Classic City Vibes

Poet Karla Kelsey

• Athens Regional Library System • Episode 93

Share episode

Send us a text

This week we have a conversation with poet Karla Kelsey who was recently the featured poet for the UGA Diann Blakely Visiting Poet Series.  Karla was a delight to talk with and we hope you will enjoy this conversation as much as we did!

Karla Kelsey’s books of poetry books include On Certainty (Omnidawn, 2023), Blood Feather (Tupelo Press, 2020), A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014), Iteration Nets (Ahsahta, 2010), and Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (Ahsahta, 2006) selected by Carolyn Forché for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her book of experimental essays, Of Sphere, was selected by Carla Harryman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize. She is the editor of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy, (Yale University Press in 2024). Her poet’s novel, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy was recently released from Winter Editions. She is the Charles B. Degenstein Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. 

SPEAKER_01:

All right, welcome to Classic City Vibes. I'm James, your host today, and we have with us Carla Kelsey. Thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, James.

SPEAKER_01:

Carla is a poet, essayist, and editor whose writing wees together the lyric with philosophy and history. Carla has published five books of poetry with Knowledge Forms and the Avery selected by Carolyn Fourche for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her book of experimental essays of Sphere was selected by the Carla Harriman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize and was published in 2017. She is the editor of Lost Writings, two novels by Minya Loy from Yale University in 2024, which I'm interested to hear about, Minnie, because I wasn't familiar with her at all until I read a little bit about some of your work and stuff. So let's start out with it. Tell me about your first experiences with poetry and fiction.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, thank you, James. So for fiction, we have to go to the El Dorado Park Library in the city of Long Beach, California. And Mrs. Reedy, who was the children's librarian, and she introduced me to Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, LM Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. So I just loved Mrs. Reedy and I loved the library. And I have always loved reading fiction.

SPEAKER_01:

That's awesome. You remember her name and all that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I can see her in my mind's eye right here. She was marvelous. And she had this program where you would check out books over the summer and you would get stars for how many you read, and I just ate that up.

SPEAKER_01:

And you did well, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_00:

I did. I got lots of stars. I was a recurring customer for Mrs. Reedy. So that was really formative. For poetry, we have to go to a little bit later. I was about 14 and I was very serious about ballet. And we had annual examinations where the examiners would come from the Royal Academy of Dance from London and you would do a class for them and they would grade you.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, that sounds pretty.

SPEAKER_00:

It was very intense. You'd go in two by two and do the class, perform the class for them, and then a month later in the mail, you would get a write-up with your grade and some comments.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow.

SPEAKER_00:

So after one of my examinations, I was sure that I had done terribly, that I just absolutely failed. And I remember it was very stormy outside. So I went outside into the wind and the weather in the backyard, and a poem came to me just out of the weather and made me feel better. I think I wrote it down, I'm not sure. I think it went something like the wind in me will always be free, or you know, something very original like that. So that was my first love of poetry was writing out of that experience. And then in college, I went to a poetry reading by Amiri Baraka, and he was just so remarkable the way that he delivered his poems, the sound of his poems, his language use. This was at UCLA, I think I was probably a freshman or sophomore, and I listened to him and I said, that, I need that. So that was also a very formative experience of coming to poetry.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Ross Powell How old were you during the recital of the first poem?

SPEAKER_00:

Probably about 14. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

That's the ripe age to start writing poetry, too.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, it's a great age for starting to write poetry.

SPEAKER_01:

Did you do well on that?

SPEAKER_00:

I did. I did really well. Yeah, life lesson, which I'm still trying to learn. The experience of reality doesn't always map onto others' perception of reality.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's funny how often that happens in life. When you just And sometimes the opposite, you think you nailed it and it's like, oh, it turns out not so well. True. Do you think ballet, which has so much judgment and critique and rejection as part of it helped you because writing also has a lot of that. If you're a writer, you have been rejected many, many times. And um Do you think that helped you in your writing career to have that kind of background of of of kind of artistic struggle?

