Robert Frede Kenter

Silver Branch Series

Robert Frede Kenter has been published widely, in Canada, the U.S., the UK, Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands.

Robert’s latest book, FATHER TECTONIC, is available from Ethel Zine. Previous books include the hybrid EDEN (Floodlight) and Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press).

Robert grew up in Hamilton, Ontario (the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas). Hamilton is an industrial city on a bay, notable for pollution, folk and blues, draft dodgers, lounge jazz and a guitar-based punk and metal scene.

In addition to poetry, Robert writes essays, prose, is a visual artist, and notably, is engaged with numerous international collaborative projects, including the ongoing helming of Ice Floe Press, which makes books and runs web-based projects.

Robert’s work can be read in print and online venues including Black Bough, ABR, New Quarterly, ballast, HarpyHybrid, Watch Your Step, The Storms Journal, ARC, Grain, Going Down Swinging, Anthropocene, Fevers Of, Setu, Otoliths, Street Cake, Acropolis, Broken Spine, Olney Press, Steel Incisors, Penteract Press and many more.

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

From Black Bough Poetry's Dark Confessions

Nine Years In A Winter Mirror

Hatred, jealousy, light no candles,

snow covers all your footprints.

Mid-afternoon, subway lines intersect

with the might-have-been.

At the edge of every street, sharp corners.

You, disappearing act, returning from illness.

Published in Black Bough’s Christmas-Winter Anthology V

O Lover

tonite i feel unhappy

separating laundry

into bundles

in the bathroom

a bloody needle

in a pocket

but I cannot describe

this loneliness

Murder Ballad (con molto)

Moon ripples on Moon Lake,

a spotlight over mica and birch bark.

Trees blow cold.

Many ghosts come here,

somersaulting slow

down hills. Over ridge

and granite rock,

through trillium meadows

(past fields and yards),

the cut down pines,

to a shore-side. Exiled moon,

a knife cutting a darker current.

Rough pianism’s rag-time, one a.m.

A sonata, a magical, abject sonata. Gods

with amused fingers splatter

motifs of aching tresses. A woman

in a night gown. Cascading

crescendo search-light moon,

blood-hounds, diminuendo.

D Train (Midnight) Conduction

from a window on the D train:

remember booming metal

cylinders of factories

bellowing smoke from

the hometown: birds on

bridges that span superhighways

endless the criss-cross

of ruptured conversations

and uneasy silences

a sullenness

fills the ulcerated

hotel rooming houses

between Broadway and

7th Avenue, curtains

pulled down

if we could wake

to erase the endless

groping production

fill the city with

pure beauty

falling snow

and the sadness

at the root of this

inexplicable

a restlessness

in my heart

The Moon’s Raven

I’m sick to death

with cold

and misery

stories

the rain

endless

coal

and rain

and coke

a cola

billboards

winter

rain

cold

to tears

Carbon Dating

Ice rising up to chip and chisel.
Haunted hands full, arm loads—the dead trees,
split decades ago—to burn.
The storm calls, sky bears down.
Otter songs, wild honey, a heron lands lakeside.
Generations of ashes carved away, and the old
men and women buried uphill, the child’s grave—
imperceptible as deer tongues threading red fungus
in four-four rhythm. I want to be burned here, too,
with the three-hundred-year-old trees—
a secret cove of driftwood, boxes
of cracked tubes—generations of radio listeners.
Now million-dollar houses come with skis, prop planes, gardens,
and we bottle the ice, burn the woods, freezing inside,
not daring to talk about what we torched, choking the sun.

From Deep Time #1 Black Bough

Beyond a Windowsill

Look through a camera lens

marked with fingerprints,

the juxtaposition of the rising sun

and the end of night.

Beyond the trees lies the sea.

This is a meditation.

Dawn, call out my name.

Hold my bone thin wrists –

turning in the sleeves of a jacket.

Motion’s black curtain

pulls against your naked body.

Nightbirds

by rooftops

the moon sang through windows,

casting pale blue light

over silver painted walls

graffitied backs of houses

peeling, enormous

was the silence

i stumbled through an

alleyway

she said

he will come home

no more

Loneliness and Magic

I used to read at a hallucinatory pace

in the fulcrum of vision and incantation.

Chartreuse roses dying, blackened petals,

Charcoal singed. Everyone knew

everyone else, who painted, or at the worst,

wrote a few songs. We lived, factored in

ruminative lives, travel, its displacement.

Projecting trees upon dioramas. Fleeting

encounters in sick rooms, enjambment and

silhouettes. Bullet trains, blurs, digital camera shakes

put through morphing software.

Oh production lines. Flippant military

incursions. To the south and north of

the local food bank, the refugee centre.

Doctor’s offices with their identifiable

portraits, queues of exhaustion, rooms

of combination locks.

One aggrandizing element hitting upon

another, unnamed and unidentifiable

bruises. The examination revealed

the metastasized tumour and your final

portrait in the outdoor window gallery.

This poem of grief, with its nights, scripts

for drugs that help wash sleep over pain.

In a hotel lobby, gather up community

towards the light of other’s

survival. In forms of money

and purpose, gather up.

To the mothers, fathers,

sisters and brothers. To loneliness and magic.

Later, shadows in gated

gardens. The night of blooming song.

"My work is performative – it comes out of body-physicality-and-memory, experiences of flight, travel, illness and intuition, exploring oppressive family and social structures for myth and mystery. Whether I’m working with texts or images or hybrid juxtapositions, the poems, stories, photo works, paintings and collages foment worlds that exist alongside our own – the daily trials and the historical frameworks – ecological and denatured, stoic and emotionally grounded, proposing interventions into norms and states of mind, including dream, hallucination, terror, marginalization and wonder."

"I create when I can, rest when I need to rest (for years incorporating invisibility due to a life-altering post-viral health condition); my goals are to explore and communicate from where the interior meets the kinetic, in the arcs of the abject, of musical notation, dance, personal and collective voicings."

"I am honoured to have a new book out now from Ethel Zine, FATHER TECTONIC, exploring childhood, the industrial city where I grew up, flight from conformity and claustrophobia, the way that the past seeps into our core visions, and ways to process, reject, reformulate and reconfigure, transform raw images into new ways of thinking, acting, being. Hopefully something of beauty, frameworks of radical discourse and textured layering, of art and collaboration that investigate and ground our necessary connections to others and to the ecologies of vision and place will intuit a mix of textures, abstract, representational and numinous."

"I celebrate mystery while also bearing witness, encouraging deeper engagement in human & post-human configurations, May ecologies of hope in our season of despair emerge to sustain, like visions in a cameo."

Robert

April, 2025