Laura Kerr : Experimental Poetry Criticism : An interview with Legio

Introduction:
artist and poet, Legio 

Legio writes the hand
into system. 

not origin
but transfer 

the mark occurs
between the mark
and its registration 

velocity anchors it
signal passes through
human / machine
machine / human 

the image is not atmosphere
it is ground 

a record
of something
still becoming
still.

  

1. 
Hand tremor.
Punch card.
Where does the mark
decide? 

When i lived in nyc i used to draw while riding the subway -- ink on paper -- most of my lines were influenced and assisted by the vibrations and shakings of the train car -- sometimes the line-work was completely misdirected by a sudden jolt -- but these misdirections were merely new directions -- maybe i would save certain critical portions of a drawing for moments when i knew that there would be no shaking -- but usually not -- the machine passed its own tremors thru my hands -- the city and the universe helped decide the marks.

+++++++++

2. 
A name.
A face.
Who is the author
When is the machine visible? 

Existing in the shadows is most interesting -- and my shadows are upside-down -- or inverted -- not "my" shadows as i'm not sure that shadows can be owned -- can they be? -- but some of the most handmade looking work is entirely machine generated -- or are they? -- because i found machines that have been lost to time -- that others can't find -- so is my search part of their authorship? -- did the machines find me in order to stay alive? -- reciprocal creative conduits.

+++++++++

3. 
Cloud-shaped void.
Ink falling.
Must data
be made heavy? 

Unbearable lightnesses, hacked atmospheres, hurricanes of impermanent inks -- fast forward thousands of years and maybe some of these images survive and will be in museums -- not as fine art but as artifacts of an ancient civilization -- hieroglyphs of cloud-compute integrated circuits lined with typographical codes -- puzzles to be deciphered as the future's past.

+++++++++

4. 
Page.
Screen.
Model.
What question
is still unanswered? 

Charles Ives.

 

 

 

MOONLIT CYCLOGLYPHZ 001

 

Afterword: Reciprocal Tremors

Legio does not speak of authorship as creation but as transmission. The subway tremor is indistinguishable from the hand. The machine is not a substitute for gesture but enters it. The mark is determined not before but between vibration and consent.

Anonymity, for Legio, is not concealment but inversion. He does not hide but redistributes. Authorship becomes reciprocal: the artist finds the machine, and the machine finds the artist. Survival becomes collaborative.

Legio’s clouds are not gaseous. They leak, stain, sediment. He conceives the work not as image but as artifact — future hieroglyphs from a culture that stored its memory in suspension.

When asked what remains unanswered, he offers a name: Charles Ives. Not a theory but a bearing. Ives understood that multiple temporalities could coexist within a single listening. That noise and structure were not opposites but simultaneities.

Legio’s work resides within this simultaneity.

The hand trembles.

The system registers.

Authorship remains open.

 

Discover more of Legio’s art and visual poetry:

https://x.com/LEGIO_X_

https://objkt.com/@legiox/collections/created

 

 

 

 

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.

Amanda Earl : where does a poem begin for me?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

i am not certain it begins at all
Frederick Hoyle, in an effort to
prove the existence of gawd
suggests that a collection
of airplane parts
falling to the ground
will not assemble themselves
into a plane
he thinks there's something
divine about creation
so i don't know
all i know is i am restless
more comfortable with
who and what are wild
so maybe a poem
no
maybe the poem
because I'm not sure
i write individual poems
i think possibly i am always
just writing
if writing is me constantly
ruminating and meandering
maybe the poem never begins
because it never ends
ouroboros
nautilus chamber
echo of soundings
inside and out
does it assemble somehow
into a flying machine,
small or large,
of words
maybe
i only want to draw us closer
to doodle us closer
you and me
kindred weird
wild and close
maybe a poem begins with birth
but i don't believe it ends
recently two great loves died
if i keep talking about their lives
maybe they never end
maybe a poem
is a perpetual motion machine
fill the bird's cup with water
soak its beak
see the red food colouring rise
watch the bird dip its beak
over and over into the water
maybe a poem begins
with a parched beak

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) [photo credit: Susan Johnston from Jane's Walk - Ottawa in Verse on Sunday, May 4, 2025] is a polyamorous pansexual intersectional feminist who writes, edits, reviews, publishes, does poetry and visual poetry workshops, and organizes literary events on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca and editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021). Her latest poetry book is Beast Body Epic, a long-poem collection provoked by her near-death health crisis. Subscribe to Amanda Thru the Looking Glass, her Substack for quotes of the week, recipes and tips on saving money on food, and miscellaneous whimsy.

