everything beyond the ark.
August 24, 2025 at 11:13 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
For Day22 @sealeychallenge.bsky.social CM Burroughs 1st collection (2012) from @tupelopress.bsky.social The Vital System correlates mechanisms of body presence & self/other explorations w/a highly personal syntax experimental prosody /new forms performative expressions on identity, sex & grieving.
Cover of THE VITAL SYSTEM by CM Burroughs (2012) Tupelo Press Cover art a photo by Elaine Duigenan entitled "Equus Caballus III" Black and white beautiful abstracted juxtapositions of fabric, glass, a window and mysterious night. Excerpt from "THINK AWAY THE BLOOD" the tumble of presence had I turned sooner had I bone kissing my precise destination asked the correct question the undercarriage your grave in Virginia taste of blood in my throat absence visible before it goes under was it your face my precise pain driving as into sludge then breaking in the earth'sface against the head of a doe as into sludge then breaking please ON IMPACT We watched the bird begin -- at the veranda's edge and taking off with mission into the French/doors five feet ahead. A red bird reddening . Sexed in vermeil. Damaged. Days, this continued -- / you saw it. The bird dying for the bird: how to love the self. A week at least, at last. The elongated click/ of its mouth a tension, repetition. The work of watching its attempts to die. / The words please and / don't mined from every throat in that house. As much as we were witnesses, we did not see its beak/ gag, did not see it die. But gently noticed no refrain, no rhythm at the glass -- its body or betrothal/ gone.
August 24, 2025 at 12:19 AM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Day 21 @sealeychallenge.bsky.social 2024 collection Temporary Skin by Romana Iorga. from Glass Lyre Press.
Sometimes brutal, riveting, long lined interior poems mythic voices women & children in stress, talking & thinking escape, to weave their way out of claustrophobic situations thru dream & wish.
A fractured art-deco-y cover design of leaves falling, women's stylized faces in profile, mythic, wings, oval faces, body on a stand, roots and veins. Temporary Skin a book of poems by Ramona Iorga from Glass Lyre Press 2024. Cover art Cristina Iorga From SILENCE AT DAWN The dreams I have. You, growing upward from the mud and I, one with it. A swamp creature. My swamp mouth latching on yours. There was darkness in both of us, but mine was lighter. I see that now. You carried the sky. I merely watched you do it. And now, this morning. A distinct shade of blue that only exists in memory. And the voice. Do you hear it? Forget who you are and come over, it says. Out of the Labyrinth In the morning the girl sits by the window, pulling dried husks of flies off the spiderweb. The brown spider drops from its corners on a glistening, tremulous thread, hauls itself up to inspect the damage, hairpin legs climbing the air on invisible steps. The girl watches it patiently end its snare Each day a new pattern emerges, holes filling with faces she knows or dreams about, rivers she swims in, forests she runs through. Outside the window, her parents work in the garden, feed the fowls, lead the ducks and the stubborn young cow to pasture. The girl sees the day go by, flies get trapped, then die slowly, kicking the air in agony. (an excerpt).
