Creative Writing Program reading casts Spotlight on lyricism

 As a part of the month-long Spotlight on the Arts event, Karla Kelsey, the Diann Blakely Visiting Poet spent the last week participating in events, visiting classes and finally a reading of her most recent work, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy (2024). 

Kelsey was introduced by Nik Moore, graduate student in the Creative Writing Program and began her reading, not with her own work but an excerpt from Mina Loy, giving the audience historical context for her work. Loy, a British poet and painter, was part of the generation that—beginning in 1912 with the founding of Poetry magazine—launched the modernist revolution in poetry in the United States. History would become an important theme that that ran throughout the works she read that night. Transcendental Factory is a lyric-documentary of writer and artist Mina Loy that discusses Loy’s work and life. 

Kelsey brought Loy’s world to life through her lyrical writing, elevated by her in-person reading. She pulled the packed room into the version of Paris that Loy would have navigated. Her work is textured by the physical objects of that time, and the historically informed depictions of fashion and architecture build a vivid picture. Kelsey elicited the feeling of a shadow, brushing up against the same dresses that Loy made moments after she touched them and following two steps behind her as she walked to a cafe. However, she ensures that the audience never forgets that the narrator is not Loy, but someone who is processing and interpreting history from a philosophical and informed perspective. Things do not play out in a linear narrative one might expect to find in a biography. 

Kelsey also read some of her poems that are a part of her current project. These poems were written during the same period she was working on Transcendental Factory. One may glean the way history and writers of the past informed these poems. During a brief Q&A that followed she expanded on the research that went into her works and motifs that she is drawn to. 

I left the room struck by the way Kelsey presented history in a creative way that didn’t make me feel like I was reading a history textbook. It was insightful to see and hear someone use lyrical prose to explore the past.

Kelsey is an accomplished poet and essayist whose other works include On Certainty (2023), Blood Feather (2020), A Conjoined Book (2014), Iteration Nets (2010) and Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (2006). She is also a professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. The Diann Blakely Visiting Poet supports authors like Kelsey, to engage broader audiences with poetry through active readings.    

Image: Photo of the Blakely Visiting Poet reading by Jami Mays, courtesy of the UGA Creative Writing Program.