In this episode of Poets at Work we talk with poet and curator Elena Karina Byrne about Los Angeles, Art, and contemporary poetry.

For a transcript of this episode, email cgupodcasts at gmail.com and be sure to include the episode title.

Our intro and outro music for this episode is Lee Rosevere's "Night Caves", licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/

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Genevieve Kapla...: Hi, I'm Genevieve Kaplan and this is Poets at Work, a podcast featuring
conversations with poets and readers.
Today we'll be talking with Elena Karina Byrne. Elena Karina Byrne is the author
of three books of poetry, most recently Squander, out from Omnidawn. Her
fourth book, Phantom Limbs, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2021. In
addition, her chat book, No, Don't, will be released from What Books Press in
2020.
Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena is a
freelance professor, editor, the poetry consultant and moderator for the Los
Angeles Times Festival of Books, and literary program's director for the Ruskin
Arts Club. In 2018, she completed her three years as one of the final judges for
the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards.
Her publications include the Pushcart Prize, Best American Poetry, Poetry, The
Paris Review, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, the Kenyon Review, and so
many more. Her poems are forthcoming from Volt, Denver Quarterly,
Massachusetts Review, Spillway, Terrapin Books, a Compendium of Kisses and
others. She's also completed a book of essays called Voyeur Hour; Meditations
on Poetry, Art and Desire.
Welcome, Elena and thank you so much for joining us.
Elena Karina By...: Thank you, Genevieve, this is a delight.
Genevieve Kapla...: So I've asked our guest to start off by sharing a poem that she loves, a poem
that invited her into poetry in some way. So Elena, will you tell us a little bit
about the poem that you brought with you?
Elena Karina By...: Yeah. I think probably to no surprise, I brought a Sylvia Plath poem. Like so
many students, I feel in love with Sylvia Plath in high school. Although my
mother introduced me to Keats and so many others when I was young. But, I fell
in love with the Sylvia Plath, not the typical, popularized Plath of aerial. It was
her earlier poems, like this one and like Blue Moles where the use of
personification first came alive for me. And a fresh kind of revelation, that selfrevelation
through close study of something outside ones self, especially her use
of nature which was not too pretty. She made this exciting and accessible to me.
Results of that notion, I think, I think it was Heidegar that said, "Angst is leading
to authenticity that I recognized in her work. And I saw as something that I
wanted. I wrote my senior thesis about how Plath wasn't just writing from a
place of depression, rather, I believed she had just discovered her own language
tools of empowerment as well.
As you probably know, she was a meticulous artisan and she looked up most of
her words to ensure she always had the best word possible. Masterful, she was
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a master of oral persuasion and of surprise endings, knockout, endings, but you
can bet they came as no surprise to her. I think anger was her hives engine, a
driving force, the inanimate and natural world was the perfect vehicle platform
for let's say what then might have been considered her unsavory, emotional and
intellectual unleashing of dissatisfaction or merely know what we know as a
canvas for her perceptual genius.
And this certainly rises above a kind of ours poetica. Also, I believe we fall in
love with different authors at different times in our writing, in our reading lives
for various reasons of need and desire. But, obviously, I keep going back to her
and I keep going back to other poets like Theodore Roethke, and Hart Crane for
the same reasons. And I love her music.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah. Plath is definitely somebody worth returning to right
Elena Karina By...: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. And you know, it's like any great art. You keep
finding new things and you keep relearning from it.
Genevieve Kapla...: yeah. Will you share the poem with us?
Elena Karina By...: Sure. It's called Black Rook in Rainy Weather.
On the stiff twig up there Hunches a wet black rook, arranging and rearranging
its feathers in the rain. I do not expect a miracle or an accident to set the site on
fire in my eye, not seek any in the desultory weather some design, but let
spotted leaves fall as they fall without ceremony or portent.
Although, I admit, I desire, occasionally, some backtalk from the mute sky, I
can't honestly complain: A certain minor light may still leap incandescent out of
the kitchen table or chair as if a celestial burning took possession of the most
obtuse objects now, and then, thus hallowing an interval otherwise
inconsequent.
By bestowing largesse, honor, One might say love. At any rate, I now walk wary
(for it could happen even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical, yet politic;
ignorant.
Of whatever angel may choose to flare Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a
rook ordering its black feathers can so shine as to seize my senses, haul my
eyelids up, and grant a brief respite from fear of total neutrality.
With luck, trekking stubborn through this season of fatigue, I shall patch
together a content of sorts. Miracles occur, if you care to call those spasmodic
tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, the long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.
