The Art of Minor Incarnations – Harpy Hybrid Review

“Twin Souls In Circadian Light” – Photo-based mixed media. © 2024 Robert Frede Kenter.

We begin with a single stroke, expecting more. A smile or a furrow of implied grief
that common expression fails at. I tell you, this is what I do. Acts which earn nothing
but keep the spirit above the body’s dead weight.

Except, I’d rather go deep into the wild. Chance upon what most only imagine.
I saw a famous painting once. A lake of waterlilies, like pastelled idealism,
the Japanese bridge vanishing into mist. What would hold up such crossing but love?
Or some hard labour for the lonely. Studios of unfinished light. A glass display of affection.
Abstractions the bystander labels with a non-human cost.

But would we burn the bridge that forsakes the way back to Eden?
Or declare peace with the artist who paints blooms larger than our fists?
I don’t know how to fight anymore, nor resist moving on.
I’ve grown tired of the transactional. And reproduction has nothing to do with it.

They claim a work of art is only worth its copy. But there’s pain in every birth. Yet pleasure
in the making. We create to outlive ourselves. You and I, lying with our limbs a sorrow apart.
But always closer than knowledge.

I went further today, lay my troubles by still, green waters, listening to some late orchestra;
the shutter of his camera capturing a revelation; the drunken frenzy of bees as they witnessed
us trying to replicate such fertile gestures. Straddling the honey that keeps the canvas wet and
devoted. Like talking to God on a Sunday — then turning our faces for a week, plunging with
the koi into a darker faith. We know, in sinking, there’s no prayer in our lungs until the cold
shakes us back to humanness.

Like every curator knows, the prophecy about love is that it ends. So we try to make it daily.
The act of reproduction is pleasure enough. The lotuses dirty beneath, pristine white from
above. Because it gets complicated, we fantasise being the first. Both origin and creator. We
hope to be the undrowned. Minor incarnations in circadian lament. Yet still, we aspire to be
less — a fragrance worth a small revolution.

“Lily Pad Dance” – Photo-based mixed media and digital collage elements. © 2024 Robert Frede Kenter.

Vikki C. and Robert Frede Kenter

About The Author

Vikki C. is a British-born, ‘Best of the Net’ award-nominated writer, poet and musician from London. She is the author of the chapbook The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and the full collection Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024).

Vikki’s poetry and fiction are internationally published/forthcoming in The Inflectionist Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Stone Circle Review, EcoTheo Review, ONE ART Poetry, Amethyst Review, Ice Floe Press, Ballast Journal, Boats Against The Current, Dust Poetry Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, DarkWinter Lit, Acropolis Journal, The Belfast Review, The Winged Moon, Sontag Mag, Nightingale & Sparrow, Origami Poems, Jerry Jazz Musician, Across The Margin, Lazuli Literary Group and various other venues.

Vikki was named a winner of Black Bough Poetry’s 2024 Poetry Manuscript Contest and is scheduled to have a third collection published in 2025. She was also shortlisted in the Jerry Jazz Musician 63rd Short Fiction Contest (US) and DarkWinter Lit’s 2nd Anniversary Poetry Contest (Canada), judged by Kim Fahner.

Twitter: @VWC_Writes
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/vikki_c._author

About The Artist

Robert Frede Kenter is a writer, publisher, grant recipient and award-winning visual artist whose art has been internationally exhibited in galleries and widely published in both print and online. His recent visual poetry/art has appeared in Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022), Seeing in Tongues (Steel Incisors, 2023), Feral, talking strawberries all the time, InterPoem #1 and #2 and Watch Your Head, as well as on the front covers of Reformatting the Pain Scale (Olney Books, 2023), Street Cake Magazine (U.K.) and COUGH (Canada). He is the author of the hybrid VISPO chapbooks Audacity of Form and Eden.

Robert is the Editor-in-Chief of Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net). Through its ongoing projects and hybrid series, he has collaborated extensively, creating art alongside the written works of hundreds of established writers worldwide, as well as in-house book cover design for individual author collections and collaborative anthologies.

His work utilises a mixture of analogue and digital techniques, pastels, acrylic, photography and mixed-media to produce both abstract and representational pieces with a focus on juxtaposition, intuitive-oriented strategies and performative elements.

Twitter: @frede_kenter
IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, icefloe22