Lost and Found: the Voices of Plath, Sexton, and Woolf in KNOCK

It’s the start of another semester of rhetoric class and we’re defining argument. What is argument? I ask.

You don’t say I, someone says.

Only give the facts, says another.

And how do we know it’s a fact? I ask, which moves us to a conversation about positionality, how each of our experiences and backgrounds shape the way we make sense of the world, the things we’re willing to believe. How none of us can be separated from our "I."

I think this is why I’ve always been fascinated by found text—the way we can transform a word in our own mouths, the way the act of my (anyone’s) speaking is already an act of change.

While working on Knock, I became re-enamored with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf—writers whose words have long bloomed in my bones. Writers who committed suicide. Who could not see past their own anguish into anything that might carry them forward.

I think about how narrow the line between still being here or not.

But also about how it doesn’t need to be so narrow: how social support and available resources can make all the difference. How our attention can make the difference.

So I wrote poems incorporating titles from famous female authors who’ve committed suicide. Because these titles speak to me of solitude and sadness and strength. But also because they ask me to be ever mindful of how to honor someone’s story or turn it on its head, to embrace or confront it.

Just as with the other voices that weave in and out of Knock, found text brings to the forefront an aspect of poetry that always deserves our care, a question I ask myself about everything I write: whose voice(s) is(are) amplified here? Who is honored?

Who is believed?

Who is heard?

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Knock is now available for pre-order! Please visit the pre-order link and give this little book some love.