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Genevieve Kapla...: Beautiful. I mean, that's an amazing poem and I think your introduction of it too
really helped me to be able to listen to it. I mean, thinking about Plath doing the
things that you brought up like, I don't know, empowering herself through
language and really thinking carefully about the form of the poem and the line
of the poem, are things that I admit are not the first thing in my mind when
someone says Plath to me.
Elena Karina By...: Right.
Genevieve Kapla...: And so it was really nice to have those in my head while I was listening also and I
could make different sorts of observations about that poem while I was listening
to it.
Elena Karina By...: Yeah. I think when things are popularized, we overhear sometimes maybe the
wrong parts, but I think what... I mean, I think for me too, what I'm realizing
more and more and as an artist, we're going to learn things from ourselves is we
go along our entire lives, but I'm realizing that we learned from our own process
either deliberately or accidentally, and I'm certain that she realized what was
empowering her and what she was doing well.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah. Yeah. And I think listening to that now, we're like, "Yes, she's doing so
many things well," and we need to think about this a little bit more.
Elena Karina By...: Yeah, yeah.
Genevieve Kapla...: Great. Thank you so much for starting that way with us today. I think it's so
good. I wanted to transition a way to think a little bit also about your daily life as
a poet, which is, I don't know what people think of when, think of what a poet
does all day. One of the things that I really love about you is that in addition to
your work, as a poet and a poetic thinker and somebody who's super smart and
reads all these things and looks at art all the time, is also the way that you
continually contribute to and participate in the poetry community that we have
year in Los Angeles and in Southern California in general.
So I know when I read your bio, it mentioned that you are the former Regional
Director of the Poetry Society of America. Also, that you're the poetry
consultant and moderator for the Festival of Books and then the literary
programs director for the Ruskin Arts Club. So I'm interested if you could tell us
a little bit about how you began getting involved in poetry in this way. I know
it's kind of a big question, but what drew you to those maybe more community
oriented aspects of poetry or what do you enjoy about those roles that you
have?
Elena Karina By...: Well, it's not a big question. I mean, it's only a big question because I worn so
many hats in the community. And, when I look at my own bio, I go, "oh my gosh,
how did I get into this?" It's sort of like the mafia thing. They keep pull me in. No
it's. And I only say that because my former first beloved professor Thomas Lux
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was around when I was first offered the gig as he called it as regional director
for the Poetry Society of America and that happened almost accidentally. In the
sense that I was a mother of, and I had been traveling. I'd been living in Europe
with my now ex-husband but I was a writer and, the minute I left Sarah
Lawrence, I had been writing, I had already been publishing quite a bit in
magazines. And I knew, I guess, because of Sarah Lawrence and going to a lot of
readings, meeting a lot of poets, I knew a lot of poets as well. As you can tell, I'm
kind of a gregarious person and I love writing essays. I loved writing
introductions.
So, it seemed sort of, I think, a natural fit to those who knew me and, it was
Carol Muske-Dukes, the actor and her husband David Dukes, Daryl Larson, the
owner of the Chateau Marmont hotel, André Balazs' and another smaller group
of people that had started the series. And I believe they started it in 1990. I was
invited to come to one of the readings around 1991 and that group of people
did not want to continue with it for various-
Genevieve Kapla...: I'm sorry to interrupt you. Is this the Reskin Art Series or the [crosstalk
00:11:16]-
Elena Karina By...: No, no, this was called The Act of The Poet at the Chateau Marmont hotel.
Genevieve Kapla...: Okay. Yeah.
Elena Karina By...: And, it was an amazing series. In fact, to this day, everyone says it was the best
series that we had. And The Act of the Poet paired actors and poets. It was
probably one of my, definitely one of my favorite series that I ever handled. And
so because there were so many actors involved, they were able to bring in very
renowned actors and pair them with poets. People like Blyth, Danner read with
Steven Dunn and John Lithgow and, my gosh, Jennifer Tilly read with Gowie
Connell and so on and so on.
But, in any case the original group for good reasons, because most of them were
working actors, professionals and professors, they just couldn't continue with
the series. So they asked me if I would carry on in the running of the series. And
I said I would love to. And then Elise Paschen, the then Executive Director of The
Poetry Society of America said, "Well, we'll give you small stipend to do that
through The Poetry Society of America."
Genevieve Kapla...: Interesting.
Elena Karina By...: "And we will fund the series also with a small amount of money." We were able
to do that. And actually, the series, we had eight readings a year. I did
everything. I did the programming. I introduced the poets. We even set up the
chairs. We had a free wine and food reception after the events, the Chateau
Marmont was very generous. They gave free rooms to the poets and whoever
was involved that wanted to stay there. It was an incredible series.
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Genevieve Kapla...: That sounds great. It makes me feel like I got to Los Angeles too late because I I
missed the series.
