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/ This transcript was exported on Sep 14, 2021. Page 1 of 17 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 This transcript was exported on Sep 14, 2021 - view latest version here. S01E05_Poetry_Art__Los_Angeles_with_Elena_Karina_Byrne_mixdown Transcript by Rev.com Page 2 of 17 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. This transcript was exported on Sep 14, 2021 - view latest version here. S01E05_Poetry_Art__Los_Angeles_with_Elena_Karina_Byrne_mixdown Transcript by Rev.com Page 3 of 17 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 This transcript was exported on Sep 14, 2021 - view latest version here. S01E05_Poetry_Art__Los_Angeles_with_Elena_Karina_Byrne_mixdown Transcript by Rev.com Page 4 of 17 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 o