Our world is absurd and, at some point, every writer has to decide what they are going to do about it. Absent a vanguardist faith in utopia, it’s understandable that so many withdraw, attempting to find an island of sense in the self. Much contemporary poetry takes this path. But what if, taking that path, one discovered that the self is no refuge from the absurdity of the world, and that what we imagined as as an island of sense and coherence was chock full of contradiction and nonsense? What would a poetry that took this seriously look and sound like?
I think it would look and sound like the poetry of Jennifer L. Knox. This may come as a surprise, at least to those of us who expect poetry to meet the demands of the age with an arsenal of formal experiment. Indeed, Knox’s poetry does not, at first, seem unduly burdened by the absurdity of modern life. It might look, and at times does look, like just another slice of that life, of a going and getting along. To leave it at that, however, would be to sell this poetry short, to narrow our sense of the kind of provocations poetry may provide. In the right hands, it’s still possible for a poetry of subject matter to feel fresh and suggestive.
Here is “The Morning I Met My New Family,” which opens Knox’s new collection, Crushing It:
A forest of conifers stands upright on the floor
of Fallen Leaf Lake in California’s Tahoe Basin,
deposited by millenniums of landslides. Trees 100
feet tall, mummified in icy alpine water, needles
still pristine. Rock-encrusted root-balls weigh
them down, but every now and then one
shoots up like a prehistoric rocket.
Everyone else
on the yacht was passed out when Merle Haggard
heard a roar, looked up from the pile of cocaine and saw
a whale-sized Christmas tree erupt from the water,
felt its wake’s glittery spray, smelled its piney sap as
it sailed over the deck, hovered a sec, spun, then splatted
back to earth unanchored, yet forever tethered to Merle
and all the naked people stirring on the deck, awakened
by this second birth, as “From now on all my friends
are gonna be strangers” blared on repeat.
Meeting a new family — especially in an era when “family” bears so much emotional and ideological freight — is not a trivial thing. Knox knows this and raises the stakes of her poem from the outset. But rather than trying to meet the expectations, she keeps them at a remove, then subverts them, before circling back to meet and refuse them at the same time. First we get the startling, almost surreal story of the underwater trees, which places us in the deep time of geology. For many other poets, the depth of this time, let alone the sheer size of the objects involved, would call for something approaching rapture (and the Anglo-Saxon echo of “Rock-encrusted root-balls” gives an whiff of this). And yet instead of rapture we get Merle Haggard — and not just him, but cocaine and friends, too. In its bathos, the poem looks like a straightforward parody of both scenic pastoral and the ode to domestic life — except for its proposal, not unserious, that the breeching of the great conifer is “forever tethered to Merle / and all the naked people sitting on the deck, awakened / by this second birth.” These booze cruisers are the “new family” of the title, reborn together, an improbable, even miraculous counterpoint to the broken-hearted skepticism of Haggard’s song (“The only thing I can count on now is my fingers / I was a fool believing in your and now you are gone”).
On the other hand: can we really take this family seriously as a family? What if the tree had remained on the lake bed, and everybody on the yacht had just continued doing lines or sleeping off their hangovers? The poem attests to the desire for escaping conventions of family life, and it satisfies those desires by imagining a new version of a family. But, because this new version is driven by such a random event, among a group of people who have no other bonds with one another besides the pursuit of their own enjoyment, the result is as ridiculous as it is touching. The only things more absurd than our old families are our new families.
The combination of humor and pathos in Crushing It will be familiar to readers of Knox’s poetry, which has been noted for bringing these qualities closer together than they are usually found. Knox’s humor allows her to say things that might be uncomfortable or taboo, while the pathos defends her from the charge of merely saying things that might be uncomfortable or taboo. The result is close, at times, to stand-up comedy, and thus to a living tradition of American poetry. Calista McRae’s new book Lyric as Comedy suggests that postwar American lyric poetry and stand-up share an affinity for abjection, “a sometimes searing embarrassment arising from something connected with you, something that cannot be subsumed or shaken off.” Knox’s poetry performs this embarrassment of the abject in a spectacular way, while also grounding her performance in the particulars of what one might be embarrassed about. Think Sharon Olds on psychedelics.