Elena Karina By...: Gosh, it was amazing. And, you know, I thought again, going back to the
incredible part, Thomas Lux who's no longer with us sadly, but he said to me, he
said, "That'll be a good gig kid." He said, Do it for a couple years and you'll get to
meet some poets and have some fun." And I said, "Okay, I'll do that."
And, almost 13 years later, I decided it was time. Because it was a lot of work
and a lot of energy, it was time to move on. But, I did a series at the J Paul Getty
Center for almost five years with the Getty Research Institute and then USC's
Doheny Memorial Library, the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is now
called the Craft and Folk Art Museum and so on and so on.
Genevieve Kapla...: I feel like in some ways you're responsible for so much of what poetry in Los
Angeles is right now. Just because we've been involved with so many of these
series, and you have both a vast and an intimate knowledge of what is
happening in the city poetically.
Elena Karina By...: It's certainly fun. I don't know if I'm responsible, but I was certainly riding on
one of the mainstreams, but I think, we have to remember that Los Angeles
because of its geographical vast nature, it functions more like a state than a city,
I've always said that. And it's culturally very rich. So there have always been
Beyond Baroque and other wonderful reading series. There have always been
some wonderful reading series going on for many, many years. And now, I gave
Kate Gale at Red Hen Press my lists, all my lists and all my contacts, and then
now she's really taken it even further and she has many, many reading series
and she's done things nationally, as well as locally.
And then, there are so many other things going on here in Los Angeles. Of
course the Hammer Series at UCLAGenevieve
Kapla...: Amazing series.
Elena Karina By...: And that's not a new series. That's been going on for a long time. It was first
Doris Kerns and then Steven Yenser who's still doing it, you know, just so much
available.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah. Yeah. There's so many things happening-
Elena Karina By...: It's exciting, yeah.
Genevieve Kapla...: I feel like whenever... So I really like the entropy calendars that they have on Le
boom [inaudible 00:16:04] calendars, I think is maybe one of my favorite places
to go for what's happening in LA poetry-wise.
Elena Karina By...: We need one. We need to have one giant master calendarThis
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Genevieve Kapla...: Yes, yes, can you be in charge of that?
Elena Karina By...: I don't know. You need to get the NAA to fund some giant poetry and fiction
magazine series.
Genevieve Kapla...: I know. There's so many things and I feel like there's often five things on a single
day ain five totally different parts of Los Angeles-
Elena Karina By...: Like the Village Voice. Right, right, right. It is. It's marvelous. It's a show of... It's
not just a show of faith, it's an example of how we're growing as a city, but also
an example of what we've already done and people forget that. People always
make the mistake thinking the West Coast has been behind the East Coast and I
think that's no longer true and it can't be ignored anymore. There's so many top
poets living in the greater Los Angeles area now. So many universities. It's really
exciting.
Genevieve Kapla...: Can you talk a little bit more about the LA Times Festival of Books or the type of
work that you do with them? I guess that's one of the things when I think
whenever I say your name, they're like, "She's in charge of the Festival of
Books." So I feel like that's one of the things that people know a lot of, they
associate you with that.
Elena Karina By...: Well, I'm glad about that. I mean, I am very proud of that. I came on board their
second year. I believe, and I would like to give credit to the right person.
Sometimes in my bear of a little brain like Winnie the Pooh. I think it was Fred
Dewey who recommended me, so it's been what, 24 years now and-
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah.
Elena Karina By...: ... I am the... Technically I'm titled the consultant and moderator, which means
that I bring a giant list of poets to Anne Benny, who is astonishing. She is the
backbone and the hard work for the festival. But I bring the list of poets and
then we start very early in the year and we work on that together, putting
together a list from poets that either contact me or the festival directly or and
Benny directly. And it's a marvelous list because we get poets from all over the
country and sometimes from out of the country wanting to read. They have to
have a book that's one of the rules. And then as a moderator, I will be
introducing the poets at the festival.
And do that we're... I used to think we were the second largest, but I found out
that we are the largest book festival in the United States.
Genevieve Kapla...: Wow. That doesn't really surprise me having seen it. It is enormous and-
Elena Karina By...: Incredibly exciting.
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Genevieve Kapla...: Wow. And the poetry stage, I mean, the poetry stage at the festival books is one
of my favorite poetry events every year.
Elena Karina By...: It's phenomenal and I have to say, I'm very proud of it. I love the poets that
we've had, and the poets give marvelous performances. It took us some years to
figure out the timing of it. We used to have half an hour slots and then we
wanted to include many more poets. So we sometimes had some shared slots
that were 15 minutes and then that somehow didn't seem fair. Now we have
across the board, 20 minute slots, and that took care of being able to include
many more poets. My gosh, it really is stunning. And we have a great green
room.
