~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of January 2026 ~
Tag: Kip Knott
Lessons in Walking by Kip Knott
Lessons in Walking
The day my son was born, I worried whether or not I would be able to teach him how to walk. I knew I would have to hold his hands and lift him off the ground just enough—but not all the way—so that he could still feel the earth beneath his feet. I knew, too, that I would have to let him fall from time to time so he would come to know the joy of getting up on his own. I knew that there would be pain and frustration and anger at me for not always protecting or helping him. And over the decades, he has fallen, gotten up, fallen again, gotten mad, and gotten up again, all on his own. But today, after he picked me up from another in a series of nasty falls of my own, I’ve begun to worry whether or not I can teach my son the proper way to die.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.
Self-Portraits in a Broken Mirror by Kip Knott
Self-Portraits in a Broken Mirror
When you break the mirror this morning
to celebrate turning 60, your ordinary
face shatters into a hundred cutting shards
like a running commentary on who you were,
who you’ve always been, and who you are
at this moment—just a person standing alone
in a pile of broken faces staring up at you
wondering who it is that you’ll become.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.
New World Order by Kip Knott
New World Order
When I wake up this morning, it dawns on me
that I haven’t heard from Normal in a while.
The last time Normal called, it was on summer vacation.
Somewhere in the Canadian Rockies quietly flyfishing,
if I remember correctly. I recall that it didn’t say,
“Wish you were here,” which, in hindsight, seems odd.
And now it’s been months without so much as a word.
No calls. No texts. Nothing. So I’m left questioning
everything. Like, where does that leave me?
Where does that leave Normal? Alone
in some liminal space between today and tomorrow?
Between what Normal used to be, whatever this new reality is,
and whatever Normal will be if it returns?
Did I ever really know Normal at all?
Will I even recognize Normal? Will Normal embrace me
with open arms, or will it say I’ve become abnormal
and report me to the authorities?
I try to calm down by losing myself
in the minutia of daily chores. I vacuum and dust.
I clean out the fridge of leftovers I always mean to eat
but never do. I even breakdown all the Amazon boxes
I’ve received over the last days and weeks, boxes
that were filled with all manner of products
I was too afraid to venture out of the house and buy
on my own. But as I begin knitting a scarf
to welcome Normal back, should it decide to return,
the newsfeed scrolling across my flatscreen highlights
events in the outside world: more executive orders;
more firings; more plans to rename this and take back that;
more news stories of blind eyes turned.
I snap off the TV, pack away my needles and yarn,
and shuffle off to bed. Perhaps Normal is better off
where it is, I think as I sink deeper into the dark
well of a pill-induced dreamless sleep. Perhaps
Normal should remain incommunicado
and untraceable for its own protection. Perhaps
“out of sight, out of mind” is best for Normal,
and me, at least for the foreseeable future.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His writing has recently appeared in Bending Genres, Best Microfiction 2024, The Greensboro Review, HAD, Merion West, ONE ART, and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press. You can follow him on Bluesky at @kiptain.bsky.social and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.
Parting by Kip Knott
Parting
Clouds and lightning desolate the stars.
Somewhere past the vanishing point
of railroad tracks a Doppler shift approaches.
Across the alleyway a ringing phone goes silent
as an open window closes.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His writing has recently appeared in Best Microfiction 2024, Ghost Parachute, HAD, Vestal Review, and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of poetry, A Mob of Kangaroos, is available from Ridge Books. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.
Circumference by Kip Knott
Circumference
Night consists of circles
that together add up to nothing
but the absence of sunlight.
The circle that holds the most
nothingness is called a new moon;
circles that hold the least are called stars.
I used to take night for granted,
like air, and didn’t notice
all the absences. As I’ve grown older,
I’ve learned to accept those absences
like ghost limbs that need scratching.
I’ve learned to begin each day
with three blinks of my eyes to clear
the nightmares that circle my mind
and one deep breath to remember the air.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Ohio. His writing has recently appeared in Best Microfiction 2024 and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of poetry, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.
Deer Season by Kip Knott
Deer Season
Sycamore shadows spread over the world
as I sit next to the dry tongue of Sunday Creek
and watch for shooting stars. Above me,
the moon climbs into its night-time blind
to hunt the cloudless dark for meteors.
A screech owl sails silently over furrows
freezing rabbits in the fallow field below.
Silo lights from surrounding farms blink on
as thickets whisper the approach of deer.
Suddenly, distant gunshots pepper the air.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His most recent book of poetry, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.
