Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

Karla Kelsey

An extended bio from the author

I was born in Long Beach, California in 1975. I grew up there and stayed in Southern California for my undergraduate work, which I did at UCLA. I majored in philosophy and literature and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. I went on to the MFA program at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop where I was awarded a Teaching Writing Fellowship and then did a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Denver. While at the University of Denver I was the Associate Editor of the Denver Quarterly for two years.

One of the very important elements of my biography not reflected in my academic and publishing career is that I trained to be a classical ballet dancer. I was passionate about ballet and it is quite literally the end to which all I did was focused towards, from the age of 4 until about 18, when I realized that I had allowed all of the pressures of being a dancer to eclipse the joy of dancing. I quit ballet and went to college because I didn’t know what to do with my life. I quickly found writing and pursued it with all of the passion with which I pursued ballet. I have never written any “ballet” poems, but the training and rigors of classical ballet have been fundamental to the writer and person that I am. When you grow up spending hours teaching your body to fulfill certain very specific forms (positions and movement) you develop a very unique and distinct relationship to form. When you grow up spending hours inspecting the forms that you make in the mirror as you are making them, you realize the extent to which the act of dancing does not equal the image created by the dancer; rather, it is more. It is no wonder that I ended up fascinated with philosophers like Plato, who deals with the ultimate realities of forms—the ideal dancer—and hashes out the physical and mental relation to those forms. Along with physically teaching me things that I think I will always be working through in language, ballet also taught me to protect what I love about poetry from the pressures of the “profession.” Iowa, for example, is well known for being very tough on writers in terms of competition, but after having dealt with that sort of thing from a really young age, those pressures didn’t really bother me and I was able to get so much out of the program.

Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary is my first book. I wrote another book during my years at Iowa called The Seeing Exercises, but I don’t think that it will ever see the light of day. The book is important to me, because I was working through many things—particularly elements of objectivism and ideas I had about the ethics of language—but I don’t know that the book would be very interesting to readers. I also have a chapbook published by Noemi press called Little Dividing Doors in the Mind. I’m currently working on book-length project based around the sonnet called Iteration Nets. This book takes my interest in form and in pulling ideas and language through different forms that I work with in Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary and applies it to the sonnet. My poetry has appeared in Fence, Verse, Boston Review, 26, The New Review of Literature, Elixir, and The Antioch Review. I am Visiting Assistant Professor at Susquehanna University where I teach poetry writing. I live with my husband, Peter Yumi, on the Susquehanna River in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Peter is a visual and sound artist and we always have a few projects cooking at any one time. We are currently at work on a chapbook/cd project of hymnals about the river.