Crushing It falls into two sections: “Mines,” oriented around first-person experiences, and “Ours,” which deals with the collective, social world. These topics aren’t sealed of from one another, of course. The pun on “Mines” especially suggests ways in which the first-person point of view is embedded in, and dependent on, various economies that are only possible in a complex society. In Crushing It, that society is emphatically American, and often more specifically a version of the West or Midwest (Knox was born in California and lives in Iowa). These settings are anything but stand-ins for mythic frontier or wholesome heartland. They are above all a source of kitsch and quirk, heartbreak and darkness. In fact, Crushing It is something of a more somber book than Knox’s previous collection, Days of Shame and Failure (Bloof, 2015). That volume rides on a wave of winning anarchic energy; one poem, “Certainty is Born of Pain,” describes a speaker who removes a swollen taste bud with … toenail clippers. (I cringe even now.) Although the poems in Crushing It are frequently good for a laugh, the overall emotional tone is sadness. “‘I love you,’ I say inside my head, and back / in the rental car, it comes out: ‘I know I’m capable / of killing someone for money’” (“Friend of the Devil”). We’re not crushing it, friends. If anything, it’s crushing us.
Although there are a few poems here that are written in propria persona, as well as the occasional experiment (“How to Manage Your Adult ADHD” is, fittingly, written as a chaotic mock-outline), Knox’s poems mostly read like dramatic monologues. The theatrical dimensions of the monologue — its self-consciousness of an audience, of its own mediation — mean that her work foregrounds the social, and thus it’s not surprising that the second half of the book, which focuses on this topic, is stronger than the first. Indeed, two of the standouts of the first half, “Meeting Myron Floren” and “Tourists,” take up the social world explicitly. This doesn’t mean that they are not attentive to the first-person, only that they have more to say about how performance calls the immediacy of first-person experience into question. Take the Floren poem, for example. Here, the narrator/speaker of a prose poem asks the aged but charismatic musician (known for his role on “The Lawrence Welk Show”) what has happened to his famous rings:
Myron answered to the crowd, “An old friend got robbed leaving a gig, but the robbers couldn’t get his ring off, so they took his finger —” the fans gasped. Myron grinned and winked at me [!] which flushed a bursting sweat-bead down my ass crack. “And that’s why I don’t wear ‘em anymore!” “Hooray!” the crowd cheered. “Good call,” someone shouted, and everyone laughed, except me — the goon who couldn’t tell a body or its wake from the glitz its shed.
This passage, anti-poetic as it might seem, nevertheless revels in awareness of artifice. Knox’s narrator misses Floren’s rings. She cares about something trivial, like glitz, not about something important, like the music — or, in this case, the body of the person playing it (“they took his finger”). Of course, Knox’s poem tries to direct us to the body by emphasizing the narrator’s surprising attraction to Floren, a much older man (he’s 81 in the poem, and the narrator, who has come to an autograph signing, is surrounded by “octogenarian Polka groupies”). But it’s impossible to tell whether that bracketed exclamation point, or that sweat-bead in the ass-crack, or the narrator’s earlier statement that “I’ve never wanted kids, but I wanted Myron to make me pregnant,” or even the story that Floren tells, are also glitz of a sort. How are we to take this poem? As an expression of frustrated desire or its critique? It’s hard to take the desire for Floren at face value if it depends on something like his rings. Then again, people can desire all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, known to them and not. What’s wrong with glitz, really? It’s artificial, but so are poems.
If there’s something wrong with mere glitz, for Knox and for other poets writing in a post-Confessional vein, it’s not artifice per se but superficiality. The omnipresent mediation of our experiences challenges our capacity to make meaningful distinctions between surface and depth (“a body or its wake from the glitz it’s shed”). There’s a felt risk that our language will lose its connections to the world, such that it may no longer refer to anything solid and real. That’s why stand-up comedy — much of it, anyway — is basically reassuring: in confessing and ridiculing the abject in herself, the comic reveals something real that we share. What a relief! Knox’s poems possess this palliative ambition, too. But in its corresponding sallies with darkness and despair, it also reminds us, as stand-up frequently does not, that palliatives treat symptoms, not the disease.
Eliot famously remarked in Four Quartets that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” Knox, in “Wrapping Up the Time-Share Seminar,” characteristically rewrites this in the voice of a self-aware salesman doing a Power Point presentation: “Living — and I’m talking the basic stuff / here like eating and coming in out / of the rain [slide: donkey in rain] — / requires a suspension of disbelief.” The implication of Eliot’s remark is that the disease of modern life was us. By placing an equivalent thought in a sales-pitch, Knox implies that it’s actually a result of the world we’ve made. Perhaps there’s still time to change it.
[Published by Copper Canyon Press on October 20, 2020, 96 pages, $16.00 paperback]