ONE ART’s Top 25 Most-Read Poets of 2023
~ ONE ART’s Top 25 Most-Read Poets of 2023 ~
1. Abby E. Murray
2. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
3. Betsy Mars
4. Donna Hilbert
5. Linda Laderman
6. Alison Luterman
7. Julie Weiss
8. Robbi Nester
9. Roseanne Freed
10. Karen Paul Holmes
11. Heather Swan
12. Timothy Green
13. James Diaz
14. Jane Edna Mohler
15. John Amen
16. Barbara Crooker
17. Jim Daniels
18. Susan Vespoli
19. Sean Kelbley
20. Susan Zimmerman
21. Kip Knott
22. Jennifer Garfield
23. Margaret Dornaus
24. Paula J. Lambert
25. Gail Thomas
Night Lessons by Kip Knott
Night Lessons
1. Separation Agreement
Pallid and swollen,
the moon lifts itself
out of our fallow field
where we stand alone
together one last time.
2. Our First Meteor Shower
You made a point of telling me
that shooting stars were not
whole stars but shards
of light discarded by the night.
3. Astrology vs. Astronomy
We constructed a life together
the way ancient astronomers
constructed constellations out of myths
and legends and imaginary lines
connecting one emptiness to another.
4. Night Lessons
In the sky tonight, long dead stars
teach us Heaven begins with loss.
5. Nocturnal
The darkness cannot cast
a shadow without moonlight,
while the night only needs
the feathers of an owl.
6. Winter Farewell
When we finally say goodbye,
the moon hangs spider-like
for a moment in the silver
threads of our breath.
7. Waking to a Morning Moon
The night has come undone.
I find its lost, bright button
rolling across the dawn sky.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His most recent full-length collection of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is available from Kelsay Books. A new poetry chapbook, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.
Two Poems by Kip Knott
Somebody Somewhere
for Sam and Joel
Someday, when someone tells me
out of the blue that they love me,
somehow I’ll stop myself from turning
and walking away the way I sometimes do
when love threatens to blow apart my heart
with something too much for me to hold inside,
something like—but not exactly like—fullness,
something like an emptiness of emptiness,
something that I know we all deserve,
but something that far too many of us fear,
something that somebody somewhere
once told me was happiness.
*
When I Play Leonard Cohen the First Time for a Friend
Yeah, my friends are gone and my hair is gray
I ache in the places where I used to play . . . .
— Leonard Cohen, “The Tower of Song”
She winces and grits her teeth. “Who is that?
His voice creeps me out!” she says, shaking
her head as if trying to cast out a nightmare.
She isn’t wrong. But she isn’t right, either.
Where she feels the unpleasantness that creepy
can cause, I feel the unease of someone
approaching the end of his life at the speed of death;
the unease of someone whose body has taken
over rather than be overtaken by its owner;
the unease reverberating like a cry behind every note
sung with a voice raw with knowing, raspy with regret,
yet somehow resolved to keep on singing
until every breath is gone and all that remains is
the long, slow, lingering fade out.
*
Kip Knott’s most recently full-length book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is available from Kelsay Books. A new poetry chapbook, Little Hiroshimas, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2024. You can follow him on IG at @kip.knott and read more of his work at http://www.kipknott.com.
Two Poems by Kip Knott
Dendrochronology
after the painting Divorce by Todd Rector
How many growth years can be counted
in the light and dark concentric rings that mark
our life together? Thicker rings prove
that we flourished for a time—mostly early—
while thinner rings show the wear and tear
seasons of drought wrought upon the two of us.
It’s those later years where the wedge slips in,
splitting us all the way down to our roots.
What’s left of us, splintered kindling and logs
already weathered by years of neglect,
will burn hot, but will also burn too briefly,
sending our smoke high into the air entwined
until the wind dissipates us into the atmosphere,
separate parts of one inescapable whole.
*
Early Onset Ghost Town
The ghost town where I have lived my life
is a cage full of air. All the birds flew away
in search of other trees or other skies beyond this sky.
There’s nothing left but weathered ribs and hollowness.
For years I have been a cage full of all the birds that flew away.
But now feathered memories have broken through my chest,
and soon there will be nothing left but weathered ribs and hollowness.
There’s no stopping them. I watch as they take flight one by one,
feathered memories flapping out of my chest
in search of other trees or other skies beyond my sky.
There’s no stopping them. I watch as they take flight one by one,
leaving only the ghost town of my body. I have lived my life.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, teacher, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His third book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is due later this year from Kelsay Books. His debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches (Alien Buddha Press), is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.
Lapsed by Kip Knott
Lapsed
At ten years old I prayed
every night before I closed my eyes
that I would live a long life.
