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[ interview ]
A Gringo Like Jennifer L. Knox
by Doug Cox
Jennifer L. Knox is the author of A Gringo Like Me and Drunk by Noon. Click here to listen to Knox’s reading at FSU’s Warehouse reading series.
Doug Cox: Your work has been described as "more like Richard Pryor with a MFA" than what a typical audience is used to hearing from even our funniest and most experimental poets. In fact, more consistently than any other poet I can think of, you rely on humor, popular culture, and the well-timed curse word to set up the dramatic situations or switch the tones of your poems. Do you see yourself working in any particular comedic tradition, school of the absurd, foul-mouthed and funny?
Jennifer L. Knox: In workshops, my poems were often described as “sarcastic” and “ironic”—but neither label ever made sense to me. I’m not being sarcastic, and irony is, like, “The Gift of the Magi,” right? Dramatic irony, yes—but not fat guy in a Girl Scouts t-shirt emo-rocker irony. Then I was in a workshop at NYU with Marie Ponsot who corrected someone who referred to a poem of mine as ironic: “Get your terms straight: it’s satire.” That was a real gift. I didn’t know what I was, but suddenly I made sense to myself. (I have since heard it described as Menippean satire, and once the word “Menippean” was painstakingly, slowly explained to me, I had to agree.)
My dad’s sense of humor is very satirical. He’s from Nova Scotia, and Nova Scotians share the British love of understated, self-deprecating satire. It’s very proletariat—they love to bring down people who put on airs. My dad always has his scope on phonies. “Trailer Park Boys” on CBC captures the Nova Scotia funny perfectly. But he also adores the really blue stuff. He’d get me out of bed to watch “The Two Ronnies,” “Monty Python,” “Benny Hill,” and anything dirty on BBC. He loved Gilbert and Sullivan— which is a terrible thing to pass onto a child as it singles you out as the Whitest Dork in Town. My 1926 recording of The Mikado is the first thing I’ll put on when I’m drinking alone.
We listened to Red Foxx, Bob Newhart, and Jonathan Winters. He bought me Steve Martin’s first album for my 11th birthday, and I wore the grooves down. We both love Randy Newman. I remember when he left the 45 for “Short People” in the back window of his car and it melted; he had to buy a new one on the way home. He also loves ribald working-class car movies: Used Cars, anything with Burt Reynolds—especially Smoky and the Bandit and Cannonball Run. So that’s where I get my propensity for foul language and a love of car crashes.
I adore Warner Brothers cartoons, especially their timing and sidelong glances when someone realizes they’re screwed—that little “ahoh.”
I know I’ve been very influenced by Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes, and Woody Allen’s Without Feathers and Side Effects. I love the way they straddle high and low culture—just like Warner Brothers cartoons. I went to school out in the middle of the desert—our teachers were paid less than RTD bus drivers. I didn’t learn about the Barber of Seville in music class—I learned about it through a parody of it.
I love Jacques Tati's stuff. It’s weird but gentle—like the Andy Griffith Show.
I guess the only “funny” thing I don’t find “funny” is that American Pie-kind of humor. Not even the band camp bit. It’s like laughing at someone in a wheelchair falling down a flight of stairs—and that’s what Germans do. Animal House, however, is running 24-7 on the Cable Station in My Soul.
DC: Also, how do artists outside poetry circles influence your writing? You often work in dramatic monologues, speaking in the voice, or voices, of folks we don't often encounter in poems, and there is a big performative aspect to your readings. So, do actors, comedians, street musicians, ventriloquists, or any other performers shape the way you write or change the subjects you deal with?
JK: I’m not sure how, specifically. My delivery is more based in theater than in stand-up. I have a theory about a big Venn diagram intersecting poets and actors. Actors know how a monologue should sound—so do poets. I was a wannabe actor until I bombed at it in college—I’m very shy, and I was too drunk to make it to rehearsals. I’ve been told by stand-up comics to ditch the paper, but I’m not a stand-up comic. Paperless poets who stare at the audience when they read make me very uncomfortable. Anyone who just stares at you. I love sword swallowers and carny people, but I don’t want to read like they perform—I want to read in their voices.