SPEAKER_00:

Sure, absolutely. In several ways. So I think um, you know, with ballet, you I don't think you really can be a dancer by yourself. You have to be in a company, you have to be within a structure. And so that's something really difficult to learn at a young age, that unless you're good enough or accepted into that structure, you're not going to be a dancer, you're not going to have that life. So that was hard to learn at such a young age. And then after ballet, when I fell so in love with poetry, I realized yes, there's structures of success in this kind of thing, but this is something that no one and nothing can tell me I can't do. I don't have to be qualified. Um, I can educate myself and do it alone. Luckily, I've had many wonderful teachers and peers and haven't had to educate myself in it, but I think it helped me appreciate that. That poetry for me, it's always been important to keep it slightly separate from those structures, that it's mine and it's this art and this life that exists outside of them. So that was helpful. Um, also with the creative writing classroom, you do come up against critique. And so that's something I was very used to and was sort of natural to me as a student. And then now as a professor of creative writing, I understand there's better structures than others for critique, but um it certainly was good preparation.

SPEAKER_01:

And when you were so you started writing poetry, would you say first seriously in in college, or would you consider yourself in high school? I know you write your first poem at 14. Were you writing a lot of poetry during high school, or is that just kind of like a uh, you know, kind of the first epiphany and then college is where it blossomed?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. It was the first epiphany, and I very much saw myself as a ballet dancer until college. So um at my senior year in high school, I realized I wasn't going to be um good enough to be in a company or a good company. And so I stopped dancing and went to college. Uh luckily I had applied. Um and my first year in college was very difficult because I was used to having a passion and a reason for everything, which had been ballet. Um, but then in college I found philosophy, which I deeply loved and majored in, and then also found um poetry through Amiri Baraka, and there were creative writing classes which I took and had some wonderful teachers in in college. So that kind of restarted me and set me on my new path of being a writer.

SPEAKER_01:

And did you and did you get a degree in philosophy or creative writing? What was your undergrad in?

SPEAKER_00:

It was um a philosophy major and also a literature major, so I did a double major.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, nice.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

How has philosophy informed your poetry?

SPEAKER_00:

In so many ways. I love reading philosophy. Um, I love philosophical concepts. My first book, Knowledge Forms the Aviary, uh, takes off from Plato's allegory of knowledge as an aviary with the birds of knowledge flying around, and one plucks them down to use as one sees fit, which I both love and also have issues with this idea of knowledge in that fashion. So for me, those modes of writing and thinking have always been twinned. So it was very formative and still is formative. I like to read philosophy as much as anything else.

SPEAKER_01:

So you read as much philosophy as you do poetry, do you think?

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Maybe, yeah. I always keep a book of philosophy and um some poetry and fiction going. I love research, so I also add historical research into it. It's a big mix. Aaron Ross Powell Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's informed your writing a lot. Um your newest book. Tell us about your newest book.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell Sure. So the two books that came out, one is mine and one is not mine. So I have a book called Transcendental Factory for Mina Loy, and it's an experimental biography about the writer, artist, and inventor Mina Loy. Um I got to know Mina Loy's poetry in my PhD program, and uh she was a modernist, published alongside people like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and was mostly known as a poet. But I discovered that she also wrote extraordinary books of prose, poets' novels. And one of these novels called Insul, which is German for Island, came out in the 90s, and I encountered that book in the early 2000s. And that's a book that Mina Loy wrote about an artist who she calls Insul in the novel, but it's based off of the German expressionist Richard Oles, who she knew in Paris in the 20s and 30s. I loved Insel so much, and I heard rumors that there were other novels of hers that were unpublished that existed in her papers, which are held by Yale University's Beinekey Library of Manuscripts and Rare Books. So I had the chance to go and look at her papers and instantly fell in love with the writing. Very lyric, very descriptive, philosophical, very beautiful. And so one thing led to another, and I edited two of these unpublished manuscripts for a book called Lost Writings, two novels by Mina Loy. So while I was working on that project, I read everything I could, written by Mina Loy and about Mina Loy. And there's an extraordinary body of literature around her work. There are great resources like the wonderful public access website, Navigating the Avant-garde, all devoted to Mina Loy. There's wonderful volumes about her writing and now about her visual art projects. So when I was writing, when I was editing Lost Writings, Two Novels by Mina Loy, I started writing my own response to her called Transcendental Factory. And it's an experimental biography. It takes various years of her life and investigates the writing and visual art that she was doing that during that time as well as the historical context.

