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.

This was so much fun to write, but even funner(er?) to try the amazing pickles, jams and honey from The Pickling Poet! Thank you, Stacey Harwood-Lehman, for thinking of me!

A Peck of Pickles and Poetry [review of "The Pickling Poet" by Jennifer L. Knox]

As a poet and cook, the pickle/poetry connection is obvious to me. A poem preserves a moment. No matter what emotion of that moment (wonder, surprise, grief, love, etc.), in its preserved poem form, we can turn it over in our hands and watch the light pass through it.

I'm so proud of my students! They hit it out of the park!

LAS students serve as readers for Bicultural Fellowship

Growing up, Kartika Budhwar struggled to find literature that represented her "working-class, bilingual, and culturally fractured" experiences, she said. Now she writes her own stories as a graduate student in Iowa State's MFA program for Creative Writing and Environment (CWE).

Collin and I won last summer's Ames Library pub crawl. I got to say my favorite line all night: "Pardon me, I don't normally look this way—I've been Christmas shopping." Collin sweated through that acetate smoking jacket. Perhaps something cooler this year..."Lord of the Flies"? All we'll need is a conch shell and tattered British school boy uniforms.