This week’s PoetrySnaps! guest is Elena Karina Byrne, a poet and multi-media artist. She grew up in Los Angeles in the 1960’s in a family of artists: her parents and brother were painters, did sketch work and conceptual art. Byrne was inspired by all of it, but she also wanted to find her own niche. In poetry, she was able to take the visual world she learned about as a child and put it into words on paper. Here, Elena Karina Byrne shares her poem William Wegman's Weimaraner William.
Elena Karina Byrne:
I am a poet because my parents were artists. My father was a very famous drawing teacher. He taught figure drawing and Disney animators anatomy, which is to say that he not only taught me how to draw but how to see, and how to really look at things carefully.
Because I was exposed to so much art, and my mother was an abstract painter, my orientation as a child was always in the visual world. Much of my exposure and my experiences involved visual art and discussions with my mother about art. It was a marvelous experience.
I wanted to be a poet around the age of 13, or at least decided at that time because everyone was an artist. Even though I could draw and paint, I wanted something of my own. Because of a wonderful teacher in school who introduced me to poetry, I found this new passion right away. So that was it! I think poetry will always be relevant. It reminds us of our humanity.
WILLIAM WEGMAN’S WEIMARANER WILLIAM
–be a stand-in
Two shoes I took off at the party & left them in a footfield with others
by the door looking back at them ditched looking at
their Weimaraner-brown obedient mouths
I wondered if they
revealed personality could be identified as belonging to me W.W.
photographed his shoes once old pair Untied on, Tied off, 1973
they, together I only remember because I thought I
once recognized their sockless near twins in
Van Gogh’s painting just
askew worn-in as if far
windows wept away from them as if
once gray animals in our clothes groaned then slept Children
love or hate shoes as they do dogs teach them-
selves how to tie them up keeping
left & right side by side well-behaved
by the bed Psychologists say that
we choose pets & colors for a reason We look alike So Be Other
I say Be a stand-in once Souvenir Leggy For A Moment
while collapsing Into The Ocean room
About the poet:
Elena Karina Byrne is a poet, visual artist, editor and teacher. She is also a poetry consultant and moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. In 2008, her poem Berryman's Concordance Against This Silence received a Pushcart Prize for which she has been nominated eleven times.
About the host:
Steven Law is a poet, journalist and educator based in Page, Arizona. He is the author of a collection of poems called Polished.
About the music:
Original music by Flagstaff-based band Pilcrowe.