SPEAKER_01:

I've started that book and it's I love the way it has that mixture of the history in there and kind of like, you know, the research, which obviously the librarian I love so much, and just kind of like putting a context, because a lot of times you read a biography and you're you you really get an idea of their world, but not like the wider world that's influencing their world. So I like the way you you did that. And I've I've um like there was like the you know one that reminds me like China ended slavery in 1910. There's little tidbits of little things that kind of like, well, this is what's going on in the world. Um I just thought that was I love that.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much, and thank you for reading the book. That's really wonderful to hear. Um I loved making it, and there's a a fantastic, extraordinary biography of Mina Loy called Becoming Modern by a writer Carolyn Burke. And um I mentioned that because it's indispensable to our understanding of Loy. Also, I feel like I was free to write my book because that book existed, a more sort of standard factual biography. In my book, I have a character called Mina, and that character I allow myself to imagine into, and then I also have Loy. And with Loy I try to stick as close as possible to all facts to kind of give them both spaces. But also when I was writing the book, I became very interested in that question of fact and research.

SPEAKER_01:

How how finished were those two novels as an editor? You know, they're unfinished. And of course, that can mean a lot of different things. How much structure was already there? How much decisions as the editor were you having to make?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. The manuscripts are so interesting. So for the first book, The Child and the Parent, which she was working on in the 1930s in Paris, um, there are two type scripts as well as some handwritten drafts. Neither of the TypeScripts are complete, and um, but they're copies of each other. So for example, like chapter three, there might be two pages of one version and then like four pages of another. So you have to kind of patch them together. For the second novel, Islands in the Air, there are three copies as well as some handwritten drafts. So by piecing together these fragments, you get the whole story. Because they're type scripts, they're rather advanced, and they have her hand corrections on them. So I always incorporated her hand corrections. If there were competing versions, I chose the one that seemed to flow best with the text at hand. There was a larger version of the book that she called Islands in the Air that was probably five or six hundred pages long, that her son-in-law Julian Levy read. Um, James Laughlin, the director of New New Directions, probably read and other publishers, but that manuscript itself seems to be lost to time. And we think that it incorporates the novels that I worked on, Insel, and then some other novels that are now just known as fragmented manuscripts in her papers.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Ross Powell That's a theme that's also in your newest book where you mention how many things are lost.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Keeps coming up. Lost, lost, lost.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's amazing. She was a very remarkable visual artist, and there was a wonderful show of her work in 2023 and 2024. Beautiful catalog that I highly recommend. Um some of it still exists, some of her early drawings, her paintings in the 1950s and early 60s. And bear in mind she was born in 1882. So in the 50s and 60s, she lived in New York on the Bowery and gathered trash that she made into these wonderful three-dimensional painting sculpture items that she called refusees. And some of those still exist.

SPEAKER_01:

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00:

They're really beautiful. But you'll see entries of her work in something like the 1905 Salon d'Atom in Paris, and those works are no longer in existence that we know of. Whereas works by Matisse and the faux that were so important to that exhibition, of course, those are now prized superstars of international museums. So that was something that was interesting and heartbreaking to learn about her and other artists of her time, particularly women.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And that's probably one of the main reasons a lot of this was lost, is because of the way women art was kind of perceived back then.