August 23, 2025 at 2:50 AM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Today @sealeychallenge.bsky.social Day20 Im exploring visual poetry. I chose Lost Sonnets by the late Catherine Vidler @timglaseteditions.bsky.social (2018) & @guillemotpress.bsky.social collaboration/conversation Lens Flare by @derekbeaulieu.bsky.social & Rhys Farrell. @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social
Purple swirling abstract wave-shapes form the cover of Lens Flare by Derek Beaulieu & Rhys Farrell (2021) from experimental Guillemot Press. Farrell reconfigured Beaulieu's 2009 Aperture project from Penteract Press, where the poet experimented with pre-computer era dry-transfer lettering, which tends to decay, crack and deconstruct over time. Farrell's brilliance is a call-response poet-to-poet digital reimagining of the already deconstructing earlier technology's transformations, adding brilliant layers of bright pop neon hues to create provocative visual tone poems with arresting movement and visionary dreamscape movement. Rectangular cover of Catherine Vidler's Lost Sonnets. Stark, minimalist pale blue lines with arrows in diagonal patterns close together like a weave, arrows moving to the right bottom. (2018) Timglaset Press. Vidler used the Paint program connected to Microsoft Word; in particular, the insert shapes function. I love these pieces with their wide variety of both simple and more complex iteration. As above, the overall technique was to cut and paste endless variations of black and white, blue, and black/red geometric shapes of different type, in effect using 'found' materials "to start" yet manipulating and altering the shapes with the rotate tool, a both precise and intuitive compositional process. She also used other tools such as Microsoft "callout" to envision 'wordless' yet potent modern sonnet hallucinations that are visual representations of the compact expressive 'essay' of the sonnet form still favored by text-based poets, Sonnets today are created in both traditional and elaborated individual new designs. As I make both text based and visual works, I deeply appreciate the hybridity of the experimental artists who work either in purely visual or visual/text formats, and through exploration and expansion of their text based production, see visual works/ or hybrid/ as the significant poetic/art practices they are, simple, diverse, complex.
August 21, 2025 at 10:10 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
1 of my poems from Visual Verse, now an archive. Poems & prose published in the project were prompts each issue to contemporary artist images; each issue responding to a single visual work. I was thrilled to write a poem to juxtapose to wonderful poet, film-maker visual artist, Sarah Jane Crowson.
Little Feral Dew Drop Like snow drop parachutists -- listen. We are tilting left towards Cinema. Our mother of fabric, lime green intentions. Hoop skirts and hula hoop rosaries in sky-way swings. O Eiffel Tower, O Lady Liberty, your croissant beret. Your plum affection is in the delegation of crimson saltshakers, the blueprints of upside down cocktail-aunties. And the dancing, dancing along Madison Avenue's nightclubs of Heaven. Tumbling seeds of renewable resources. The eclectic electric slippers. A banquet offer to sessional relations between torrents of toes. March, March. Marching drunk to the archway of the sea, the green algae seaside inside Heaven awaiting New Year's lyrical bells. Pearl doublets, buttons spinning. Deft hands weaving from inky bandstands surplus April's dripping life jackets. All new, some older. All at the ready, spun from winter fleece by tailors, milliners, the husbands and wives of miners with electric heaters, coral diver's tenebrous winks. Painting by Sarah-Jane Crowson. A playful image of queens and hoop dresses, floating corsets, yellow and pale green stars (fairy tale, fairy dust) on a lime green background. Fanciful collage art with the words "nacreous" and "wave rs" also feature floating in this hybrid.
August 20, 2025 at 6:50 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
Emerging to acclaim(CBC Poetry Prize) & 1st book @arsenalpulp.bsky.social. Kyo Lee's 'I Cut My Tongue On Broken Country' interweaves queer & immigrant lyric, Korean history, family, language, teen years; new voice in Canadian letters @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social @sealeychallenge.bsky.social #day19
an excerpt from a bilingual poem (in Korean and English) The title an Korean lines are lyrics from a children's song written and composed by Yoon Geuk Young. waiting for my flight, you hold my hand & we start the clapping game with the song about the rabbit. You went to Korea last summer to become beautiful. Returned brokenly, so, double eyelids & sun-skinny. My turn. My favorite word is because i cannot define it except with a world so young & green the horizon moves away as you run toward it. Because it's an adjective. Because how can something so complete mean nothing when alone. Cover of I Cut My Tongue On A Broken Country poems by Kyo Lee, Arsenal Pulp Press, (2025). Cover by Jazmin Welch ( a textured acrylic painting of a young Korean woman surrounded by flowers emerging from their stems, a blissful face, the colours, face, foreground, background shades of green, with pink flowers. Yellow Noise My father can't sleep through silence. He says silence is too loud so he drowns himself in YouTube videos about North Korea's dictatorships, gentrification, Britain's colonies, things that only vaguely remind him of home. He sleeps on the floor. That reminds him of being home or poor or something. The bed is too silent & too white & too his & too comfortable, causes too much sleep. Maybe he wants to stop dreaming about expired reams. Ghost-white, ghost-silent ghost dreams about white beds & orange juice & money. Maybe he's becoming America & its relentless noise. The best way to survive in this country's cacophony is to shut the fuck up. We know this He wakes up every three hours gasping for noise & i pretend not to hear him.