Genevieve Kapla...: You've let the cat out of the bag. Now everyone's going to be emailing you and
saying, "Elena get me on the poetry stage next year. My new book is coming
out."
Elena Karina By...: And then, even though the panels only happen on Saturdays, the panels I've
heard, I never get to see them unless I'm on one of the panels. The panels are
wonderful too.
Genevieve Kapla...: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Oh yeah. It's a great book festival. I always tell my
students to go if they can. I like the casual feeling of it too, is like, you don't have
to be somebody who knows a lot about poetry or about books or about
anything to show up there. You can just go and you'd like drop in and out and
you see what everybody's been working on and you get to listen to some great
pro and cons-
Elena Karina By...: I work very hard at making sure that it's incredibly eclectic diverse, not only in
all ways in terms of stylist ethnically age-wise, we across the board make sure
that it's incredibly diverse, yeah.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah.
Elena Karina By...: So I'm very proud of that too.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah, it's a success.
Elena Karina By...: Thank you.
Genevieve Kapla...: So you're somebody who is always really busy, I know. And we've talked about-
Elena Karina By...: Too busy.
Genevieve Kapla...: Some of your local contributions in the Los Angeles area, but I also know that
you recently did the Georgia Poetry Circuit, this past year where you were
telling me a little bit earlier where you go to, correct me when I say this wrong,
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10 different colleges in Georgia over the space of one day. Could you describe
what the experience of being on the Georgia Poetry Circuit was like?
Elena Karina By...: Well, that was such a treat. Because, besides being poetry host and our arts
curators, I call it, I like being recognized as a poet obviously, especially in the last
two years, I've been working very hard on my own work. So it was really such a
treat to be acknowledged in that way.
So, the Georgia Poetry Circuit, they pick three poets a year to visit the south and
to visit Georgia specifically and you are paid and taken very well care of to visit
universities in the northern part of Georgia and the southern part of Georgia.
It's split in the fall and then in the spring. The idea is to read and either lecture
or do a Q&A as well for each university and to give... A lot of them are, I think,
underserved universities as well, an experience of poetry. It was an incredible
experience. I really enjoyed it. It was exhausting of course, because, not only do
you give a Q&A and a reading each day, but you're also having lunch and dinner
with the professors so, you have to be on all the time.
Genevieve Kapla...: Right.
Elena Karina By...: Yeah.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah. So in my understanding of it, it's like you go every day of the week, it's like
five days straight of you doing this lunch, class visit reading, Q&A, dinner...
Elena Karina By...: Right. And the reading. And, I was very prepared which was really important,
but I was not prepared for the fact that the students, I would say about 98% of
them had never experienced a poetry reading before. So I really threw out what
I had thought I was going to do. And thank goodness I... Although I had balanced
this with my Poetry Society of America work up until a certain time, prior to
that, I had spent many, many years as a preschool teacher and many, many
years before that and after that also as a teacher with middle school, high
school, and then some college mixed in there and a lot of experience with inner
city schools. So I used those experiences during this visit, because I felt that I
wanted the students to have something more than just a visiting poet getting up
and reading their work. I didn't feel like that would be fair.
I wanted this to be more participatory, so I started out by just kind of having a
casual conversation with them about what poetry could be, what it was. And
one of my favorite things to do is to talk about how poetry is like filmmaking. It's
like cartooning, it's like painting, and it's very much like advertising. Got milk, all
these time types of things. And I gave them some examples and, we talked a lot
about films too and about how it's like being an actor.
I could see their faces relax. Because I didn't want them to feel that this is an
academic experience. I wanted them to know that the power of language was
their power and, that that's so much a part of what poetry can be and should
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be. That it's not an academic pursuit necessarily. And that also the use of the
imagination wasn't just for art and artists, that it was something that could be
part of their everyday experience. Yeah.
Genevieve Kapla...: It sounds like you really were able to make it. I don't know if accessible is the
right word. That's not quite what I'm looking for, but, to make it an experience
that they are actually going to remember and think fondly of. Yeah.
Elena Karina By...: Yeah. And luckily, when I'm in these situations, and I think because I'm a little bit
hyperactive and, I used to be an athlete and I was a sprinter and actually won
best athlete in high school. So that my adrenaline works really well in these
situations, which means that also my memory kicks in when I'm standing off in
front of a classroom. So I was able to quote quite a few things to them. And
then I just read them either some of my more accessible works or fun things and
just bits and pieces, kind of threw it out there and then asked them, "Well, do
you have any thoughts or do you have any questions?" And again, so that it was
more like a dialogue. I think they really enjoyed that and I think it was a little bit
more unexpected.
I got a lot of feedback because of that and the teachers were really enjoying it.