SPEAKER_00:

I would imagine, yeah. Yeah. And and also even though she was involved and knew the futurists and the surrealists and the Dadaists, she was never a card-carrying member of any of those movements. She never quite fit. She always was doing her own thing, which of course I love about her. That's great. You know, um, but it's also harder to stick around when you're not a primary example of a movement.

SPEAKER_01:

We kind of jumped past your whole poetry career at the beginning. Let's go back a little bit to kind of when do you do you remember your first published poem? When was that?

SPEAKER_00:

I do. It was when I was in college, and it was in maybe I was a junior or a senior, and I had a poem in the Antioch Review, which was really exciting and special. And I think the title was We Do All Good. And so that was thrilling to have a poem published in a in a real literary journal.

SPEAKER_01:

Um I assume many rejections before that, or was it Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Many rejections before that and after that. It's just part of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I encourage everyone who writes and wants to share their work to send it out into the world and then also find fellow writers to share with so that you can talk about your work together and maybe even write poems back and forth. I've done that with some writing friends, and that's just such a fun way of circulating your work that then takes some of the pressure off of acceptance and rejection.

SPEAKER_01:

Did you have a pretty good community at that in college of friends and colleagues for for that kind of thing, sharing your work?

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. Yes, I did. There were a group of us that were taking all the poetry workshops that we could. We had Stephen Jenser, who was a remarkable first teacher of mine, and David St. John was also a remarkable first teacher. And we would meet in class, but then we would also go over to each other's apartments. Sometimes there were bottles of wine involved and you know read our workout for inspiration. We wouldn't, I don't remember much critique of like, oh, you should change this line, do that. It was more sharing and celebrating, which was really nice.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Ross Powell What was your first collection? How'd that come about, your first published collection of poetry?

SPEAKER_00:

My first published book, Knowledge Forms the Aviary, I worked on while I was doing my PhD at the University of Denver. I had a previous book that I wrote called The Seeing Exercises that I was working on during my MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop. And that book, I sent it out a couple places, but it was very narrow. And I decided that it was more a practice than something that I wanted out in the world. I think at that time I was trying to take the visual world and translate it exactly into poetry, which is really difficult to do. I don't know if it's possible, and also seemed in some ways limited. Once you do that, then you have a rock, but it's in poetry. So I wanted, I decided that that one just maybe wasn't, you know, wasn't for the world. It was for me to try to work some things out. But Knowledge Forms the Aviary, I wrote while I was living in Denver, and taking wonderful classes with poets like Ben Ramke and Alini Sakilianos and Cole Swinson. And then I was also taking classes in the religion and philosophy program at the University of Denver. And that was fantastic to be with the philosophers and reading texts with them as a non-philosopher, adjacent type person. So that certainly influenced the writing of that book.

SPEAKER_01:

Is it a pretty open community or is it more closed community?

SPEAKER_00:

They were very open. Yeah. They were a great bunch and loved reading widely. I don't know that they read much poetry, but they were interesting to talk with and were very welcoming in terms of being in graduate seminars together, and teachers weren't too hard on my writing, so that was good.

SPEAKER_01:

Now that I think about it, if you probably couldn't put two groups that are more concerned with the exact meaning of a word than philosophers and poets, maybe from different angles, but certainly like I can't think of any off the top of my head. So that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. So just for new poets or peop people who are just getting started, uh what's the process of getting a book? Do you just kind of start writing poems, sending them out, getting some published, and then start collecting, or are do you sit, are you after you get some out, do you think I'm gonna write a book of poetry and start with that in mind? How does that work?