 

Patrick James Dunagan : CORSO’S DOT

 

 

Student: Do you get in arguments, Gregory, with Ginsberg about anything that goes down at Naropa?

 

Corso: No I don’t bother with that one. That’s his choice. Fucking consideration. Whatever people want let ‘em take the shot man, they’re not going to live very long. What is it, a hundred years? or some shit.

 

- THE BALLGAME’S OVER the dialogues of Gregory Corso and Tom Clark on The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, unpublished transcript once held in New College of California’s library, edited by Poetics student Allen Ensign

 

…

  

Spirit

is Life

It flows thru

the death of me

endlessly

like a river

unafraid

of becoming

the sea

The above lines serve as epitaph upon Corso’s grave in Rome’s non-Catholic cemetery. His ashes are buried just across the way from Shelley’s own. There’s footage “out there” of Corso at the site in his later years, hanging out, taking notes, while the feral cemetery cats wander about. Keats is buried in the far corner of the same cemetery and there’s a photo of Ed Dorn in his last years standing by that grave similarly with notebook out and feline nearby. While Pound is laid up to the north on Venice’s San Michele Cemetery Island with lizards by the dozens crawling in and out of the tombs there.

Italy is a poet-pilgrimage well worth making and Rome a fine locale for hosting Corso’s remains. As he puts it in “Is Love Instinctive” one of a number of late poems gathered in The Golden Dot: Last Poems, 1997-2000 (Lithic Press, 2022):

I loved things romantic

most things I loved

seemed lifeless

I loved beautiful Greek statues

I loved young dead great poets

And so how fitting he now lies amongst them.

Throughout The Dot he also frequently imagines entering into eternity via The Mermaid Tavern, that infamous poet’s watering hole of Old England frequented by the likes of Donne, Marvell, Herrick, etc.    

say when my time is up

will I be welcomed at The Mermaid Tavern?

There’s Joyce standing at the bar

with a booted foot on the brass rail

It looks like [with] a haughty eye he’s on me

 

It doesn’t look good

there’s Keats seated alone

looking dejectedly down upon his death mask

The bartender was standing at the far end

It was Andrew Marvell and he was conversing with Milton

There was Auden; him I knew

I acknowledge him

he smiled…or was it a grimace?

I moved away from the door

and began looking at the Blakes on the walls

These lines show how truly “in process” the writing in The Dot remains. I’ve added “with” to attempt smooth out the haughty eye line, it only sort of helps out. Corso abruptly shifts perspective, moving from imagining being at the scene inside the Mermaid to as if describing an actual past visit within those walls, perhaps recalling a literal dream experience? While his wondering whether Auden smiles or grimaces at him offers a rather touching glimpse of self-judgement and regret over his well-documented abrasive social antics over the years, which—from the references he makes to them in The Dot—appear to have plagued his conscience.

The Mermaid also appears in “I feel like writing a beautiful poem…” (many entries in The Dot are untitled, the editors thankfully supply an index of titles and first lines):

          The Mermaid Tavern sign creaks  

like a mouse caught in a windy creaky door

each squeak lets go a dot of blood on the hinge

within the velvet suits have a boot up on the bar rail

“Brightness falls from the air” was your best

And “Fat as butter; cheap as egg” yours

back and forth it went

Each poet reciting the other’s best line

Once again, he is back to imagining the visit. An exercise he repeats yet another time in “When the year 1 arrived for the descendants…”

the labor is in dwindling the redundancy;

the finite-infinite thing can make it in a line or two—

To tailor the brown velvet suit when I enter the Mermaid Tavern

with Joyce and Allen seated at a table; and the Immortal Bard

a booted foot on the brass rail; I’ll order a stout and vow

my soul to keep my mouth shut the entire stay—

It’s rather impossible to imagine Corso ever managing keep such a vow…yet there’s no doubt he’s now at The Mermaid Tavern, in velvet suit with booted foot on brass rail as he wags about and swaggers his way through the endless night of elevated bombast and ridicule challenging everybody and anybody as outside rain falls and the poets inside warmly cheer him on.

for Tate Swindell
from notes presented on 9/21/2022
at The Golden Dot release reading
Bird and Beckett Books, San Francisco

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick James Dunagan recently edited David Meltzer's Rock Tao and Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California (eds. Dunagan Lazzara & Whittington). His new book of poems, After the Banished, variations off of ancient Chinese poets Li Bai&co, is dedicated to Tom Clark.

Gary Barwin : BRAINSNAIL, after Lucretius 1.936-943

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist and the author of 27 books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and Bird Arsonist (with Tom Prime). His latest book is the poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures (ECW Press, 2022. Born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Lithuanian Ashkenazi descent, he lives in Hamilton, Ontario.