Poet, Painter and Musician T. Byron Kelly has been working as an active performance artist in the South Western Virginia area (Appalachia) for over two decades and has generations of family from West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia. Live, spontaneous lyric poetry performances and gallery exhibits have been at the heart of the Poet's work.

I grew up in North Virginia about an hour and 1/2 from Appalachia and had many car trips South to Salem and Blacksburg Va. to visit my Grandparents and Aunts and Uncles. I recall several trips to Long Branch West Virginia with my Grandfather and the Kelly men of the family that have stayed with me all of these years as well, we visited the family house where my Dad was born, the abandoned coal mine where Granddad once worked and an old family grave site as well. At barely 18 I moved to Blacksburg to attend Virginia Tech and to enroll in the Corps of Cadets as my Father had done back in the late 1950's. My ROTC days were over after my first year due to a crisis of conscience, but I stayed at Virginia Tech, studying English and Creative Writing for my remaining years as an Undergraduate and Graduate student at Radford University. I also started to write poems around that time and began to experiment with painting and music as well. I still go on long wanderings around the old Mountains of the Jefferson and George Washington National Forests and have lived here on the outer limits of Virginia's Appalachian region now for almost 30 years. Diggendicht was an extension of transcendentalism for me after a time-"beauty rests content with itself" was how Goethe put it. I am still interested in the poetic story line. The art of Rilke's in-seeing as giving the object a consciousness of its own. My early poems were greatly influenced by the dialecticism of William Blake and the visionary surrealism of Jim Morrison. The later poems merge elements of the French symbolists, Emersonian Transcendentalism and the ancient oriental aesthetic of Li Ho and Wei Tai. I paint poems and found a kind of home there> My paintings have always been rather cartoon like and fantastically oriented, a rendering of a dream if you will- I always thought (about realist art) that if you wanted a photograph then why not take a snapshot with a camera? 

Most of my poems start out as small notes to myself, the journey then begins to a first written draft. Giving yourself a chance to write is the most important thing-kind of like going fishing, you have to take the line and throw it in to catch a fish.

Ghost House Publishing www.studioappalachia.com/ghost-house.html 

*T. Byron Kelly's Poetry has been archived by the West Virginia Archives and History, the Virginia Historical Society Archives, West Virginia University Library, Virginia Tech Library, Radford University Library and The University of Virginia at Wise Library.