Private Mentorship with Elena Karina Byrne

BIO

Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, former MOCA and J. Paul Getty Center poetry series curator, Elena Karina Byrne is the long-time Poetry Consultant & Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club. In 2018 she completed her three years as one of the final judges for the Kate & Kingsley Tufts Awards in Poetry and in 2019 her lecture/reading tour for the Georgia Poetry Circuit. She has taught full-time, part-time or been a guest speaker for USC, Cambridge University, UK, Koc University Istanbul, University of Greensboro, NC, Oxnard College, U.C Long Beach, Poetry Barn, Unleash the Writer Within, Brentwood School, AWP and elsewhere.

Pushcart Prize recipient Elena is a freelance editor, multi-media artist and author of four books of poetry (Phantom Limbs, Omnidawn 2021; Squander, Omnidawn, 2016; Masque, Tupelo Press 2008; The Flammable Bird, Zoo Press/Tupelo Press, 2002) a poetry chapbook (NO, DON’T, What Books Press, 2020) and collection of published “interrupted essays” entitled Voyeur Hour: Meditations of Poetry, Art & Desire. Her numerous publications include the Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Verse Daily, BOMB, Poetry, The Kyoto Journal, Denver Quarterly, Volt, diode, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, APR, Poetry Daily Anthology, Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, Persea Books 2019 anthology The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making, Poetry International, and is forthcoming in  Entropy, Blackbird, Narrative, and New American Writing among others.

ARTIST & TEACHING STATEMENT

Here, we have an inspirational obligation to ourselves, to others, to our subjects…so, there is no subject, no object that does not belong to this shared life-long endeavor! I believe in the imperfect poem, reckless blessings, shame as an aria, feelings in poems, traveling any uncharted territory, letting your wildness be pure but with a disciplined eye on the image, line, and the use of an attentive ear! I’m a generous teacher with my time, critiques, and personalized enthusiasm. Shall we go to work? 

As a perennially-green empath who lives “out loud” (Emile Zola) in black and white, I’ve come to love the matching high energy of cities, but find I will temper my wild child sense of awe and unrelenting curiosity in the calm chapel of nature with a new poet’s book, a walk, and glass of Pinot Noir. If my deep love of humanity, of art and of cooking doesn’t lead me to the oddest word origin histories, my constant hunger for research will lead me to the philosopher’s precipice, take me body-back into the happy realms of deep-sea creatures or deep space, the unexpected addiction to language’s erotic impulse to change and procreate (“Words are so erotic. They never tire of their coupling.” Stanley Kunitz)…and it will allow me to re-discover the beginning relationship to the art of language. We are language’s accomplices, always hungry, voracious, knowing, like Victor Hugo, that the “darkness is nuptial” where we can marry the outside world with the world of our imaginations in order to create light in the realms of image, metaphor, juxtaposition, and sonic lyric breath-for-breath capture of writing a story.  For that reason, as an artist, I will always consider myself a student and challenge myself to see, hear, and make this film anew.

WHAT I’M READING

I am a collage artist, so you can imagine me on the bed surrounded by dozens of books I can taste–– I see this as a warm-up, the way an athlete warms up before entering the playing field. These books are not just poetry books. I adore art collections (Leonardo da Vinci said a painter is a poet, and a poet is a painter with words), philosophy and non-fiction books, (Susan Sontag, Lorca, Breton, Unamuno, Márquez, William Gass, Artaud), books about the ecology and the sea, essays on semiotics, ones written by filmmakers, scientists (Darwin, Tarkovsky, Michio Kaku, etc.), and eclectic, strange people! Galway Kinnell once told me that we must feed our work with everything but poetry! 

Since poetry begins in the body, (I think that’s Hass) I do feel often like I am rowing toward my subject matter, trying to find shore through the fog, the waves, past the storm … Theodore Roethke, Plath, Hart Crane, James Wright, Pablo Neruda, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Anna Akhmatova, and John Keats were my first love-matches; I often return to them again and again…but I believe we need and love different authors at different stages in our writing lives because we developmentally require new touchstone references and triggers. Therefore, I am constantly swooning over past & present voices. This is a seminal reminder that the former "big guns" of former writing generation-cultures are informing our writing, even when we are not aware of their influence. 

So, yes, let Ocean Vuong have you dancing inside a beautiful body alarm, waking as you stand by his fresh consciousness-window, but remember all the past voices’ ghosts weighted in his limbs when he says, “I want to tell you—but I only earned / one life. & I took nothing. Nothing. Like a pair of teeth/ at the end. The TV kept saying The planes...” in his TriQuarterly poem Untitled (Blue, Green, & Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952. I’m still haunted by fiction writers Eugene Ionesco and Kobe Abe, poets Agha Shahid Ali and Lucie Broch-Broido, although they have yet to make their way into my writing. Same for Brigit Pegeen Kelley who I had the brief good fortune of knowing. I can say her work still teaches me something, especially now in my newest challenging narrative adventures. 

Like so many of us, I have become politically enraged, ignited, and informed, which also changes how I read. A recent influence includes Joshua Cohen’s ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Distracted Society and of course, the lovely Ross Gay’s books, all of them, poetry and non-fiction... for the heart-garden, for calming down.

-from “An Horation Notion” by Thomas Lux

You make the thing because you love the thing
and you love the thing because someone else loved it
enough to make you love it.
And with that your heart like a tent peg pounded
toward the earth’s core.
And with that your heart on a beam burns
through the ionosphere.
And with that you go to work.