By twelve I had come to know death
was not the empty robin’s nest
just outside my bedroom window,
but the desiccated hatchling
lying on the ground below
curled into itself forever.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, teacher, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His third book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is due later this year from Kelsay Books. His debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches (Alien Buddha Press), is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.
Three Poems by Kip Knott
It’s Just Human Nature
“Death. It’s inevitable. There’s a hole you come out of
and there’s a hole you’re gonna go in. . . . Being dead
is a liberating experience.”
— from an interview in 2021 with Gary Betzner,
who faked his own death in 1977
Who knows what compels a man to jump off the edge
of a bridge in the middle of nowhere Arkansas,
wife and kids in the car, engine running,
churning river currents below whispering,
The water will save you. Come on in.
Drugs? Smuggling? Underworld kingpin? Spy?
The mind loves the unknown, the mysterious,
the impossible equation, the riddle left unsolved;
podcast fodder that draws the casual listener in
with what ifs, whodunits, and new clues.
If the world we live in today has shown us anything,
it has shown that we secretly crave catastrophe
when we watch the evening news, that we pray
for the hurricane to exceed expectations and destroy
everything—someone else’s everything.
After years of conjecture, the truth about the man
on the bridge reveals itself to be nothing
more than a hoax, an escape we secretly hoped
would keep our antihero free from 20-to-life behind bars.
We breathe a sigh of relief and let out an inaudible cheer.
But the real truth is this: we all hide secrets
deep beneath flesh, muscle, and bone; secrets
that eventually become too heavy to carry;
secrets that are just heavy enough to pull us under
roiling river water to a grave of silt and mud
where clouds of catfish wait to pick our bloated bodies clean.
*
Photophobia
May 24, 2022
I used to believe in the spirit animals
and gods that I found in constellations
of stars. But when I look at the sky tonight,
I see only bullet holes piercing the dark,
one for every child we’ve lost,
two for all the children we will keep losing
until constellations bleed together
and the night sky becomes something
other than night, something
horribly empty and horribly full.
*
Post-it Notes to a Young Poet
based on Post-it Note drawings by Aron Wiesenfeld
1. Post-it Note Drawing #28
Learn to wait. Rain won’t.
The bus isn’t a sure thing.
You are the rain. And the rain is.
2. Post-it Note Drawing #29
Be content to carry the burden
of all the words you plan to write
throughout your life.
3. Post-it Note Drawing #26
Feel free to worship anything.
Prayers are nothing
more than poems waiting to be written.
4. Post-it Note Drawing #25
Never forget: Shadows
have the power to cut
through more than light.
5. Post-it Note Drawing #38
A poem exists in that moment
after you’ve climbed atop the slide
and before you take the plunge.
6. Post-it Note Drawing #20
Learn to accept those moments
when your words become
someone else’s burden to carry.
7. Post-it Note Drawing #37
And learn to accept other moments
when poems slip formless as smoke
from your lips when you speak.
8. Post-it Note Drawing #40
Always remember that smoke carries
some part of you away as it rises up.
Be truthful in everything you say.
9. Post-it Note Drawing #22
If ever you lose the will to write,
burn all these notes and harvest
new words from the ashes.
*
Kip Knott’s debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, was released earlier this year from Alien Buddha Press. His newest book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. He spends most of his spare time traveling throughout Appalachia and the Midwest taking photographs and searching for lost art treasures. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.
Distress Signals by Kip Knott
Distress Signals
inspired by the artwork of Aron Wiesenfeld
“There is a lot of darkness that people are confronting
right now . . . . All people are like prisms, with internal
characteristics, through which the world is filtered.”
—Aron Wiesenfeld
1.
When I was a child I sailed
toy ships in the drainage ditch
beneath the looming overpass
that ran behind our house.
Tires speeding through puddles
overhead channeled crashing waves
that I imagined smashed against the hull
tied to the end of my line.
Breaching eighteen-wheeled
leviathans shook the world around me,
rippling rings of greasy rainbows
from one shore to the next.
Above everything, I heard my parents
shouting, not for me to come in,
but at each other, the way thunder yells
at lightning for flashing too bright.
To this day I still don’t know
if I was the one guiding the ship,
or if an otherworldly stowaway
had thrown a line to me
and I was waiting for someone
to pull me in, to pull me under.
2.
It’s easy enough to step that one step forward and fall
endlessly away from the troubles that trouble the world
around me, around you, around us all.
To take that one step away from the edge and fall
back into all the divisions and ills that plague this world,
that step is the hardest step of all.
Whichever way I choose to move I know that I will fall
upon a high wire stretched between the precipice of a world
I will come to know all in all
and the precipice of a world that every day seems ready to fall.
3.
The sight of my reflection
waving from the cell of a mirrored
windowpane stops me in my tracks
as I walk alone to work.
