Laura Kerr : Unfixed Readings : Fugue, Fire, Fish

Writing experimental poetry criticism could be revolutionary—steeped in academia’s legacy, yet wide open for reinvention. My background? Visual art, not literature. That’s exactly why it’s thrilling. I’m not trying to be Greenberg or Saltz—but like them, I aim to break conventions, redefine critique, and shake up the whole scene.

With computers comfortably at our fingertips and AI no longer speculative but integrated into our daily practice, now is the time to experiment—with both traditional and computational poetry.

I write criticism in collaboration with AI trained on my own critical writing, poetry and visual art. It’s a partnership suited to the world we live in. This creates a self-reflective loop, where my critical voice evolves and morphs through machine reinterpretation.

 

Part 1
August

 

Part 2
Asemic Flowerwork

 

 

 

 

Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.

She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura currently serves as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.

For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.

Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.

She is also developing a body of experimental poetry criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.

Buck Downs : How to Be Alone With Someone Else Who Is Also You

 

 

 

 

There are things that I think it’s important to tell you about how I work that aren’t important at all; not to the experience of reading the poems, that is. Maybe in some inside-baseball sense, for people who collect poetics the way my friend David collects baseball cards: he buys a pack whenever he goes by the place, which is not every day, and because he is prepared to be surprised and grateful, he routinely gets great surprises out of it.

Whatever poetry I am making at any time has its roots in a source-text I created some seven years previously; I have been about that far behind for several years. The gap is long enough that I have forgotten what I wrote in any specific sense. The stranger I am today meets a stranger I was, at the cross-road of an interminable text.

The ideal is to ransack the profoundest scribblings of my heart with the same cavalier devotion that Tom Phillips brings to Mallock’s A Human Document or Ronald Johnson to Milton’s Paradise Lost. I fail at that, of course – the ideal is ever only the burst that gets you out into the field, and gets discarded in favor of whatever game it is you find when you get there.

It seems that seven years before I wrote what would become the source-text for these poems, I was listening to a lot of John Prine again. He is one of the comets that passes through my night sky on its way through, taking up all my attention for a time then singing off into the cosmos. And Comet Prine was passing through my sky again, in the season when I came to write.

And so, “burnt orange” talks back into “Bruised Orange”, after a fashion. Things get turnt, sometimes as hard as they can be without breaking, and sometimes breaking all the same. I have a sense that John often hides a song within the song, purloined-letter-style. Other times, the song starts out to be one thing and ends up being something quite other, as in “Jesus: the Missing Years”. The word I use to describe this phenomenon is, “realism”, and John Prine is one of the most realistic writers I know.

There’s an ‘anyway’ in “a photo I saw but do not have” that echoes that song’s tone of protective diffidence; the phrase ‘bought the farm’ shows up as well, although in both cases it is at least unclear that it happened at all. Many of these things have never happened, despite being founded in the details of everyday life.

 

 

 

 

BURNTORANGE is Buck Downs's fourth above/ground chapbook, after Shiftless [Harvester] (2016), The Hack of Heaven (2017), and Another Tricky Day (2020). Buck divides his time between Washington, D.C., and Ellisville, MIss. His latest full-length is Exit Style, available at buckdowns.com

Kemeny Babineau : Two poems

 

 

 

 

The Children of Étienne Brûlé 

Empire wrought the end, it was written; in the beginning God's missals and
Muskets were sent up river. Goods and liquor exchanged for furs and lessons
On geography. Illiterate as a fish yet fluent in tongues it was Brûlé carried the mail
Ignorant of its meaning; the impotent man of action unable to trust the translator
The first post-modernist of the wood, avant-guardian of the word
Dubbed vicious by religious hypocrites he was doubtless in Atheism
Afflicted with women Brûlé scattered the forest with children while the Jesuits (ahem)
Left none. A lawless man without Nation his likeness spread thru generations
Do Étienne's wounds yet bleed in the hearts of citizens? Betray begets
Betrayal. Assassination in the Pays d'en Haut: from Trader to
Traitor to torture.  A garland of axe-heads for his heirs, and now a Polis near ruin.

 

 

 

The Death of Tecumseh
(An erasure of Charles Mair's “Tecumseh: A Drama.”)

 

Wash my side. Tease my grave stretching to the sea.
Beware persuasion, and charms by night. Ho!
Perfidious purpose. A crab has more love.
Shelter the witness of falsehood.
Restore stumbled profusion. Tradition
Is the past being born. Break their clocks
Heave them out to sea. This is the end of northward.
Visit a deeper awe. Answer the earth
Break a people's fate, purpose yourselves
Howl! My tongue flags. I perceive the night's creeping.
Revenge is sick. It withers your heart.
Go into tomorrow's sun. Abhor the sword.
Do not despair. Rejoice, Be skilful. Strike

 

 

 

 

Kemeny Babineau lives in Stratford where he works as a cook and bookseller. He has previous works with Angel House Press, above/ground press, Book*hug nee Thug, Laurel Reed Books, and others.

Jessie Jones : Two poems

 

 

Applying the face
 

Near god, near good.
Proscenium in shades
of aristocratic veins.
Vacant rotunda. Oil drops
spun wide by light, bared
before the vanity. Pearly wigs
and spackle leave expressions
Changed, wavened, eyes caved.
Lips wine and curl to reveal
fangs, tusks. Growing up, up.
The stranger-seeking gaze.
Mirror, mirror, assemble
yourself, contrive. Look:
a stage. Look alive. 

 

 

Gingham was the sky

A colour you don’t know is blue until you lose
a tooth or
an eye 

Nor that colours change
with moods—a surging purple
marble foretelling ardour plum with a sweet
dense bruise. And amber
your anger. Uranium your want. A bleed
between your angry want. 

The vibrant architect, possibility,
going. The road leading home had always
been gold, the city jewelled. Your shoes 

were new, true, and they suited you.
Poppies bloomed, black yolk, sunny-
side up, souring sleep. And you rose with the snow
intending to speak of the threshold, 

the electric beyond
in a farewell note. 

But it was the facts that bore
fruit. When you spoke it was of technicians 

mistakes
the director’s lead hand
lead paint
insanity’s dance
the woman burned in her wickedness 

(not
escape/
escape/
escape) 

You could say
you’d changed 

and how
and exactly
in what way. 

 

 

 

 

Jessie Jones is the author of one poetry collection, The Fool, which was published in 2020 with icehouse poetry, and was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She grew up in the prairies and now lives in Montreal.