Dylan Karlsson creates poetry with his laptop’s keyboard, transforming individual words into an intricate story with references that reach into the depths of history, politics and literature.
After winning the 2016 Fred and Edith Herman Memorial Prize for his poetry, the second-year English student will present a 13-minute selection of his poems alongside his brother Stefan Karlsson, a UCLA alumnus, at the Hammer Museum on Thursday.
Dylan Karlsson said creative work always attracted him whether it was drawing comic books as a young child or jamming out in his living room with a guitar, bass or piano. However, during the summer before his freshman year at UCLA, Dylan Karlsson turned to poetry as a new creative outlet when his brother read his own poetry at home and shared poetry books such as “The Duino Elegies” by Rainer Maria Rilke.
“The things (my brother) wrote really influenced me in the way he was playing with language,” Dylan Karlsson said. “He was a role model in that sense, being able to talk with another about one’s creative endeavors.”
After his brother introduced him to poetry, Dylan Karlsson said he started exploring different ideas in politics, media and the news through his creative work. One poem he wrote questions the rapid expansion of construction of warehouses in America by displaying the text as a barcode, a symbol of consumerism. Another poem is told through the perspective of a home-video camera lens to analyze how children prepare for adulthood through imaginary games.
Dylan Karlsson said he opens tabs of YouTube videos and Wikipedia pages while writing his poetry to serve as an “active library” for inspiration. The writing process is challenging because he tries to make each line as constricted or absurd as possible, sometimes making it difficult to piece words together, he said.
“That is perhaps the feat of language in a way, trying to push the bounds of how someone can just sit down and write this sort of crazy assemblage of words,” Dylan Karlsson said.
Along with writing in his free time, Dylan Karlsson said he also improved his writing in an academic setting during one of UCLA’s creative writing seminars led by English professor Harryette Mullen.
Every week, students prepared an original poem, which they would present to the rest of the students in the class, said second-year English student Zach Conner, who participated in the seminar with Karlsson. Sitting at a round table with the professor, students offered critiques and praise of each other’s poems to improve their writing skills.
Outside of the seminar, Conner said he trusts Karlsson to edit his work because of his talent with poetry and added that the pair often exchange poems.
“Dylan stresses resilience and treats poetry kind of like a linguistic gym where your potential for improvement is infinite,” Conner said.
At home, Stefan Karlsson said his brother influences him just as much as he influences his brother. Although they are both performing their own poems at the poetry reading, Stefan Karlsson said they have a strong familiarity with each other’s work.
Stefan said the pair often talk about poetry together when they are hanging out at home or getting food at a cafe. Over spring break, they collaborated on a poem about a Rube Goldberg machine, an apparatus that performs a simple task in a complicated fashion, and bounced ideas back and forth, Stefan Karlsson said.
“His poems display a real attention to form and craft. I think he really strives to develop the artfulness of his poems,“ Stefan Karlsson said. “There is a subtle humor and cleverness to his writing much like there’s a subtle cleverness to himself.”
As Dylan and Stefan Karlsson prepare for the upcoming poetry reading, Stefan Karlsson said he and his brother have been calling each other to get advice on which poems to perform.
“The most edifying thing (my brother) taught me was he broke the mold of what I thought poetry was in the first place,” Dylan Karlsson said. “He had a playful and humorous style that freed my conception of what poetry could be.”
Contributing reports by Andrea Henthorn, Daily Bruin reporter