I wave back. My reflection
motions for me to join him.
Over both our heads, dark clouds
shift and churn in opposite directions.
Before I take another step, I must
decide if the blood that broken glass
will draw from shredded flesh
is worth the chance to learn
who lives on the other side of who I am.
4.
We occupy a liminal space.
One of us stands, the other sits. We exist
together, apart,
not quite shadows, not quite
reflections.
Reflections
exist as both the same and other,
reversed, opposite.
One of us stands, the other sits. We exist
in an endless liminal space.
5.
I have sometimes posed
myself in a final repose
just to know the shape of death.
And now, after years
of loneliness, I am too weak
to lift my head to see
if any pose I ever struck
actually matched the contours
of my body as I slowly
drift away.
*
Kip Knott’s first collection of short stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, is available from Alien Buddha Press. His most recent full-length book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his writing at kipknott.com.
*
I would like to offer my thanks to Aron Wiesenfeld for creating the powerful and evocative artwork that inspired this poem. The following five paintings were particularly inspirational:
· “Study” (2020)
· “The Pit” (2019)
· “Morning” (2002)
· “Hallway” (1999)
· “Chris McCandless” (2003)
The Abstract Artist on Her Deathbed by Kip Knott
The Abstract Artist on Her Deathbed
for Janet Sobel (1893-1968)
My paintings—not my life—flash before my eyes.
For decades I tried to paint the heartbeat of the universe,
filling a thousand empty canvases with something more than stars
and darkness, more than the atoms that no longer bind me
to this world. I watch the five moons of my children orbit overhead
as I drift away. They weep for me as they wept for their father
when he departed this world more than fifteen years before,
never knowing the truth that he took with him, the truth I still carry
in my failing heart, the truth that art was the real center of my universe.
And now in death I must accept a truth just as harsh,
that the sound of the universe is nothing more than a chronic static hiss,
not a heartbeat at all, but a dying breath exhaled and unending.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. His first collection of short stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, is forthcoming in 2022 from Alien Buddha Press. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his writing at kipknott.com. Currently, he lives in Delaware, Ohio, with his wife and son.
ONE ART nominates Kip Knott for Four Quartets Prize!
*
Author’s Statement
by Kip Knott
As a teacher and a part-time art dealer, I am an avid patron of art museums who typically visits museums throughout the Midwest and Appalachia several times a year. Due to the stay-at-home mandates in Ohio during 2020, however, I was limited to either conducting my museum visits virtually or thumbing through my own collection of art books to satisfy my cravings. I found myself returning again and again to The Helga Pictures by Andrew Wyeth. The story of Wyeth’s and Helga Testorf’s self-imposed isolation from the prying eyes of the public for nearly 15 years so that he could produce more than 240 portraits of her really struck a chord with me. The poems that make up the Andrew and Helga sequence were all written during that stay-at-home period and reflect the sense of isolation that many people felt at the height of the pandemic. In a very real sense, these poems could not have been written in the same way under “normal” writing conditions.
When Mark Danowsky accepted the sequence “Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found” for ONE ART, he challenged me to write a series of poems based on the paintings of Jamie Wyeth, Andrew’s son. I accepted the challenge and immediately began an in-depth exploration of Jamie’s paintings. I found myself particularly drawn to his many excellent portraits of people and animals, portraits that did more than merely replicate the appearance of his subjects. Just as his father’s portraits of Helga reveal a startling intimacy between the artist and his subject, Jamie’s portraits convey a similar intimacy that pulls the viewer into the worlds and emotions of his subjects, be they pigs or people. In just two months, I had written three poetry sequences based on eight of Jamie’s paintings. When read together, the poems based on Andrew’s paintings and the poems based on Jamie’s paintings coalesce into conversation between a father and his son about intimacy, love, family, and—above all else—art.
*
Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found
I’m a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting. It would be like somebody watching you have sex—painting is that personal to me.
— Andrew Wyeth
I’m supposed to be the mystery woman, something lost and found.
— Helga Testorf
I. Black Velvet, 1972
I have completed God’s work,
creating you as a constellation
with the empty spaces between stars
filled in and fully realized.
I have made you whole yet weightless,
luminous in the perfect darkness
of the universe, God-like
in your own right. Or, more
truthfully, a Goddess reclining
on the backs of prayers that slip
silently from the lips of supplicants.
Every night, believers look up
to you for guidance before being
pulled down into sleep,
the only world where we exist
alone with nothing, or no one, to hold onto.
II. Sheepskin, 1973
There is something you’re not
telling me, something I try to conjure
out of you with a tempera potion
born out of rabbit-skin glue,
distilled water, crushed marble,
honey, egg yolks, and beeswax.
