Robert Frede Kenter’s poetry exists in the space between dream and wreckage, between deep illness and electric vision. He didn’t stumble into the literary world with a neat plan, he arrived like a synaesthetic detonation. “Wow — I began in a hallucinatory fusion,” he says, “enamoured of French symbolists, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, the work of Huysmans, Blake & Rimbaud.” That canon of decadents and mystics was just the gateway drug. What followed was a plunge into punk-industrial aesthetics, class struggle, and revolutionary collapse. “From there I progressed to punk-industrial working class visions of struggle, general-strikes and the world-imperial in thankful collapse.” Now, years on, Kenter finds himself circling back to that original dreamstate, only this time tempered by pain, by illness, and by a far more textured sense of self. “I seem to have come full circle,” he says, “though with a much deeper textured understanding of self/process emerging from a long illness, where I now angle my work to dream and personal and ecological themes / mayhem / and hallucinations.”
This is not poetry that plays by polite rules. It’s not interested in clean arcs or tidy catharsis. Kenter writes in the dead of night, often from a darkened room, waking into images that demand to be caught. “I often write in the night; wake and fill notebooks with insistent images,” he says. While some poems fall into place like gifts, “first thought / best thought (sigh)”, most are sculpted through years of revisions. “There are between 5 and 25 drafts,” he notes, “some traverse a decade or more before they are sent out into the world on tiny parachutes.” Drafting is its own kind of struggle, restless, physical, and elemental. “Time, patience, restlessness, a brutal sledgehammer of gouged sculptural music is the gauge of readiness amidst frustrated wrestling.” That tension between the ecstatic and the exhausting sits at the core of Kenter’s creative engine.
Music, too, plays a constant role in that engine, especially the haunting avant-garde work of John Cale. “I think John Cale has been a lifelong muse,” Kenter says, remembering a childhood Boxing Day when he stumbled across one of Cale’s albums in a dollhouse, of all places. He grabbed it, not knowing what it was, just drawn to the cover. That instinct has guided him ever since. “When I’m up or down I listen to some Cale, it always inspires.” Beyond that, it’s a wide landscape of sound: free jazz, acoustic blues, Isaac Hayes, soul, electronica, solo piano, serialist experiments. “& the forest!” he adds, because nature, too, has its own strange music.
Kenter’s work isn’t confined to the page. His art practice, drawing, painting, visual poetry, moves in lockstep with his writing. “My art process… is entwined,” he explains. “Generative.” The images and the texts don’t merely co-exist; they feed each other, blur into each other, collapse boundaries.
The process of writing while managing ME/CFS is both brutal and revealing. “I write in a curtain drawn room. I like to write in the dark, edit in the light.” Sometimes, he lies down to work, body flattened by fatigue, text balanced like a tightrope across his mind. “The surface of the text is a tight-rope,” he says, without metaphor. There’s a clear before and after, “I draw a line in the sand between before ME/CFS and after.” But that solitude also forged a new relationship with the self. “Years in a solitary vicarious sanctuary of pain enabled me to ‘befriend’ myself and work through the body’s impossibilities after years of life as an actor and all of that.” Out of illness, he’s built an identity not as survivor, but as maker. “I love that idea that we create ourselves through our work, and create the world as well. That’s still where all of this leads me.”
And that path also leads to collaboration, though maybe not Brecht’s cigar-strewn salons. For Kenter, Ice Floe Press has been a vital lifeline: a platform for his experiments, his hybrids, and his community. “Not quite Brecht’s room full of pals smoking cigars,” he says, “but Ice Floe Press has been a conduit and lifeline.”
His publishing history reflects that long, expansive creative arc: raw, refined, always reaching. Highlights include FATHER TECTONIC (Ethel Zine, 2025); EDEN and Audacity of Form (Ice Floe / Streetlight); three poems in Cable Street; and visual-text hybrids in the final issue of Otoliths (2023). His elegy “Saying Goodbye #22” for the late artist Cathy Daley was published in storms journal, and WRIT 19 (1987) remains a foundational Canadian chapbook. Coming soon is In the Blueprint of Her Iris, a collaborative book with artist Vikki C., and Seeing in Tongues, an anthology from Steel Incisors.
These aren’t just publications, they’re waypoints on a long, jagged, luminous path. Kenter’s work doesn’t aim to comfort or explain. It conjures, provokes, survives. Through illness, insomnia, image, and collaboration, he keeps finding new ways to say the unsayable, and to light the way forward with a match pulled from the dark.