And again, I didn't want just to be someone talking at them or reading just one
type of thing and making it seem like it was an something that they couldn't
belong to in some way.
Genevieve Kapla...: Right. Like something that just touches down for a minute and then gone again.
Elena Karina By...: Right, right. So, it became a new experience for me too. My dad was an art
professor and he used to say, "If you're not learning something, they're not
learning anything at all."
Genevieve Kapla...: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I'm going to put that in my head and keep it there for a
while. Wow.
Elena Karina By...: Yeah.
Genevieve Kapla...: So how do you balance your work as a public poet and arts curator, as you say,
like an organizer, how do you balance that kind of work, your outside work with
that time that you need to write and create? How do you make these two things
work together?
Elena Karina By...: Well, it's a good thing I'm not a fiction writer because I know that that requires a
lot more lengthy periods of time. For my essays however, I do need lengths of
time to write. So I do sometimes go away with a very close girlfriend, the poet,
Kathy Coleman, who has a book coming out with What Books Press and
Marvelous Book and she got some incredibly wonderful blurbs from Patricia
Smith and Sam Sax and Dorothy Barresi. But anyway, Kathy and I go away, we
usually go to Inverness, California, or Cambria for about 10 days at a time and
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that's when I can sit down without distractions which, I'm gonna make you
laugh in a minute because I write really well in terms of my poems with
distraction. Again, because maybe I'm a little ADD, distraction is something
sometimes that I thrive on. I I'm a collage artist so I like to collage my essays, I
like to collage poems, I like to do research and throw a lot of things in the pot,
but with the essays, obviously, you have to have linear thoughts much more so.
So I do like to sequester myself on those occasions and work at periods of time.
But, when I'm home and when I'm doing work for these other things and
institutions, or if I'm teaching or whatever it is that I'm doing, I learned after my
children became older, I just had to learn to find the time to write. And so that
became snippets, time in the weekends, in the mornings, whenever I could
really grab that moment, when I was young, it was always only at night, but
then that had to change because I'm older now and I get tired at night. My brain
gets tired at night.
Also, I'm inspired very quickly instantly by certain things. So then I will
sometimes try to run and write something down. I keep a lot of different
journals. It's in snatches of time. I don't have one way of doing things. Although,
I did make the students laugh because, people will often ask, "How do you
write? Where do you write and do you need quiet?" And I say, "No, I don't. I can
have lots of noise around me, but I do like to write on the bed in my pajamas."
Genevieve Kapla...: That seems like a good place to do it.
Elena Karina By...: Yeah. And, I found out that Anne Rice, the woman that wrote all the original
vampire books has to write in her pajamas apparently.
Genevieve Kapla...: I feel like that makes sense with fantasy type books like that. Like of course you
should be in a, I don't know, near the dream state in order to-
Elena Karina By...: Right, right, right. Right. And even though I may have a chaos of books
surrounding me and a chaos of papers, I don't like to have my house in chaos
which is interesting. I do like to have that in order. So it's kind of a balancing act.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah. Like the writing space can be a chaos space because it is right?
Elena Karina By...: Right. Right. Do you know that Theodore Roethke, one of my favorite poets,
after he died, they found a pair of pants on his desk underneath a pile of books.
I don't know whether that was [crosstalk 00:32:02] of his mind or-
Genevieve Kapla...: How long they had been gone. That's really funny. So I know that the visual arts
are really important to your poetry and your poetics, and, in your current work
you've been working on or responding to works by visual artists. Can you tell us
a little bit more about that project and maybe read us a poem from one of those
that you've been working on?
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Elena Karina By...: Absolutely. This is really an homage to my past. I grew up with parents who are
artists. My father was a very famous figure drawing teacher and he also taught
Disney Animators Anatomy. My mother's a painter, my brother's a painter. I
grew up with a lot of contemporary and conceptual art. That was really my
upbringing. Not because my parents were Bohemian by any stretch of the
imagination, but because it was the time that we grew up in, in the '60s and
'70s. And I'm realized recently couple things that I wanted to write differently. A
lot of my past books have been really based in imagination, even though real life
informs my work and a lot of research, obviously very lyrical work.
And I also thought, I have this warehouse, we all do, we have a warehouse of
memory and a warehouse of experiences that I have not tapped into and so
much of my life was art and was really immersed in some really good art. I
mean, people in my dad's school were like Baldessari and Robert Irwin who
designed the Getty Gardens and Billy Al Bankson and Ed Roche, the list goes on
and on, and Jack Goldstein was a close friend of my parents. So I thought, I
really want to go back to that. My dad, as I said, had all of these wonderful
aphorisms, but, he said, "You could tell how good a painter was by how many
failures he had in his studio." I thought, "I bet you could also tell how bad a poet
is by how many successes he has."
