Kelli Anne Noftle grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia and has lived for the past 12 years in Southern California. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art from Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. As an undergraduate, she studied painting restoration and art history at the Lorenzo D’Medici School in Florence, Italy and also lived and worked with art students in a study abroad program in Paris, France. Her first publication, a personal essay, appeared in the Harvard Summer Review while attending the Harvard Extension Program during the summer of 2001. Although she was not academically involved in the writing program at Point Loma, she hosted a weekly open mic on-campus poetry reading and participated in several community open mic readings in San Diego. In 2005, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a Masters Degree in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. There, she studied with poets David St. John, Elena Karina Byrne, Holly Prado, and Amy Gerstler. Mentored by Elena Karina Byrne, she interned at The Ruskin Art Club, host to poetry readings and workshops with award-winning published poets. It was then that she began reading contemporary poets and discovered early influences: Mary Ruefle, Charles Simic, Richard Siken, Larry Levis, and Martha Ronk. After receiving her Masters Degree in 2007, she focused on music, singing and performing with various Southern California indie-pop bands and musicians. Her singer/songwriter solo project, Miniature Soap, has performed many times in Los Angeles and she is currently recording a full length album at Red Rockets Glare Studio in West Los Angeles that will be completed by 2012. Over the past few years, her poems have appeared in several literary journals including: Anti-, Blackbird, The Baltimore Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, Cream City Review, The Greensboro Review, The Journal, The Nepotist, The Offending Adam, Oranges & Sardines, Quarter After Eight, and VERSE. Kelli currently resides in east Los Angeles, works as an assistant to the CEO of a shipping company near LAX, and is working on a second book of poems, a novel, and collaborating on a performance piece with a Los Angeles artist/actor.

Praise for I Was There for your Somniloquy:

Kelli Anne Noftle’s I Was There for Your Somniloquy is a thrilling, destabilizing meditation on our divided selves: our split brains and checkered evolutionary pasts. Here we are (in this book): hermaphroditic chimeras talking in what may be our sleep. We’ll know once we figure out what consciousness is. In Noftle’s arresting debut, we can slip from “comma” to “coma” with frightening ease. These poems are nimble, daring, and convincing. Get ready, if you can, for the things they will convince you of!

--Rae Armantrout, judge of the 2010 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize

Awake, reader! You are about to enter the world of Kelli Anne Noftle’s remarkable debut volume, I Was There For Your Somniloquy. These elegant, sensual, and reckless poems read like Ovid dreaming of the Twenty-First Century. Kelli Anne Noftle knows that we are all Sleeping Beauties, in our hearts and at our cores, each of us waiting for the hard and singular kiss of the world to bring us to our senses.  These wise yet disarming poems remind us -- all of us, not just poets -- that what we hope to speak is often precisely what we have left to dream.

-- David St. John

The poems of Kelli Anne Noftle capture by turns the beauty, whimsy, fragility and vulgarity of nature's most elegant animals, sea slugs --and of those who study them. In words as graceful as her subjects, she cleverly reveals aspects of the natural history, sex lives and biology of these colorful cousins of your garden-variety slugs, while also reflecting on the challenges we obsessive science-types face in studying such elusive beauties. I particularly enjoyed the brief back-story to each poem given at the bottom of the page, a little dash of edu-tainment for the reader. My students, colleagues and friends will delight in reading these artful depictions of my beloved
critters, and you will too.

--Patrick J. Krug, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences California State University, Los Angeles

A brief interview with Kelli Anne Noftle
 (conducted by Rusty Morrison)

What aspects of your history and/or what particular obsessions of yours do you see apparent in I Was There for Your Somniloquy?

I am fascinated by “hypnagogia,” the transitional stage between sleep and wakefulness—an intermediary moment of physiological limbo where hallucinations and out-of-body experiences commonly occur. The poems in this book reside in this space of “threshold consciousness” where a voice speaks to and from the other, hovering inside a liminal world of strange admissions and abstract silences. A somniloquy, a speech one makes in one’s sleep, weaves itself through the language of this book, continually disorienting the reader and subverting subject matter, insisting there is a very precarious boundary between the conscious and unconscious, logical and illogical, dream and waking life. Other poems dip below an oceanic unconscious, describing mating habits, taxonomy, and defense mechanisms of deep sea Nudibranchs (sea slugs). I want to suggest not merely the analogousness between this species and ourselves, but to create an emotional expansiveness, exploring mysteries within and beyond the self.