DC: Ok. What's up with those book covers? The paintings on both A Gringo Like Me and Drunk By Noon fit so well with your poems; did you have to commission the artist or something?
JK: Aren’t those awesome? Those are by Charles Browning who I met because “Dumbass” on the Gringo Like Me cover was in an exhibition where I work. The painting is at least 5 feet tall—huge—and only when I stepped back did I see he was walking off a cliff. For DBN, I just told Charles the title of the book, and he emailed me back a jpg of the painting. It was already done. Up close, you can see all the boils on his face. Charles says he’s the model for both. If you were in a gallery with 300 people, you’d be able to spot Charles. I wish everyone could see his work up close. It’s stunning, bizarre, and hilarious. Here’s something I just pulled out of my ass: an element common to both our aesthetics is animated hyperrealism.
DC: Any writers out there whose work you are currently crushing on? Any you wish would disappear into the great talk-radio white-noise in the sky?
JK: I’m reading Black Box by Erin Belieu. It’s full of crystal clear descriptions of blinding rage and anguish. Like concise instructions on how to blow torch a human head off its neck. I’m also reading The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon—talk about blowing your head off. The older I get the more I love detective books—the ones driven by flawed main characters: all Patricia Highsmith’s stuff; Maj Sjöwall and Peter Wahlöö’s series of Swedish detective novels. One day, I’ll write a detective book about a guy who owns a bird shop and solves crimes.
Stuff I don’t like, I ignore—you couldn’t pay me to read something that I don’t like. Well, you could, but you’d have to pay me a lot or else I’d fall asleep. I’d like to see mean-spirited internet bullies disappear, but every pool’s got a little pisser in it.
DC: Since you don't seem to write autobiographically too often, could you give us a quick character sketch of what you were like as a child?
JK: I grew up in an isolated housing tract in the Mojave Desert. We’d wake up to find our brown lawn covered in grazing sheep and tumbleweeds up to the roof. My eyes were very light sensitive—the sun made the skin on my eyeballs swell up and blister. I dreamed of trees, shade, and snow. My dad was an accountant who always wanted to be a cowboy. My mom was a speech therapist who taught me how to talk like someone who needed an asskicking. I was very obnoxious, very lonely, and vice versa until junior high school when I discovered drugs and alcohol. I played the clarinet, was voted Class Clown, stole Boone’s Farm wine from the 7-11, and got mostly B’s. I wanted to be many things: an actress, a jockey, a truck driver, a monster movie make-up artist, a glass blower, an animator, a vet, and an avian linguist (current).
DC: Being born on one coast and living on the other, with a few pit-stops in between, does place come into play in your work?
JK: Richard Hugo talks about the poet’s “triggering town”—the landscape you know that triggers writing. My triggering town is definitely in the desert, during grasshopper season. But I’ve lived in California, Iowa, New York, Japan, Texas, Wisconsin, and Indonesia. I’m sure I’ve internalized them.
DC: What is your relationship with rejection like?
JK: Very intimate. From memory, I can play connect-the-dots with every mole on its flaccid, hairy back.
DC: What was the process like putting together A Gringo Like Me? Was it easier or more of a struggle the second time around with Drunk By Noon? How so?
JK: When it was finally published, the oldest poem in Gringo was seven years old—as old as rocks—while the newest was about two years old. The oldest poem in DBN was two years old; the newest, about two months old. So the poems weren’t as pored over in DBN—it took Shanna and I much longer to edit and proof the manuscript. I’m still finding sloppy little mistakes. I felt more confident putting it together, but maybe that’s hubris talking.
DC: Any writerly habits you'd like to break? Any you've broken but wish you could glue back together again?
JK: I find it a lot harder to write these days. I wish I could go back to when it was easier.
DC: Last, and probably least, what was the greatest surprise for you responding to this interview/interrogation?
JK: How long it’s taken me to finish, and what a terrible typist I am.
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Copyright © 2008 The Southeast Review
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