Laura Kerr : What is a poem?

 

 

 

 

What Is a Poem?
The poem asks what only a poem can ask.

 

After Form
The poem continues in another form.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Process Note #76 : John Cross : “Endangered Animals of Ohio”: Mathias Sets Out

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by John Cross are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor,Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

 

          Ohio haunts me.
          Though I’ve lived most of my life in the Los Angeles area, my formative years unfolded in Northwest Ohio. Strange dances of dreams and memories aswirl in the pipe smoke horizon mimicking battlefield haze my dad puffed out as he read to me from books steeped in the blood of history, much of it local accounts of the War of 1812 (maybe one day war and destruction won’t define us?) come up for air whenever I hear in the intimate distance a train, notice the soft golden light on a stand of trees (the very same light that used to slant through the living room of my childhood home), or smell fresh cut grass. Much of my poetry broods there.
          “Dudley’s Massacre” comes from that twilit space. The so-called ‘massacre” was actually the defeat of a few hundred foolhardy Kentucky volunteers who marched into an ambush near the spot where the Maumee branch of the Lucas County Library now stands. The poem offers some specific memories from my life – allusions to the library, a nearby ice-cream place, the beautiful Maumee River, my favorite bass amp, the Ampeg SVT, and one Saturday morning when my dad and I went to an “Indian Guides” recruiting effort. White kids and their dads dressed up as stereotypes of Native Americans and…I’m not sure what they did, Cub Scout-like activities. After an uncomfortable half-an-hour on rigid chairs, we snuck away from our guides. My dad suggested we go fishing every Saturday morning instead. We went once. Anyway. On to the poem.
          A bunch of memories along with markers of loss inspire this piece. The little bit of lost childhood, my amplifier that someone stole, memories of playing in the countryside while my mom and aunt gathered wildflowers to dry. These thoughts led me to consider the growing tally of other living beings we lose, fauna specific to Northwest Ohio and the larger fabric of our shared world.
          At the time, I’d been reading David Byrne’s beautiful book How Music Works and was struck by the acoustic qualities of spaces. Having worked in a church as a custodian (in order to eat and pay rent while playing in bands), I had experienced the uncanny, almost dizzying physical sensation enveloping me when standing in a particularly resonant space. Again, there’s that distant train. Cicadas droning on a close summer evening…In that sacred place, the poem ends on a note of hope. One almost-plea of a “hello” sent into the abyss.
          These hazy ideas join together in the piece. 

 

 

Dudley’s Massacre

Everything keeps pulling to the

left margin, toward a point of

origin, a strumming of zithers, a

full stretch of the slingshot not

far from the soft-serve ice-cream

palace. Plumes of summer

clouds, sudden storms,

something cool, sweet, &

fleeting, I went fishing with my

dad once not far from here, near

the library, where the Indian

Guides & the screeches of metal

folding chairs made us

uncomfortable, so we left the

library & fished the Saturday

morning rapids. Later from

garage & basement I Ampegged a

deeper thunder through the

neighborhood, something they

could feel, but someone stole the

amplifier & now the bees have

been Africanized, so they’ll have

to go away too. The big cats in

the zoo still pace their cages.

Someone thought we should call

it the “corrections” system.

Someone else thought we should

trust Exxon. I wonder who will

collect the damage deposit, their

trucks’ rumbles, screes, & back-

up beeps. From this distance I

mistake the wind for voices:

gathering Queen Anne’s lace &

lupines outside the old

workhouse, prying loose the

boarded window with my belt

buckle, Black bear, Graceful

underwing. We didn’t catch

anything that Saturday 40 years

ago. There’s so little left in the

river that metaphors don’t make

sense here anymore. The only

signified is revenant in transport.

I’ll wait here, floating for a

moment, cartoon Coyote over

the abyss, seeking a sacred space

chosen for its echoes. Hello.

 

          Ohio, memory, and all that we’re losing in the name of blindly seeking profit; that’s what beats at the heart of this collection. “A Volcano Half-Consumed Holds Its Crater” deals more explicitly with socio-political strife and struggle. This one was written as we were dragging ourselves our of the pandemic. A time when some of us held fast to a belief that things might change for the better if we made it through alive. In this piece, statues are torn down, a fat-cat rat wallows “stuck in his tub at the edge the edge of the crater”, and then the language slips into a child’s dreamworld. The last three paragraphs offer two clear observations. My partner Christine and I were walking our dog when we ran into a former student. She’s in the poem. The occupier of the White House makes an appearance. Then the poem closes by stepping back into the child’s dream, a frightened, hunkered down, perhaps threatening source of fire peering at us.

 

 

a volcano half consumed holds its crater

 

Windswept world, I watch them pull down the hollow bronze statues; the soldiers crumple, swallowed by the howls of their hats, closing like time-lapse flowers in reverse under the weight of their own plinths. Candles drop like parachutes from the stars through the swirls of dust and smoke, charring Uncle Pennybags stuck in his tub at the edge of the crater.