You don’t keep the secret in your eyes,
as a layman would believe.
Nor can it be found like the remnants
of a whispered prayer
in the creases surrounding
your enigmatic mouth.
A mouth that refuses to betray
a smile or a frown. A mouth
that once formed the word yes
when I asked if I could capture
them—and you—in ink and paint.
You keep your secret in your hands,
not as one might protect the delicate
papier-mâché of a robin’s egg
found abandoned beneath a hedgerow,
but as one cups a firefly, its tiny,
otherworldly light just barely
illuminating the narrow gaps
that never fully seal between closed fingers.
III. Easter Sunday, 1975
Runnels of stubborn snow shroud
the muddy ground surrounding you
and, by extension, me.
When I found you four Easters ago,
I knew I had found the hollow place
where the desire that I feared
had died was actually hiding,
very much alive, thrumming like a hive:
the desire to be divorced from all
expectations and preconceptions
of the artist, the father,
and the husband I had to be.
You gave me permission
to paint for myself, to personify
in you every secret I keep,
to finally release my soul from gray
barnboard and brown barley grass
and live in the world again
as flesh, blood, and bone.
Now, on this Easter Sunday,
in an otherwise barren landscape,
you are my one promise of green.
IV. Drawn Shade, 1977
I am a witness to your aging
in a light of my own making,
and I will I carefully catalogue
every new silver strand that appears
like a shiny trinket pilfered
by a magpie and woven into
the tasseled cornsilk of your hair.
Already your downy temples
have begun their transformation.
Soon, your mossy brows will
glint like cattails gone to seed.
Even the gosling fuzz softly covering
your cheeks will pale from amber
to the white of milkweed silk.
And eventually, naturally,
the perfect nest resting
between your thighs will glitter
and shine as if gilded by winter
with jewels of snowflakes and hoarfrost.
V. Braids, 1979
There are moments when
you won’t even tell me
what you see when you look away
as I pull your gaze out of the darkness
surrounding you. I want you
to reveal everything to me
freely so that I may capture
in the contours of your face
the shadows of your thoughts,
the full truth of you.
When you look into the distance,
look for me. Stand behind me
as I paint you. I want you
to see your face as I do,
a wolf moon rising
out of a January wheat field
not yet blanketed by snow,
gradually eclipsed
by the penumbra of your auburn hair.
VI. Night Shadow, 1979
Beneath my hand, you exist
in both darkness and light.
I hover above
you, the form of my shadow
diaphanous and dissipating,
a storm cloud releasing
everything it holds:
water, ice, lightning, thunder.
I rain down upon your body
and baptize you.
VII. In the Doorway, 1981
This is our house, a place for our prying
eyes and ours alone:
yours trying to see in me
the way that I see you;
my own studying every particle
of your being as an astronomer studies
the depths of the universe
hoping to find the beginning
of all creation. You stand naked,
filling the entrance both
with the white light of stars
and the dark matter that fills
the emptiness between them all.
You and the doorway
have become one and the same.
To enter our house means entering you.
VIII. Helga’s Words
quotes by Helga taken from the short documentary
film Helga (Running Stag Productions, 2018)
He said I was his silent sounding board.
He said there must be silence
to realize what is behind the world.
He said I was starved.
He said he gave me what I wanted
and got what he wanted from me.
He said our time together was a dream.
He said he was afraid of the dream
disappearing if we talked about it.
I dreamed that I had fallen in love,
and when I woke, I knelt
at the end of my bed and said,
“Let it be true. Please
let it be true.” But how
do you explain a dream? I knew
he was always painting himself in me.
I knew I was a figment of his imagination.
Like a leaf blowing in the wind,
I was there, but not there.
*
Three Portraits of a Sow
. . . if you get to know pigs, they’re very moody. They’re not sweet little animals at all. That’s what I like about them. They get depressed . . .
— Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Pig, 1970
Her teats dangle,
flaccid and empty.
Her corkscrew tail
has come unwound.
The eye we see remains
screwed shut tight
as bristly fur and hay
needle her skin.
Withered cobs
at her feet bear
no sign of a mother’s
appetite or desire
now that her suckling
litter is off to slaughter.
II. Night Pigs, 1979
The cockerel will wait
until sunrise
to crow its condolences.
There’s nothing more
for the boar to do
tonight but sleep.
They leave the sow
to sit litterless
in golden lamplight
(continued, new stanza)
beneath her own growing
shadow blackening
the wall above them all.
III. Winter Pig, 1975
She knows what can be
found at the heart
of a whiteout because she stares
into one kind of abyss
or another with every sunrise.