I don't know. I was playing, but then in my head and I thought, or how many
things he does the same over and over. And I thought... And my dad also said,
"You have to challenge yourself if you get into habits." And I thought, "I've going
to have to challenge myself. I'm not particularly comfortable with narratives and
I'm not particularly comfortable writing about real life. So even though I'm
cheating, a little bit, I'm going to use these ekphrastic poems to bring in stories
of real life. And it's been amazing because they have been triggering these
memories and particularly preteen periods of time. Probably because it was a
very sort of seminal moment in our lives when my half sister died and before I
became a real teenager and all that kind of thing.
I will start with this. I played outside every day after school until dark and then I
knew I had to come in. I was an incredible tomboy. And one day, right before I
came in, it was dusk, and they always say that it's a little dangerous dusk
because cars, it's hard for cars to see. Anyway, this woman, and I think she must
have been someone that was working for one of the houses on our street, asked
me directions for... I lived on McCadden here in Hancock park. She asked the
directions for Highland, but we lived right by McCadden and Beverly. And so I
told her where Highland was, and I watched her for some reason-
Genevieve Kapla...: Walk to her car.
Elena Karina By...: Walk wherever she was going. I think she was going to a bus, I'm not sure where
she was going, but that's all I need to tell you right now. The poem is based on
Andrew Wyeth's work. It's not any one particular painting, but what caught my
attention was we also spent a lot of time at the beach and, what caught my
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attention was one of the paintings was called Squall so that triggered also a lot
of memories. And, he has those beautiful, a lot of paintings about fields and vast
spaces. And I also thought about, for some reason that... There was the movie
Walkabout, if you know, Roeg Film and Nicholas Roeg and it's an amazing film
and I saw it when I was quite young and it had a great effect on me and about
how I think that usually the aborigines made that walk when they were
teenagers.
A Walkabout in Andrew Wyeth's painting. Calm before the squall hit, before it
threw the ton heavy boulders from the break water. Before we stood at the
window. We lay on the wood colored beach. Dreams do not sink children with
the ship. Ships carrying other languages are found empty atop mountains in far
countries, so far from their water. After giving directions, I saw the woman cross
our street get hit by a car, the color of dusk. She sank at once as if into a hole. I
carried that hole in my stomach for years. A sinkhole also known as a swallow
hole, a doline caused by some depression by some form of ground collapse.
In the '60s, TV was filled with them in islands as quicksand, and as men's
mouths, immolation fire's cadmium-midst of protests. Films of ditches, war
holes, numberless gray graves unaccounted for. Running before a storm's
roiling, I learned how to love being alone, jump over spaces. I flew roof to roof
in a rage once, slept by a tree, dreamt the wet black head of a horse breathed
desert white clouds over me. A child can look like anyone, where sea waves can
look like brown wheat when eaten by wind at the end of the day, the long walk,
the wilderness rest of your life.
Genevieve Kapla...: Oh beautiful. To me that poem, I mean, it kind of like evokes the mood of
Wyeth in a lot of ways. And then I'm really fascinated by the way you bring in
just like very not small, but short, I guess, snippets of your own life and your
own experiences. Could you maybe talk a little bit more about that relationship
between the visual of the painting or, Wyeth's uvra and how you enter this
poem? How do you see the relationship? Not necessarily in this poem, but like
in this whole series?
Elena Karina By...: Yeah. It's been an amazing series for me because, I started this series because I
have a whole other body of work and I've published a lot from that body of
work, but I wasn't really happy with it, I just didn't feel connected to it and I
thought... Well, again, I wanted to start something new and I wanted to write a
little more about real life, but I also wanted to write about art, but I didn't
wanna do an ekphrastic poem that was a direct ekphrastic and this is what
happened. What has been amazing for me in this process is to meditate on each
artist's work until some memory comes forth.
For example, there's an Ethiopian artist named Awol Erizku who does lot of
works with plants and cactuses and things and that, brought forth this very
frightening, incredible memory of a cousin who was murdered by his drug
dealer. And that was the memory that I had not thought of for, I don't know, 30
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years. And then there was the one about Rachel Whiteread who's a British artist
who casts negative space. And I was thinking, well, I'd really like to write about
something about her, but I didn't know what it was. And I love her work and I
was and thinking and thinking about it and it suddenly came to me, if I were to
express something about grief, that's how I would express it as a big giant
cement casting of negative space and then that brought me to the death of my
half sister.
So it's a way of immersing myself in the artist's work and physically being there.
And then, I think it's the physicality of each artist's work that brings me to the
memory. Because, it was Robert Hass that said, "Language begins in the body."
