Jennifer L. Knox is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections: Days of Shame and Failure, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, A Gringo Like Me, and, most recently, Crushing It. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including five volumes of The Best American Poetry, and in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker and American Poetry Review. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The developer and curator of the crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, she teaches at Iowa State University.
I corresponded with Ms. Knox via email about poetry as an access to our subconscious, the joy (and profundity) of incongruous humor, humanity’s “endless capacity for self-deception,” and writing poetry as a means of purposeful dissociation—a counterintuitive, healthy path to healing. We also discussed the subtle beauty of poems that “have a bridge player’s memory,” the masterful way the “bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways.”
What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?
I write poems to dissociate in a healthy, purposeful way that doesn’t leave me hungover, in jail, or dead. I’ve long suspected that there was a physical component to the act of writing poems, because I feel good when I write poems, but I feel stupid when I engage in exclusively mental pursuits, like math. Recently I read that traumatized brains access an unprecedented calmness when they dissociate; though that calm is, in itself, addictive, purposeful dissociation is a healthy path to healing. Imagine putting on an astronaut suit and bounding around the smoldering ruins of your childhood. You see an object that terrified you long ago: an empty tin can with a fork sticking out. “We can use this!” you shout to the reader and hold up the can, which no longer scares you at all. Our “conversations” are different every time; I never have to be the same speaker. I can be Zsa Zsa Gabor, or a tree stump, or an SOS signal floating up from the ocean floor. As poems are relatively short, I only have to breathe the atmosphere for a brief time.
What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?
Poetry gives us access to our subconscious, which we need to heal and evolve.
What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?
Defy expectations.
Your work is often praised for its sharp humor. The New York Times calls your poetry “massively entertaining,” and the Los Angeles Review writes of your “laugh-demanding wit.” Of your work’s tone, The Critical Flame says “Knox’s humor is the kind of funny which is surprising, generous, and vulnerable, and which demands generosity and vulnerability from the reader. This is the kind of funny we have found in writers as various as Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, and Kenneth Koch.” What, in your view, is the relationship between humor and truth? Between levity and profundity?
There are different kinds of humor. The one I enjoy using most often is incongruous humor, which defies the reader’s expectations, and my own as I write the poem. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes it’s scary. Either way, not getting what I thought I was going to get feels very “true.”
Your most recent book of poems, Crushing It, is widely acclaimed. Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “Darkly inventive… This is a careful, thoughtful book about the complexities of identity and the difficulty of words,” and The New York Times Book Review says that the work “hits, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery.” What inquiry or exploration unifies the collection?
Our endless capacity for self-deception—even in the face of the Anthropocene.
What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?
I would love it if readers felt that they had been seen in a perfectly imperfect way.
From 2016 through 2017, you developed and curated the online crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, which honored Iowa birds through “the words and stories of bird lovers, bird watchers, writers, artists, musicians, teachers, students, scientists, nonprofits, federal and state organizations, environmental stewards, and nature lovers.” The project was supported by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and over 750 people from around the world contributed original writing. What inspired this exciting project? And what exists at the nexus of poetry and flight? Of birds and wonder? Are you yourself a birder?
Iowa Bird of Mouth began with the question: why are some people compelled to create and others are not? For the Iowa Arts Council fellowship, I envisioned an online space in which people felt their words belonged, as if they were all part of one giant squawking, undulating flock. I researched crowdsourced poems (such as David Lehman’s long-running “Next Line, Please” project at The American Scholar) and saw that anonymity, access, and an inspiring subject were essential in motivating “norms” to participate. Iowans have an affinity for wild birds. Iowa Filmmaker Colleen Krantz told me, “I grew up on a cattle farm in western Iowa. There was absolutely nothing to look at and nothing to hear. But birds were the bling on our farm.”
I hoped that wild birds would draw people to the poem, and they did. Though I have adopted many parakeets and lovebirds, I knew nothing about wild birds. Thankfully, Iowa Young Birders Director, Tyler Harms, volunteered all his mad ornithological skills. I’m gobsmacked that Iowa Bird of Mouth happened. I’m pretty sure the reason I was able to pull it off was that the universe needed it to exist, though I don’t know why. You can see the website here. My essay about the project in American Poetry Review is here. The text and code are available for use in non-commercial projects.
What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?
Folly, hubris, self-deception, coping mechanisms, animals, TV, counter-intuitive manifestations of kindness and love, mushrooms, telecognition, homing instincts, science, crime.
The Los Angeles Review writes that your poetry “leaves the reader a different person.” To what extent is a great poem like a chemical element, reactive, interacting with the atmosphere of the moment—forever altering those who discover it, like sun on seeds?
My mother is an excellent bridge player. She has to pay attention to and remember everything that happens during the play of a hand. The poems I love have a bridge player’s memory. The bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways. Flannery O’Connor’s surprising yet inevitable ending is established by the end of the first line. So like a seed, the poem is waiting to pop. All it needs is the light of your attention.
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