SPEAKER_00:

That's a great question. It can work in many different ways. I think the most standard way is to write poems, send them out, and then start collecting them together and thinking about themes and structure and the way that you might develop an arc in the book or have three sections that are addressing topics from different points of view. And then you might start writing into those structures. So you start developing poems that fit with your themes or with your ideas or discarding poems that don't. So that's often the way that at least first books happen. And then there are all sorts of book contests where you send your manuscript out to contests. Sometimes there's a small fee involved, but it's lovely because anyone can send, so it's not like an agented press where you can't get in the door unless you have a representative. You just send in your manuscript with your fee and see what happens from that. The way I work is a little bit different, probably from my first book on, where I generate projects more holistically. So unless I can find a structure for the book as a whole, a form that I'm working with, and some ideas and source texts that are all working together, the individual poem just doesn't make so much sense to me. So I'll, you know, have little periods where I'm writing odds and ends and feel rather lost. And then I'll find a new form and structure, some new figures that I'm interested in investigating, some philosophical ideas, and then I start writing with all of that in mind. And then it can take years to develop it and revise it and refine it, but really it's once I find that form and structure that I get cooking.

SPEAKER_01:

That's really interesting. So form and structure's first for you for your books, and then then the poems come second as opposed to the other way around. That's really fascinating.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's a little I think it's not so usual for poetry, but it's what I found. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Um I want to hear a little bit about your influences. Who are some of the authors that you kind of like loved and influenced you? And maybe even a philosopher too. So that um who who kind of like gave you your direction?

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. Um one of the first poets that I fell so in love with um alongside Amiri Baraka was Jory Graham. Um she's an extraordinarily beautiful writer, a philosophical thinker. Reading The End of Beauty was just a revelation to me. And I was lucky enough to study with her for a semester at Iowa, and that was amazing to get to meet one of my, you know, icons. Um her work remains really important to me. The poet Lynn Hegen, whose fierce intelligence, um, and she's very philosophical. Her work, starting with the book My Life, um, where she's writing an experimental biography that has a lot of repeated passages, it's prose poems, um, the number of sentences per chapter is important. So all of these structural details, as well as her troubling of what it is to be an individual and what it is to make a life. That book was formative as well as her other works as well. The poet Susan Howe is just so remarkable. She digs into history and texts. She works with a collage method, so her poems are often very visual, and she also has an extraordinarily fierce and independent intelligence. So those three poets are also remarkable philosophers. And when I reflect on how they're important to me, that's probably the connecting point, as well as the language, um, their language is just so extraordinary and well chosen and unique.

SPEAKER_01:

What when you're writing, what makes uh what makes a poem successful in your mind when you finish and you feel like yes, that's right. What what what is it you're looking for?

SPEAKER_00:

In my own writing, I think it's really the language and getting it to the point where I feel like no words could be different. Um so I've taken words, often it's taking words out, um, swapping words around, moving things around. I think that's why structure is also so useful to me, because then there's a there's um architecture to push against. So it's not just any word can fit in any place. There's also the structural grid to be um mindful of. So once it fulfills its pattern and words can't be changed without entirely changing the poem, then I think that it's done.

SPEAKER_01:

As a poet, are you doing more revisions as a poet than as an editor or as a fiction writer, I would think. Is is that accurate or like a poem? Of course, some of your poems are book length, right? But are you doing more editing because you're looking for that like exact only word as opposed to maybe not so much as you know, if you're writing a 800-page novel, I'm not sure you can do that. But and finish in a lifetime.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Absolutely. Yeah, I think the process of writing a poem, the material of the language is so forefront and fundamental. And I know that's true of other genres, but in some ways you're reaching after an idea or a plot or a scene, and so it's the movie or the concept that you're pointing language towards. And I think that that is a little clearer from the outset than at least for my process of writing a poem, it's very language first. So I'll often start with language that I've generated almost in a dream state. Um, and there's a certain energy to it, there's an attraction to it, um, and then I start working with formal ideas and playing with the language itself. So the act of discovery and what is the content of the poem comes with revising and working with the language in a way that sometimes I feel is more like sculpture or weaving, where you're discovering the object as you're crafting it. Whereas other genres of writing, always there's that idea or that plot or character that is directing things from the very beginning.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you think of yourself as a poet first?

