Laura Kerr : Wanting / Silence

 

 

Wanting / Silence

Wanting is the first mark.

Not the line, but the tension that precedes it—the quiet pressure gathering in the hand before language remembers how to behave. Every poem begins in that pre-surface interval, where nothing has committed yet and everything is already trembling toward form.

In the Grimm tale “The Fisherman and His Wife,” it is the fisherman who stands at the shore, calling across the water to the enchanted flounder. Each time, he repeats the wife’s new wish. Each time, the sea grows darker. The escalation is not greed; it is geometry. Wanting has no internal limit. One wish generates the conditions for the next. The system compounds until it collapses back into original poverty: the hovel, the shore, the wanting that existed before the first wish was ever spoken.

wanting → pressure

silence → clarity

My painted poetry of this tale—scheduled for 2027—translates this escalation into hand-painted digital corruption, where desire erodes the image from within. Each canvas shows wanting as a formal system rather than a moral failure. The surface degrades not through external force but through the internal logic of desire itself. Wanting produces the next mark, which produces the next distortion, until the image can no longer hold what it was asked to carry.

Some of my peers have described me as prolific—someone who moves continually between forms, images, and experiments. But that rhythm has begun to change, turning inward, toward silence.

prolific, 

moving through forms

 through forms 

  through forms—

until the motion 

 turns inward

Lately, my wanting has changed. It no longer seeks more material, more circulation, more noise. It seeks silence—not as withdrawal, but as a condition of accuracy. Silence is the forensic field where the poem reveals what it has been holding. A poem is not written into sound; it is written out of the silence that surrounds it, exposes its edges, and lets each mark stand accountable.

Silence is not absence. It is a diagnostic condition.

silence as instrument

silence as field

silence where fragments

 declare their evidence 

In silence, the poem shows me where it has been over-articulated, where it has been forced, where the residue of other voices still adheres to its surface. Silence is how I examine the poem the way one examines a shard recovered from a site: held to light, rotated, allowed to speak through its fractures rather than through any pretense of completeness.

A poem does not aim for completeness. It strives to remain legible as a system of forces: the wanting that generated it, the silence that made that wanting visible.

the poem

 does the same— 

 survives as force,

 not wholeness 

Wanting and silence are not opposites.

They are sequential states. Wanting creates the pressure; silence clarifies the evidence. Together they form the para-material cradle in which a poem becomes legible to itself—not through explanation, but through the removal of everything that interrupts its faint signal.

Between each wish in “The Fisherman and His Wife,” there is a pause. The fisherman walks the long path back to the hovel. He sits—hesitant, exhausted—with whatever new condition the wife has demanded. Then wanting rises again, because wanting has no endpoint—only intervals. The silence between wishes is not peace. It is the diagnostic moment where the system might stabilize, but never does.

between wishes 

 the tale pauses—

 the path back 

  long,

   hesitant, 

    exhausted

wanting rises:

 go back 

  go back

   go back— 

 she has her wish

To want less noise is to want the poem more precisely.

To return to silence is to remember that form begins long before words arrive. 

And to write now is to stay close to that earliest vibration—the wanting that never resolves, the silence that makes it visible.

The wife does not learn restraint. The sea does not forgive her. The tale ends where it begins because wanting is structural, not psychological. Wanting is the first mark—and the mark that remains after everything else has been stripped away. 

And they are sitting there even today.

In my practice, I have learned to withhold circulation. To keep the work close until it can be presented under conditions I control. This is not scarcity as strategy. This is silence as protection. The work needs time to be examined in its own light, rotated slowly, allowed to speak through its fractures before entering the noise of discourse and appropriation. 

I hold the work

 closer, 

 longer—

silence as protection, 

 as temperature

Silence is where I can see the poem as evidence: 

evidence of what was wanted,

evidence of what pressure preceded form, 

evidence of what remains once excess articulation has been removed.

The wanting that never resolves. 

The silence that makes it visible.

The mark that was there before anything was spoken. 

what remains—

 the mark 

  before speech,

  before form, 

  before the first wish

 

 

 

 

 

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.