Jennifer L. Knox : part five

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with? I'm extremely grateful to have two poets I share work with. We 100 years ago met in graduate school and know the trajectory of each other's work very well.

From The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Bloof Books, 2010

"Why does Burt Reynolds remind me of you? You have a poem, no?"  Trish texts.

"Several!" I replied.

"Did you see he just died :("

Then my phone lit up with text after text.

"Burt Reynolds has left the building."

Burt in the Blood-by Jennifer L. Knox

A poet friend of mine asked if I was going to blog about poetry, since it is the BAP blog, afterall. But to me that feels a little like talking about corgis, to a corgi. Today I wanna to chase sheep. Scoliosis and bipolar disorders run like rabid squirrels between the twining branches of my family trees.

Charles Browning based the painting on the cover of my last book on Burt's 1972 Cosmo bearskin rug photoshoot.

We went dark. “It’s medication time."

Jennifer L. Knox : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished? Endings are the hardest things for me these days, so I don't, and the older I get, the more unsure I've become of when a poem's finished. That may be a good thing, process-wise.

Jennifer L. Knox : part two

How did you first engage with poetry? I wrote poems to accompany visual art pieces I made.

Thanks, Thomas White, for asking me to do this mini interview! The full discussion will come out in four parts, every Friday, for a month. Cool idea!

Jennifer L. Knox : part one

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of four books of poems. Her poetry has appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series as well as in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and American Poetry Review.

Thank you, The American Poetry Review and Elizabeth Scanlon, for giving the perfect home to my essay on Iowa Bird of Mouth, featuring original art by Polyphony Bruna and Norbert Sarfield.

And speaking of thank yous: Vaughan Ashlie Fielder, Iowa Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, Tyler Harms, Barbara Ching, KHOI Community Radio, Ames Public Library, Akwi Nji, Nicholas Manjoine, Colleen Bradford Krantz, Tracy Bohush, Ronna Lawless, Kathranne Knight, Larassa Kabel, Heidi Wiren Bartlett, Juan Felipe Herrera, David Lehman, Kwame Dawes, Iowa Young Birders, Story County Conservation, State Historical Society of Iowa, Jess Lancial, Erica Place, Jim Pease, Claire Krüesel, Heather Derr Smith, Molly McDonald, Meg Johnson, Nate Logan, Steve Rose, Iowa Raptor Project, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Iowa Youth Writing Project, Ames Tribune, Charity Nebbe and Iowa Public Radio, Cam Roberts, and all the fabulous poets who threw down and soc med IBOMers. That was FUN!

Uzi, the parakeet in question.

Thank you, Entropy and Janice Lee, for sharing this poem from my new manuscript! It's the perfect home for it!

The Birds: The Parakeet Has Nightmares

and slams herself against the bars of her covered cage-shrieking and flinging her wings till the box rocks. A cartoony blur, it sounds like there's another animal in there with her.