Bio & Response

Karla Kelsey

A native of California, Karla Kelsey is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and currently finds herself in Colorado grafting the modes of academia to the movements of poetry at the University of Denver.

Question #4: Susan Maxwell writes, “The poem furrows a way out of the white by running over it, while still white underneath ink.” Brian Kitely composes “postcard stories” that are, quite literally, started on the back of postcards that are then mailed to friends and family, after which the stories are rewritten and revised. And Bin Ramke finds that, “the necessity to make the tiny announcements that are line-ends in ‘standard’ verse becomes sometimes, often, annoying, arbitrary, and ultimately misleading.” Why do you write pp/ffs? How are your stories and poems brought into the world?

Sound of the word, clock ticking, the clicking of a modem, fluorescent buzz of lights on and on and off. These sounds of the everyday spark more words, spark poems and thought, the logical patterning of a Why pausing the poem, stuttering syntax into normalcy until the How seeps in, mixing the words thoughts sounds back into poem. The Why of writing always plunges into the How into the How Breathe, How Think, How Neighbor, How Be. Not that the logic of the Why is not a poem, it is the pause of the poem, the slowing into connectors--in the prose poem the Why seeps into a particular How of a particular form, turning the form into a logical box that the sound the word the line exceeds.