As a child, I left a water bowl inside the door for love when I heard the raptors in my head. Now, I leave the door ajar and a cup of wine set out for the guarded night,

in the shadow of the volcano. Sometimes we forget to say, hello.

A young woman tears up as she recognizes her teacher who’s grown old.

A president’s thrown his people to the wolves.

In the dawnlessness, the sun screws up its eyes to peer through its tiny periscopes.

 

 

          Form?
          Like the volcano half-consumed, two poems writhe and grapple with their respective forms. There’s a sonnet and a Sapphic. The Sapphic verse holds itself together until the final stanza, where it falls apart. This poem was inspired, at least initially by Étienne-Jules Marey’s photography. The poem tries to slow down the fleeting visuals, to catch “light’s brief shudder”, to capture simultaneity. The same challenge we encounter with language.

 

After Marey’s First Mechanical Bird

 

 

o        dusk field      panicle of washerwomen
when the eye skerricks to frame  light’s brief shudder         
birds are a particular problem      each surge
                               brokenly language 

 

and a northern raven tokking up the spine
of a winter maple        (closing of a hand)
wing shards cooked in a star        about to happen
                               first dazzling slivers 

         

descend           descend out of the edgy god-light
you spangly nail studded        [missing]  black hangar
awned           plangent    drift
                               the disassembling glitters  

          

          The sonnet started in my mind at a pizza joint in Iowa City. My friend referred to pepperoni as “the off-scourings of the hog.” The phrase conjured some troubled imagery! The sonnet does its best to hold true to the formal architecture, expanding until bursting and contracting back to the “well behaved” familiar. I love the sparks that shoot out of that tension between form and content.

 

The Off-Scourings Of The Hog

  

If I succumb to hunger    pouring sand
At my sunken hips    a bow, and arrows made from scratch
Already leaching into leaves    poking for small game
Or picking at Jerusalem Crickets behind damp stacks of plywood   

To knock at your house of uncertain aspirins
Strike-anywhere    my feeble reprobate lamps
And all these brittle slivers    red with me
And these awkward hard-ons 

If I have to ask    what do I know
And who are you    behind this darkling Woolworths
Where the stalking moon fingers us
Through slanted trestle slats   

To convince my wracked windows it isn’t time
By screaming out of them it is not time

 

 

          Mathais sets out.
          I learned about Marey while studying Dada. Dada led me to Fluxus. I’ve been reading Báyò Akómoláfé recently. All of these elements, in interesting ways, help me to shed light on the Mathias poems that open this collection. Mathias is a kind of avatar/trickster lost in repetition and stasis, ending where he begins. He offers no solution to our collective predicament, but he does invite us to dwell in bewilderment. There we might reimagine our way of Being. We may never achieve true liberation thinking from inside any established form. We have to imagine. Akómoláfé writes that “legibility = incarceration.” Mathias seems to seek illegibility. Some of the Mathias poems were composed in a more “legible” narrative lyric, inspired by frayed wires in the sky, a trip home to Ohio in the summer, growing older, but several were born from the Fluxus artist Emmett Wiliams’ experiments with disrupting the alphabet. Each letter of the alphabet is replaced by a word or short phrase. I composed a poem, phrase, or sentence, and replaced each letter utilizing the new “alphabet.” Then I went back into the piece to revise. The first summer away from grad school. I needed to play. Mathias satisfied that itch, and the play turned serious. What might be exposed by cracks in the narrative framework and associative thought? I’ll close with the poem that opens the book. Mathias born into a world on fire.

 

Mathias sets out to study birth

 

                     a hole off center blazing from body to soft ear
dragged on as Mathias could carry gender shriek at first
          he stood still                                                
           a hole off center he thought dark birds 

dark birds blazing from body very bareness stripped tree
   a hole off center braves the debris 

at first he stands still blazing from body gathered up gender shriek    
blazing from body as he could carry
             like skin   sky strands   very bareness 

like skin stripped trees dark birds
bolts gears twisted wire dark birds dark birds dragged on
   black crayon to cover dark birds gathered up
                as Mathias could carry 

 

 

 

 

John Cross was born and raised in Northwest Ohio and moved to L.A. to play bass guitar in a rock and roll band. He earned a B.A. at UCLA and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of the chapbook staring at the animal (Tupelo Press), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Prize, and his work was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poetry has appeared in Volt, Lana Turner, Yalobusha Review, New American Writing, among others. His first full-length collection What Bleak Angels Carried Your Bed was published by Omnidawn in May, 2026. He lives with his partner, artist Christine Kiphart, in Los Angeles.