She knows the cold, too,
the way its emptiness
stings like frostbite
in the wind that blows
across her empty teats.
And she knows
just four hoof-steps
over the splintered threshold
will deliver her into
a world of her own making
at a time of her own choosing.
*
Surrounded by the Sea
Islands intrigue me. You can see the perimeters of your world.
—Jamie Wyeth
I. Orca, 1990
I have painted your hands
as pointed and sharp
as any harpoon that pierced
a leviathan’s heart.
Now you must choose
for yourself: Ishmael or Ahab?
Will you live to tell your own story?
Or will you doom yourself
to a slow death floating
among the flotsam of a ship
shattered by the mortal sin
some god demands we fight?
There is nothing more I can do.
I have given you all the knives
you need to flay this life to the bone.
II. Screen Door to the Sea, 1994
You clearly want to leave.
The door stands ajar.
What is keeping you
from disappearing into the sea-spray
and salt air? What is keeping you
from slipping out
before the clock strikes twelve?
What is keeping your eyes
locked on mine, your hands fidgeting
like gulls near the surf line?
Why do I make you stay?
What is keeping me
from painting the doorway empty
like an open mouth crying out for you
after you have walked away?
III. Other Voices, 1995
Your fingertips caress
the locked door, feel the pulse
of a muffled conversation
like some version of Braille
you have not learned how to decipher.
The voices on the other side
could be inviting you to enter,
to walk on through without turning back
and lock the door behind you.
Or they could be telling you to stay patient
with the world in which you live,
to just turn around and go back home.
And then again, there might not be
any voices at all; it might just be the sea.
All I know is that there is still time
enough for you to live your life
on this side of the threshold.
Whenever you feel the need to leave,
I swear to you I will paint the key.
*
Every Portrait Is a Self-Portrait
“I’m not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.”
— Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Andrew Wyeth, 1969
All fathers are oak trees to their sons, massive and domineering,
casting a broad shadow across whatever field they claim.
Though their roots run shallow, they run wide, rippling out and out
from their thick trunk in search of water to feed their leaves
and drink the world dry. It only takes a tiny injury—a broken branch,
a redheaded woodpecker’s jackhammer bill, a passing bear claw
scratch—to seed a burl that will keep expanding until the tree dies.
What wound did you inflict to make the burl of your father’s face grow?
II. Pumpkin Head (Self-Portrait), 1972
Pumpkins grow best atop
the ground rather than below,
unburdened by the weight
of earth and the tangle of roots.
Every autumn we cut them
and gut them and stuff them
with candles until they smile
brightly in spite of their own
defilement. The Jack-O-Lantern
that hides your own face stares
at the world with empty eyes
and a jagged, maniacal smile.
You are the sole sign of life
rising out of this fallow winter
field. Unable to overcome
the cold, your pumpkin head
hangs in a blank canvas sky
like a wan and sallow sun.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren, Drunk Monkeys, Harpy Hybrid Review, HAD, La Piccioletta Barca, (mac)ro(mic), and New World Writing. More of his writing may be accessed at kipknott.com.
Every Portrait Is a Self-Portrait by Kip Knott
Every Portrait Is a Self-Portrait
“I’m not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.”
— Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Andrew Wyeth, 1969
All fathers are oak trees to their sons, massive and domineering,
casting a broad shadow across whatever field they claim.
Though their roots run shallow, they run wide, rippling out and out
from their thick trunk in search of water to feed their leaves
and drink the world dry. It only takes a tiny injury—a broken branch,
a redheaded woodpecker’s jackhammer bill, a passing bear claw
scratch—to seed a burl that will keep expanding until the tree dies.
What wound did you inflict to make the burl of your father’s face grow?
II. Pumpkin Head (Self-Portrait), 1972
Pumpkins grow best atop
the ground rather than below,
unburdened by the weight
of earth and the tangle of roots.
Every autumn we cut them
and gut them and stuff them
with candles until they smile
brightly in spite of their own
defilement. The Jack-O-Lantern
that hides your own face stares
at the world with empty eyes
and a jagged, maniacal smile.
You are the sole sign of life
rising out of this fallow winter
field. Unable to overcome
the cold, your pumpkin head
hangs in a blank canvas sky
like a wan and sallow sun.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. A new full-length poetry collection, Hinterlands, will be available later this year from Versification Publishing House. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren, Drunk Monkeys, Harpy Hybrid Review, HAD, La Piccioletta Barca, (mac)ro(mic), and New World Writing. More of his writing may be accessed at kipknott.com.
Surrounded by the Sea by Kip Knott
Surrounded by the Sea
Islands intrigue me. You can see the
perimeters of your world.