And that is for me, how I begin writing anyway. It's often, as I said, oral and so I
find my... I've said this before it sounds so crazy, but I often find myself rocking
when I'm writing. And sometimes it comes musically first and then it's like, I'm
rowing toward the subject matter. And I know I've said that before in interviews
as well, but I do feel like I'm trying to pull it out from the unconscious mind and
search for that subject matter. And you know, Stanley Kunitz, one of our former
poet laureates talks a lot about that too, "You don't know what your subject
matter's going to be right until you get [crosstalk 00:42:51]. Yeah. That's a
fascinating process.
Genevieve Kapla...: I know that you're someone who grew up around a lot of art... I don't know a lot
of artists and so that's definitely a key part of your life. How do you choose the
art or the artist that you're going to respond to? Like, do you'd wake up one
morning and you're like, "Well, it's a Joseph Cornell kind of day so I will meditate
with this box for a while." How do you-
Elena Karina By...: I started first with artists that I loved and then I also did, recently I did some,
some research. I have a lot of magazines like Bomb and different art magazines.
And then, I have a huge collection of art books. So I went back and just
immerse. And again, let the art come into me and then let it have its free
association feeling. Like you know, Hannah Höch, the data artist, German data
artists was very important to me and in fact was the main influence, the first
influence for Mask.
Genevieve Kapla...: Really?
Elena Karina By...: So it was a tough one for me and I thought, well, am I going to be able to write
about her or use her again? And so that one came later, but it took a while but
then, again, it sort of finally snapped forth. Sometimes the titles of their pieces
will trigger something.
Genevieve Kapla...: Like the Squall.
Elena Karina By...: Right. Or if it's... I have to be careful because if I'm adopting something
emotional from their work, I don't want it to seem like I'm just doing a persona.
I want it to also feel like I'm translating their experience and my experience
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separately. That's been a little bit harder for me because I obviously do the
persona thing, I've already done the persona thing as I did with Mask and I
wanted something a little bit, I wanted a fresh takeoff from that way of thinking.
You know language is so versatile that we can find a way... And I think for me
actually, what I think is the most important is how you end a poem is fascinating
to me. I think that that's something that I'm always challenging myself. How am
I going to enter the subject matter each time? So even if I start writing them, I
will sometimes invert them or think about what the voice is doing. That's the
most important part at this point.
And, I liked the constraint. I loved of course Terrence Hayes's book The
American Sonnets and I loved the constraint of the sonnet idea so I decided to
make them a sonnet size 14 lines, because I felt that the constraint would... I
think it was Strindberg who said that constraint creates a freedom. So I felt that
the constraint would really helped me reign in because I would feel then that
that would also force me to do things that I'm not used to doing.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah. Well, and to add that, the size constraint to the constraint of already
responding to a piece of art in some way. And I haven't read all of these art
forms yet because your book is not out yet. But the ones that I have read, I feel
like they're really exciting. They're doing different things in each of the poems.
And I also really appreciate how they're responding to art in a surprising way.
Elena Karina By...: Thank you. I hope so.
Genevieve Kapla...: It's not like an expected ekphrastic. It's something that is totally different. It
might be a whole new form. We'll see.
Elena Karina By...: I hope so. I hope so. And again, I don't believe in innovation for the sake of
innovation, you know that. I would hate to do that, but, as I said, I wanted to
challenge myself and as an artist, I wanted to really make it interesting for me.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah. Well, the process you're using, I think, it's inventing some really
interesting ways of using the line and ways of using language, which is really
cool.
Elena Karina By...: Well, good. I hope they're also accessible. I'm really trying hard to make them
also somewhat narrative, even though maybe some of them are short lines, I'm
trying to make them clear minded which is not always easy for me, which I
realize I don't know why. But, I wanted there to be... Even if I'm jumping like
that one where I'm talking a little bit about what's going on historically during
that period of time, the Vietnam war was going on. I wanted to at least have
some semblance of clarity. I hope.
Genevieve Kapla...: Do you have maybe one more from that series that you'd like to share?
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Elena Karina By...: Gosh. Okay. Well, since I mentioned the Rachel Whiteread and this is about my
half sister. Rachel Whiteread is a British sculptor.
Rachel Whiteread: IT'S SO.
You could almost lick the sugar cubes stacked in sleep. Find the hexahedron ark
floating today's ocean missing its human animal leaving home. Grief is an
impression of a missing table under the table, a body withdrawn from the body
floating, the color of Halloween candy wrappers. I lived a whole afternoon
under the leftover house boards in our dying garden after my one sister died,
half-sister, half-death of my thinking about death at nine. A black hole can be
measured by the sheer speed of what is orbiting around it. If you withdraw one
object from its space in a room, measure what's left, all the empty part, you
have a child inside a box, a box thinking outside itself.