August 20, 2025 at 6:27 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
For Day 18 @sealeychallenge.bsky.social Montreal-based poet David Bradford's 2021 collection "Dream of No One But Myself" Brick Books. Exploring in-betweenness, joy/pain in its processes. Poems, narrative fragments, Vispo, exploring father/son relationship, childhood, US memories Form into style.
Book Cover with an abstract painting layered rectangles Lime green, Mustard Yellow Red (on top). (2021) Brick Books, Canada. Wonderful text layout that matches a vibe in the book. Author is David Bradford. Click and on as if crackling tiny panes off the little school too cold in the wind chill too flirted off a snap a mid-century ending glowing tufts of glass pecks away all neck right above my camera all toes off the ground all noonday foil and sun a white light boring in and out the branch that will not break that repeats itself in the finest sparking knot knowing at all but h ere! ere h ere! sapping up a look down at no one a hasn't seen before two pages from 'open question' a hybrid of images and text; on the right side shredded photographs of David and his father. on the left text: Singing my angry maybe dad's bad pentameter way. How I got so carsick I grieve Brown-bag the lowing heat. The whole palpable Philly rides all the way to the service. His old value human gift. Dust in a pine can. Six years in the Delaware I ain't ever getting back. No plot. Ever safe from anyone Too late to help. Or stop letting what I lost. Be what I lost. Title: Grape Juice one of a number of distorted vispo readaction/erasure pieces. Lovely skewed unreadable text with red drawn circles.
August 19, 2025 at 10:26 PM
rfredekenter.bsky.social
For Day 17 @sealeychallenge.bsky.social @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social Fatimah Asghar's brilliant 2018 collection @oneworldbooks.bsky.social. Post-colonial, anti-imperialist, ferocious poems, personal & collective, a work of mournful, richly textured family histories, Partition to America Diaspora.
Cover of IF THEY COME FOR US by Fatimah Asghar. Three women crosslegged w/ swirling flowers and plants, blood and connectivity. A purple dreamy background of pain hope and contrasts that reflect the intensity of the volume's poetry. 100 Words on 45's 100 Days his last name means to win; he drops bombs flattening children to prove he can. my friends write "not my president" online. I am the farthest from home I've been in a long time. I write "I pledge no allegiance" but children stay dead, buried by cement in syria or a cop's bullet in america & he goes on golfing, vacationing, his belt buckle swelling past buckle while swarms of children never grow up. he's not my president but I live in a country whose sun is war we keep rotating around its warmth our faces, sun-kissed, each & every morning. Partition you're kashmiri until they burn your home. take your orchards. stake a different flag. until no one remembers the road that brings you back. you're indian until they draw a border through punjab. until the british captains spit paki as they sip your chai, add so much foam you can't taste home. you're seraiki until your mouth fills with english. you're pakistani until your classmates ask what is that. then you're indian again. or some kind of spanish. you speak a language until you don't. until you only recognize it between your auntie's lips. your father was fluid in four languages wroe persian poetry on glasses. maybe. you can't remember. you made it up. someone lied. you're a daughter until they bury your mother. until you're not invited to your father's funeral. you're a virgin until you get too drunk. you're muslim until you're not a virgin. you're pakistani until they start throwing acid. you're muslim until it's too dangerous you're safe until you're alone. you're american until the towers fall. until there's a border on your back. Script for Child Services: A Floor Plan A hybrid poem of charts, layers, humorous but dark and vivid.
August 18, 2025 at 9:19 PM