—Jamie Wyeth
I. Orca
I have painted your hands
as pointed and sharp
as any harpoon that pierced
a leviathan’s heart.
Now you must choose
for yourself: Ishmael or Ahab?
Will you live to tell your own story?
Or will you doom yourself
to a slow death floating
among the flotsam of a ship
shattered by the mortal sin
some god demands we fight?
There is nothing more I can do.
I have given you all the knives
you need to flay this life to the bone.
II. Screen Door to the Sea
You clearly want to leave.
The door stands ajar.
What is keeping you
from disappearing into the sea-spray
and salt air? What is keeping you
from slipping out
before the clock strikes twelve?
What is keeping your eyes
locked on mine, your hands fidgeting
like gulls near the surf line?
Why do I make you stay?
What is keeping me
from painting the doorway empty
like an open mouth crying out for you
after you have walked away?
III. Other Voices
Your fingertips caress
the locked door, feel the pulse
of a muffled conversation
like some version of Braille
you have not learned how to decipher.
The voices on the other side
could be inviting you to enter,
to walk on through without turning back
and lock the door behind you.
Or they could be telling you to stay patient
with the world in which you live,
to just turn around and go back home.
And then again, there might not be
any voices at all; it might just be the sea.
All I know is that there is still time
enough for you to live your life
on this side of the threshold.
Whenever you feel the need to leave,
I swear to you I will paint the key.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. A new full-length poetry collection, Hinterlands, will be available later this year from Versification Publishing House. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren, Drunk Monkeys, Harpy Hybrid Review, HAD, La Piccioletta Barca, (mac)ro(mic), and New World Writing. More of his writing may be accessed at kipknott.com.
*
Jamie Wyeth – Orca
Jamie Wyeth – Screen Door to the Sea
Jamie Wyeth – Other Voices
Three Portraits of a Sow by Kip Knott
Three Portraits of a Sow
. . . . if you get to know pigs, they’re very moody.
They’re not sweet little animals at all. That’s what
I like about them. They get depressed . . . .
— Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Pig
Her teats dangle,
flaccid and empty.
Her corkscrew tail
has come unwound.
The eye we see remains
screwed shut tight
as bristly fur and hay
needle her skin.
Withered cobs
at her feet bear
no sign of a mother’s
appetite or desire
now that her suckling
litter is off to slaughter.
II. Night Pigs
The cockerel will wait
until sunrise
to crow its condolences.
There’s nothing more
for the boar to do
tonight but sleep.
They leave the sow
to sit litterless
in golden lamplight
beneath her own growing
shadow blackening
the wall above them all.
III. Winter Pig
She knows what can be
found at the heart
of a whiteout because she stares
into one kind of abyss
or another with every sunrise.
She knows the cold, too,
the way its emptiness
stings like frostbite
in the wind that blows
across her empty teats.
And she knows
just four hoof-steps
over the splintered threshold
will deliver her into
a world of her own making
at a time of her own choosing.
*
Kip Knott’s debut full-length book of poetry, Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on, is currently available from Kelsay Books. His second full-length book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is forthcoming later in 2021, also from Kelsay Books. He lives in Delaware, Ohio, with his wife and son, four cats, one dog, and a Chilean rose hair tarantula. More of his work may be accessed at kipknott.com.
Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found by Kip Knott
Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found
I’m a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting…
it would be like somebody watching you have sex—painting is that
personal to me.
—Andrew Wyeth
I’m supposed to be the mystery woman, something lost and found.
—Helga Testorf
I. Black Velvet, 1972
I have completed God’s work,
creating you as a constellation
with the empty spaces between stars
filled in and fully realized.
I have made you whole yet weightless,
luminous in the perfect darkness
of the universe, God-like
in your own right. Or, more
truthfully, a Goddess reclining
on the backs of prayers that slip
silently from the lips of supplicants.
Every night, believers look up
to you for guidance before being
pulled down into sleep,
the only world where we exist
alone with nothing, or no one, to hold onto.
II. Sheepskin, 1973
There is something you’re not
telling me, something I try to conjure
out of you with a tempera potion
born out of rabbit-skin glue,
distilled water, crushed marble,
honey, egg yolks, and beeswax.
You don’t keep the secret in your eyes,
as a layman would believe.
Nor can it be found like the remnants
of a whispered prayer
in the creases surrounding
your enigmatic mouth.
A mouth that refuses to betray
a smile or a frown. A mouth
that once formed the word yes
when I asked if I could capture
them—and you—in ink and paint.