SPEAKER_00:

Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, I think that I bring a poet sensibility to everything that I write, and that's always underneath. Maybe it's uh wanting everything to be a mirror, but my favorite writers I also think of as poets like Clarice LaSpector, um, who we both love. She's an extraordinary fiction writer and essayist, um, but I think the reason I love her is um, and she's an extraordinary philosopher, is that poetic sensibility where the language is just so unique even in translation or maybe even especially in translation. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you have do you have favorite translators? Like if if you're going to read one of her books, do you like, ooh, I really love the way do you follow certain translators?

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell Um a little I've had ideas like, ooh, I really like what this person did. But I'm more just grateful to have the books. Yeah. Um so grateful to have the books in a language that I can read.

SPEAKER_01:

Is there a a book that's had a bigger impact on you than any other, or one that's just had a massive impact on you, on your life?

SPEAKER_00:

There have been so many impactful books. I would say that Clarice LaSpector's Agua Viva is one of these books, absolutely. Um it's uh a brilliant work of lyric prose. Um there's an unnamed narrator who's an artist and she's thinking through some of the biggest questions of life. There aren't chapters, there are just these paragraphs, and um, it's an extraordinary example of the way that something can be so particular and unique and not fall into any specific genre.

SPEAKER_01:

What are you working on now?

SPEAKER_00:

Right now I'm working on a couple of things. So I'm working on a book of poetry called Isolation Songs, which are ten-line poems that I started writing when I was working on the Mina Loy material. So she sneaks in there a little bit, as well as some other um female modernists and surrealists. So I'm at the editing phase of that book. I've also started researching Martha Graham, Maya Darren, the filmmaker, and Anais Nin, thinking I want to do something with the three of them, perhaps also involving Mina Loy. They were all living very close to each other in the 40s and 50s in Manhattan. So I love this idea of those four geniuses. Bumping into each other. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you know if any of them actually knew each other?

SPEAKER_00:

Some of them did. Anais Nin and Maya Darren knew each other. I have to think that they knew Martha Graham. Sure. They certainly did through Jean Erdman was a Martha Graham dancer and was Joseph Campbell's wife, and Campbell was very important to Maya Darren. I'm not sure if Anais Nin knew him. But there are threads that connect them.

SPEAKER_01:

You seem to love things like an interconnectedness, like finding all these different streads. Threads, streads. I can't talk either. Threads to and put it together. Has that always been the case in your work? Is that like just one of your kind of guiding lights? Is like pulling?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love those strands and finding when they come together in both obvious and also ways that you would never expect. Yeah, and I think that goes back to language and meaning, that a core of a word, of course, we can look it up in the dictionary and see the dictionary definition, but they're all sorts of connotations and personal resonances and texts that interrelate with that single word. So you could potentially take a word and write probably several novels just based on the attachments that that word has out in the world. More precise you get, the more you realize how the word has changed through time. Or, you know, like if it was translated, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01:

So it's kind of like when you go to teach something, you realize how little you know about it. Like from a movie perspective, you know, like I go to explain something or teach something, and you think you know it better than you do. Yeah. At least that's for me. I was speaking for myself. Um if people wanted to keep up with you and follow you, where can they find or keep up with your work and and and get a copy of your new book?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Let's plug that.

SPEAKER_00:

Transcendental Factory is published by Winter Editions, which is an amazing small press run by Matve Yankelevich, who is one of the founders of Ugly Duckling Press. Oh, yeah. Um he's also a remarkable translator and is the publisher of World Poetry, which is a translation poetry press. So I really recommend um those presses. Um I try to keep my website up to date, so new books I put on there, and I'm occasionally on Instagram.

SPEAKER_01:

Nice. Well, thank you so much for coming in. I really enjoy talking with you.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much for the conversation and invitation, James.