How did this book come to its title? Why did you choose this title?

The title is taken from a line in one of the poems. A somniloquy is a speech a person makes in his/her sleep, also known as sleep-talking. Several years ago, I became fascinated with parasomnias, a category of sleep disorders which involve abnormal behaviors that occur during sleep or during the period between wakefulness and sleep. This curiosity developed after observing my boyfriend (at the time) engage in many parasomias including somnambulism (sleepwalking), sleep-eating, sexsomnia, sleeptalking, and bruxism (teeth grinding). I researched and read case studies about bizarre experiences of somnambulists and sufferers of sleep disorders.  There is a sense of mystery associated with somnambulism—is the sleepwalker acting out a dream or releasing repressed emotions? A sleepwalker is usually in a trancelike state while the brain issues commands to the muscles during certain phases of sleep, and I wanted to explore this idea of why and how conscious behaviors and actions emerge from a subconscious place.

What interesting story might surprise readers about the inception or process of writing this book? 

I was fortunate to hear marine biologist Patrick Krug speak at Machine Project in Los Angeles a few years ago. The topic of his lecture centered on the sex lives of nudibranchs (sea slugs). Nudibranchs are hermaphroditic sea creatures that engage in unconventional mating habits involving multiple partners at one time and mating between species. My interest in these creatures expanded somewhat beyond mating habits, and first section of the book looks at human sexual relationships and defense/survival mechanisms from the basis that we share distinct evolutionary similarities with this very different species. 

Who are the authors with whom you feel a kinship? Who are you reading currently?

Mary Ruefle – The Most of It; Richard Siken – Crush; Rachel Zucker – Museum of Accidents;
William Stobb – Nervous Systems; Christian Hawkey – Ventrakl; Maggie Nelson- Bluets

What, specifically, were some of the most interesting or most daunting challenges you faced as you worked through this text? Were there any unexpected surprises—with respect to form or content—that opened in the text for you in the writing process?

The biggest challenge I faced was organizing the poems. I was concerned about how (and if) they worked together as a cohesive body of work. Originally, I thought the manuscript should be divided into two or three chapbooks, but finally was convinced that the reader intuitively draws connections—now I can’t imagine a single poem being omitted from the book.  This collection is essentially tethered by themes of loss and separation—I think readers will get that. 

I know that you are a singer, songwriter and visual artist. Do you see these creative areas as influencing your work in this book in any ways?

There is definitely an overlap in how I approach visual art, songwriting and writing poetry. My process always begins with an image. It’s very organic and (without sounding too mystical) almost a spiritual experience. I often feel I’ve hallucinated or been inside a dream when making art or writing poems. Afterward, I’m able to begin the editing process, which seems to be in direct opposition to my creativity. You have to have two brains and know how to use them effectively. It took me a long time to figure out how to do that with all art forms. (With regards to song writing and poetry, occasionally I borrow lines from poems for lyrics).

Making and encountering visual art is important to this collection. Perhaps I still harbor some longing to be part of the fine art world (since giving it up after college); I miss the physicality of mixing color or bending chicken wire with my hands and covering it with plaster. The “What We’re Making”  prose poems in the book began as epistolary works about the process of painting—addressed to an imaginary art student. Those poems are a bit autobiographical, recalling personal experiences in a painting studio in Italy. I don’t consider any of these to be ekphrastic poems, though I do mention works of art in a museum or gallery setting. In one poem, I refer to a Damien Hirst sculpture (a segmented cow preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in plexiglass) that I saw at a gallery in London many years ago. There is a poem about Magritte’s famous painting, “The Lovers.” Also, I spent a lot of time in the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles when I was working on this collection and some poems are littered with little oddities and relics found in and inspired by that bizarre museum.

You chose the artwork that was used in the cover design for this translation. Can you talk about your reasons for this choice?