Genevieve Kapla...: Wow. So that's the one that you were talking about, the... My brain just broke.
You broke me with that poem.
Elena Karina By...: Well, yeah, no. I think I told you earlier that she started out working with boxes
and then she moved on to casting negative space. But, the beginning of the
poem, I forgot to say was a little bit of a political tweak there because I'm so
upset about what's happening about not allowing people to come into our
country and about so many people getting into boats and coming into other
countries and and getting into rickety boats and not making it and that kind of
thing. And that comes into another poem of mine, another political poem of
mine too that's coming out, I think in [inaudible 00:50:35].
But, it's fun because I think as long as I'm using the artist's work as a takeoff
point, or as Richard Hugo said in that wonderful early book, Triggering Towns,
it's a trigger. Finding a different allegiance to something and finding that you
can... There's endless possibilities in terms of how we can orient ourselves.
And, it may seem at first, sort of cystic, but I realized that... It was [inaudible
00:51:26] that said, "The more specific you become, the more universal." So, I
don't think the human story is, there's only so many stories that we can tell in
our lifetime. And the human story is a universal one no matter where you come
from. There are only sort of a handful of emotions, but the variations within
that are endless. And then, how we relate it to these things that we can come in
contact with is also endless. That's the fun part.
Genevieve Kapla...: Yeah. Yeah. And I love the idea of creating a poem in response to an artist who's
working with negative space and you've put... I mean, I can see on the page
right there that there's the positive space of the poem. I don't know, there's so
many layers, which I think is something that's really exciting and [crosstalk
00:52:22]-
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Elena Karina By...: And I'm not sure how I came across the black hole being measured by the sheer
speed of what it's orbiting around it. But, also that idea of how we measure
things is so fascinating. This is cool stuff.
Genevieve Kapla...: I think we should probably get to wrapping it up, but I was wondering if you
would like to read one other poem, like maybe an earlier poem that you could
share with us as a way of like sending us off.
Elena Karina By...: All right. Gosh. I think... Well, I could either read History of Restoration: Grief
Mask, or I could read Fish Mask From The Water, which was one of the early
research ones.
Genevieve Kapla...: Let's do Fish Masks.
Elena Karina By...: OK. This is fun because this kind of speaks to the fact that it's sort of like
adopting material, and at least in the voice of the speaker making your own and
it's something that I've always loved to do and still probably will love doing. And
it was in inspired by the quote.
A rain of fish actually did occur in 1817 in Appin in Scotland. It consisted of a
down pour of small herrings, a feat that nature repeated in 1830 at Islay in
Hebrides. And that's from The Science of Everyday Things. Fish mask from the
water. And I used those dates to look up a number of things that happened
during that time.
Fish mask, from the water. As if common sense had a vendetta to persuade you
nothing is as you usual as it seems, that climbing the bone ladder from the heart
up to the head or better yet from the head down to the heart, you see the slave
of your logic using a child's red beach bucket to empty the sinking boat that
carries you both out to the center of the Atlantic, where you see the blue
Palazzo with women wearing white dance to Rossini's Cinderella. And you see
the Lochness monster green hair of Neptune, and you hear bagpipes leading the
wind. Now a storm is brewing in your mind and your bad behavior comes back
to haunt you like a daily cup of strong tea, like the ambition of pleasure.
But nothing is unnatural if you think about it, if Bible or Buddha says so. Sky
traded for sea, the shining multitudes of fish bodies reigning down around you,
a live alphabet. This is the same year we introduced perpendicular to the
vocabulary of architecture. The year [inaudible 00:55:20] discovers lithium. You
can almost count backwards as if dreaming, and then you are lifted by an air
funnel, past the persistence of dawn, past this Gaelic word, [Gaelic 00:55:33] for
[inaudible 00:55:35] fish. This is what you get for not thinking straight. Can you
blame anyone? Perhaps it's just the religious life raised up somewhere from the
sea and carried to land in the black body of some cloud, tiny silver fish herrings,
like so many polished chrome scales of a God stealing light. You see them fall,
pristine armies driven off his back like rain to arrive at your feet, drown on air.
Tonight, you do not know why. Tonight, when you sleep, you will breathe water.
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Genevieve Kapla...: Wow. That's such a great place to end and thank you so much for reading that.
Just to let our listeners know since they're not here with us right now, that was
from your book mask, Masque, M-A-S-Q-U-E. So that was Elena reading her
poem from Masque.
Elena Karina By...: Thank you Genevieve.
Genevieve Kapla...: No, thanks so much for being here Elena.
Elena Karina By...: It was lovely.
Genevieve Kapla...: This is Genevieve Kaplan, and you've been listening to Poets at Work, recorded
live in Studio B3 at Claremont Graduate University.