Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend, Kenny Knight (Shearsman Books, £10.95)
Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend by Plymouth poet Kenny Knight has been one of the more enjoyable poetry collections of my recent readings. There is an accessibility that I particularly like – a storytelling which riffs its way through obvious personal nostalgia with literal references (e.g. namechecks of music, people, places) and then the rollout of delightful, surreal tangents and other poetic explorations.
I hadn’t read any of Knight’s work before, but with this Shearsman Books collection, one quickly becomes familiar with that narrative style – the narrow, linear move through content with its repetitions and asides – and also the sense of who he is, which for me is in the constant touchstones of shared experience because we are the same age (Knight 73, me 70) and with those many references to a range of music and so many names, significant places and historical events.
(Image: William Telford)
In supporting the significance of these many references, there is a glossary detailing ‘Plymouth and its environs’, ‘cultural references’ and musicians/bands. It’s easy for someone my age to immediately drop anchor onto a reference like The 13th Floor Elevators which appears in the poem On Reaching a Hundred, as well as Country Joe and the Fish and similar others from that era across many poems, but I found a perhaps more personal shared liking with the mention of Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood from a more contemporary Drive-By Truckers. And I’m also with Knight on Alice in Chains…
The wonderful long poem Dicing with Room Numbers makes continuous reference to a range of music/musicians like Chuck Prophet, Bill Callahan, Buddy Holly, Ornette Coleman and so on before branching out to TV, poets and Amazon (as in the commercial conglomerate outlet) links. It ends with,
‘I spin the roulette wheel
with my lucky left hand
which takes me to a talk
on the Plymouth Poetry Mafia
the roulette wheel is still spinning
tell me if it stops on Geoffrey Hill
or Eric Dolphy.’
and this is a good example of that riffing through memories, realities, imagination.
I read this collection during a one week break away from home, at Dawlish with a sea view and nearer to Plymouth than from where I reside in East Devon, but living as I do near the seaside/coast is another shared experience with Knight. In the midst of my reading, I did tweet his poem Making Mary Shelley as an example of my early reading appreciation/celebration, referring then to the ‘incantatory narrative’ which is a different take on ‘riffing’! Seeming apt, I took alfresco snaps of this poem with my holiday seascape as backdrop, but the following share is sans that setting:
Making Mary Shelley
I made you out of bits and pieces
out of this and that
the heart of a frog
the legs of a waitress
stuck paper all over your body
tattooed with old words
gave you language
made you multicoloured
added a second coat
a hat and gloves.
Your fingernails were the colour
of a wedding dress
your mind a jigsaw of land and sea
you gaze filled to the brim with innocence
your body made out of science-fiction
out of superglue and Superman comics
the shoes of the road
the face of Mary Shelley
you were as tall as marijuana
on a night out in the rain.
On Christmas Eve
I wrapped you in gift paper
left you under a tree
sleeping on pine needles
and in the morning
fed you sunflower seeds
filled you with mud from everywhere
rain from a dozen thunderstorms
lashings of spit sprinkled with sawdust.
I taught you to play the piano
to appreciate jazz and Americana
gave you a star sign
one slipper in Capricorn
one in Sagittarius
gave you a bicycle pump
the fingers of a short story writer
the eyes of the crowd
cloned you for the supermarket
made you out of the rags of capitalism
made you as durable as vanilla.
In continuing with my full engagement, I later also tweeted his poem The Traveller, referring to its emotive impact. Like so many of Knight’s poems in this collection, he is nostalgic and continually reflective. References to childhood dominate much of the content, and this is an obvious element of my personally feeling ‘a sense of who he is’. In the poem, literal and figurative storytelling paint a plaintive picture and resonate with its ‘feeling of loss’,
The Traveller
We were playing time-travellers
in a room on that street
between the prefabs and the park
your mother’s house or maybe mine
half a lifetime ago, maybe more.
When a voice called your name
out in the darkness
you stopped playing dinosaurs
stopped playing cowboys
picked up your harmonica
and walked through the open window
never lifted a hand
or a parting word in the air
never paused to read the name
of the rock and roll group
I’d scratched into the condensation
on the glass
which drifted after you into night
like a vaporous dog.
I waited and waited for your return.
It didn’t come.
It is like this for all of us
this feeling of loss.
Is it the same for the traveller
as it is for the one who closes the window.
The autobiographical in these poems does matter, to me at least. It’s a fine line, isn’t it, the ‘I’ in poetry informing or engaging or alienating the reader? Too much and there is a self-indulgence, obviously. I think Knight presents the perfect balance because there is in this collection its seamless thread of the apparently real and the delightfully imaginative refraction of this.
During my week of dipping in and out of this collection, I researched online for background information on Knight as poet, and in addition to discovering other work of his I’ll want to read, there was an article about him in Plymouth Live from 4th December, 2023.
With a dramatic headline and sub-headline – ‘Plymouth man laughs at pain after shattering diagnosis / Kenny Knight lost the use of his eye but it didn’t stop him going on to achieve great things as a writer’ – we are informed of him having surgery on his left eye in the mid-80s which led to loss of sight in that eye. There is more detail on this which I won’t pursue here, but also the following observation which proudly describes Knight as, ‘one of the city’s most respected – and even somewhat famous – writers, with three collections to his name, work in numerous publications, and appearances at literary and academic events.’
When later reading the poem Blue Gone Grey, this obviously references his impaired sight and I was especially moved by that autobiographical ‘knowledge’ as context: a further depth to a reading that would otherwise have still impacted. I do think the knowing adds layers where the poem is witty (‘I could see Blind Lemon Jefferson’) and suggestive (‘four blue eyes gone to cloud’),
Blue Gone Grey
Yesterday’s certainty
has vanished in a trick of fog.
I now live
in a world
devoid of body language
shuffle
through crowds
some made of vapour
some made of skin.
Sometimes while crossing the road
I cannot see the green man.
Remembering my boyhood years
when I had the vision of a telescope
and I could see across space
from Christmas Day to Capricorn
when I could see Blind Lemon Jefferson
playing at the other end of the street
somewhere in Freestone County
but not now
now I’ve got four blue eyes
four blue eyes gone to cloud
hesitant and unsure
I move through fog not made of vapour
blowing notes on a blues harmonica
to light my way
and on nights when there is fog
and visibility
is next to nothing
I sit here in the quiet of my room
on the doorstep of the wild Atlantic
and read the love letters of Miss Havisham
to a sea monster playing jazz.
After reading this fine collection, one is left with a palpable recognition that whatever difficulty (‘vapour’) Knight experiences in his life, in conveying aspects of this through writing, he elevates this to the natural and beautiful blue of his distinctive poetic voice.
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Mike Ferguson
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