Kylie Gellatly
Fever Poems
VISPO
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Bio:
Kylie Gellatly is a poet and the author of The Fever Poems (Finishing Line Press 2021). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Daily, Fence, DIAGRAM, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Kylie has been awarded Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poet’s 2022 Gertrude Claytor Award, was longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s 2022 New Voices Contest, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Disquiet Prize. She has received support from Vermont Studio Center, Juniper Writing Institute, and is a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College. For more, visit www.kyliegellatly.com |
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Artist Statement:
This is a body of found collage poetry, sourced from The Arctic Diary of Russell Williams Porter, written at the turn of the 20th century. Porter, a painter and an amateur telescope maker, wrote his diaries with an eye trained to landscapes, weather, and light. Using this lexicon, I was able to deconstruct the vista he rendered and reconstruct a subjective internal landscape.
As I wrote these poems over the course of a month, the body of work revealed itself to be a phantom passing, nearly gone—pleading for harmony and begging the attention of the reader to the finitude of lives.
This is a body of found collage poetry, sourced from The Arctic Diary of Russell Williams Porter, written at the turn of the 20th century. Porter, a painter and an amateur telescope maker, wrote his diaries with an eye trained to landscapes, weather, and light. Using this lexicon, I was able to deconstruct the vista he rendered and reconstruct a subjective internal landscape.
As I wrote these poems over the course of a month, the body of work revealed itself to be a phantom passing, nearly gone—pleading for harmony and begging the attention of the reader to the finitude of lives.
This process-based hybrid poetry, in its structured and confined space, lent itself to a depth of expression that allowed me to process time and living past endings. The voice that emerged was one that could adapt to changes with an appetite, chew grief and doom to a pulp, and spit it out in a new form.