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com

Andy Butter : Three poems

 

 

 

 

Why Can’t I Touch It?

de Kooning’s “Women Singing II”, aurora borealis, Sarah’s knee, his buried face

The Boy-Mother
 

There it is in his secret womb: a child
                     Brother not birther but still
This late at night the force increases                           He wails in low tones 

creek beneath a bridge
          hearing itself for an arch’s time 

Weight bearing heroic titles
Spinegrower           or       Bloodgiver 

One heart an unread page tucked under the larger

Colors and their clairvoyance      blue dawn whispering beneath its whisker of clouds what will happen
today   blue but hours out yet 

What force drove the growing bulge in his belly

It’s not his body the baby will need

                     annealed nipples unnourishing

          But what force
                     Spiral force             Force of buds pushing against their shroud
black mar on the golden ratio’s shimmer 

How to exit an unwelcome vessel                    punished in containment

He thinks of his stomach as the skin of fruit
                     as a jackal’s way to cut a pomegranate
          sliced into six
wedges of juice and turned over like wet stones        

The boy-mother moves lithe through pre-morning bruise hours
          away from the house
                     away the forthcoming sorrow dipped into today
like a finger in a bowl of melted chocolate
                     ringed at meters where the small heart could stop
Slayed into trust the movement through jagged grass           

Constitution of inbetween
          The boy-mother is the first dawn walker this far afield 

with face full of spider web
trailblazing disturbance
          toward his sense of a secret pool
deep in a copse of birch    he’s never seen 

but he knows where
                               deer drink shotgun shells old beer cans

Water cold as all in the spirit closed like an eye around the day’s offal

The boy-mother imagines lifting off of its slow surface
in heat waves murmurs                                               a song
                     how to care for a child he never should have 

Song is motion       is gilted time
shorn like wool from folds of the throat 

sound spandrels expand in sky’s roving ceiling
Sound listless as a reader’s hand 

Already the boy-mother can hear the pool’s low bass tone             past the dip of the horizon maybe angels moaning
in fear power for his final year 

Unnatural     the boy-mother says                    as he rests    

hands run down the ruts of an oak

the gaps where water runnels                 in storms

                                         alone on the front
fields in shadow kept tight underneath the year’s snow 

wind caught on the prairie’s edge dark forest begins

How he strikes on  moves on    is ancient on

          his new conspiracy            Imagined at the grocery store

what freak child      what monster                    what abhorrence             what clatter

                                                   they will say

The child’s child will be perfect he says blown as if from melted white sand
His a problem requiring new language   commands from the resurrected army of dead
language 

or seraphim directives       language held against the bloodless morning sky 
          same a shout for help from deep in a well
          language like snowflakes falling into the blue pool          dissolved      His hands will have to be many kinds of hands his songs wholly new                   against every morning          

it’s ribbons of years he is worried about that and the power of naming         it matters

it matters      what he will call it   it matters what is living inside his own vessel
                             unseen                    writhing

The arousal of power comes from                            

names

He imagines his

house on fire with blue flame                horse jumping over broken fence
                     mouth a pile of blood and dinner                    field of hands blown about in the breeze
                     a beech tree in a crisp winter morning 

No one to be seen but the sounds of walking on hard snow
          mob’s footsteps coming              mirrored in leaving
                     either him or his child       displayed 

the private pool deep in the back forty somewhere swimming
                     portal to a safe future 

the sheen of face before the face breaks the water tension              how the child will bring
about a new era
          it’s not horror if new but a new force of spirit arrived here 

And the boy-mother is singing sagged against a cedarwood fence
And he is singing the sky a pipe
And he is singing like a long root
And he is singing often into the barrows the swales
                     There were ancient throughways           he feels 

the boy-mother traces perfectly in his pain
walking ancient paths that lead
          to a blue pool near and nearer 

kick in his belly

black lessening blue rising Everything is blue

The boy-mother is blue from cold Before his first breath
          the child’s child’s tiny fists will be blue
Dawn chorus from bird throats rises in blue smoke             A hard song 

Boy-mother struck in rings of gold chatters

At the Holy See
 

You and your every nutrient turn briefly blue
in the shining basilica. Sign of rich belonging.
We drop coins in the donation box for candles
to bow their small blue heads in this divine atrium.
In the heart of the old world St. Peter’s knucklebone
is surrounded by a shroud of tourists
while saints with necks like llamas bestow secret
religious warfare in the symbols of the New World.
A day with you is like building a subway system  
here in Rome—every few feet construction halted
for finding spooning skeletons or Latin graffiti on the bathhouse. 

My many wishes and I—they are silver lariats.
Touch me in my nearest niche like you are a weary mystic
and I am a speaking tree. Abide our modern moods.
My thought of our possible future I keep like the pope’s
ill-gotten hoard where shine expounds shine in treasure crypt
(if gold speaks so it does in solemn curses). But I won’t
show you a peek until you anoint me with your god-look.
I don’t keep you, you keep me as history keeps
its judgement of the nefarious emperors.
Last night I dreamt again for the first time in a long time—
angels each with one blue crystal wing charging
across a dark field. I’m not an accountant for miracle:
if you were in that horde, you were of the horde.

 

 

 

 

 

Andy Butter lives and works in south Minneapolis and is a founding editor of The Call Center Collective. Author of the chapbook To Circumambulate a Sacred Lake (Yo-Yo Labs @ Portable Press), his work has appeared in The Baffler, The Drift, Colorado Review, Passages North, Sierra, and elsewhere. He can be found online at andybutter.com.