You keep your secret in your hands,
not as one might protect the delicate
papier-mâché of a robin’s egg
found abandoned beneath a hedgerow,
but as one cups a firefly, its tiny,
otherworldly light just barely
illuminating the narrow gaps
that never fully seal between closed fingers.
III. Easter Sunday, 1975
Runnels of stubborn snow shroud
the muddy ground surrounding you
and, by extension, me.
When I found you four Easters ago,
I knew I had found the hollow place
where the desire that I feared
had died was actually hiding,
very much alive, thrumming like a hive:
the desire to be divorced from all
expectations and preconceptions
of the artist, the father,
and the husband I had to be.
You gave me permission
to paint for myself, to personify
in you every secret I keep,
to finally release my soul from gray
barnboard and brown barley grass
and live in the world again
as flesh, blood, and bone.
Now, on this Easter Sunday,
in an otherwise barren landscape,
you are my one promise of green.
IV. Drawn Shade, 1977
I am a witness to your aging
in a light of my own making,
and I will I carefully catalogue
every new silver strand that appears
like a shiny trinket pilfered
by a magpie and woven into
the tasseled cornsilk of your hair.
Already your downy temples
have begun their transformation.
Soon, your mossy brows will
glint like cattails gone to seed.
Even the gosling fuzz softly covering
your cheeks will pale from amber
to the white of milkweed silk.
And eventually, naturally,
the perfect nest resting
between your thighs will glitter
and shine as if gilded by winter
with jewels of snowflakes and hoarfrost.
V. Braids, 1979
There are moments when
you won’t even tell me
what you see when you look away
as I pull your gaze out of the darkness
surrounding you. I want you
to reveal everything to me
freely so that I may capture
in the contours of your face
the shadows of your thoughts,
the full truth of you.
When you look into the distance,
look for me. Stand behind me
as I paint you. I want you
to see your face as I do,
a wolf moon rising
out of a January wheat field
not yet blanketed by snow,
gradually eclipsed
by the penumbra of your auburn hair.
VI. Night Shadow, 1979
Beneath my hand, you exist
in both darkness and light.
I hover above
you, the form of my shadow
diaphanous and dissipating,
a storm cloud releasing
everything it holds:
water, ice, lightning, thunder.
I rain down upon your body
and baptize you.
VII. In the Doorway, 1981
This is our house, a place for our prying
eyes and ours alone:
yours trying to see in me
the way that I see you;
my own studying every particle
of your being as an astronomer studies
the depths of the universe
hoping to find the beginning
of all creation. You stand naked,
filling the entrance both
with the white light of stars
and the dark matter that fills
the emptiness between them all.
You and the doorway
have become one and the same.
To enter our house means entering you.
VIII. Helga’s Words
quotes by Helga taken from the short documentary
film Helga (Running Stag Productions, 2018)
He said I was his silent sounding board.
He said there must be silence
to realize what is behind the world.
He said I was starved.
He said he gave me what I wanted
and got what he wanted from me.
He said our time together was a dream.
He said he was afraid of the dream
disappearing if we talked about it.
I dreamed that I had fallen in love,
and when I woke, I knelt
at the end of my bed and said,
“Let it be true. Please
let it be true.” But how
do you explain a dream? I knew
he was always painting himself in me.
I knew I was a figment of his imagination.
Like a leaf blowing in the wind,
I was there, but not there.
*
Kip Knott’s debut full-length collection of poetry, Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on, is available from Kelsay Books. A second full-length poetry collection, Clean Coal Burn, is forthcoming later in 2021, also from Kelsay Books. More of his work may be accessed at kipknott.com.
Love Poem by Kip Knott
Love Poem
The paper heart that I’ve carried in my chest
has finally caught fire. It’s burned for six nights
now. There’s no snuffing the white flames
that flicker up my throat. Arteries and veins cauterize,
bones sizzle, a network of fuses feeding one
explosion. My mind glows, a new star hot enough
to fuse atoms. These words are its radiation.
*
Kip Knott’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, La Piccioletta Barca, Still: The Journal, and trampset. In addition, he is a regular monthly contributor to Versification. His debut book of poetry, Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on, is currently available from Kelsay Books. His second full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is due in 2021, also from Kelsay Books. More of his work can be accessed at kipknott.com.
Watching 2001 with My Son the Film Major by Kip Knott
Watching 2001 with My Son the Film Major
I think somewhere there is a room
which I am living
an old man
in the future . . .
—Franz Wright
When the ape tosses the bone
2 million years into the future,
my son whispers, “Jesus Christ,”
and I see myself in him,
or at least myself as I was
more than forty years before
when I muttered the name
of the savior I believed in then.
My son has grown up
a non-believer in anything
remotely spiritual, proudly
faithless, fervently secular,
refusing even to utter
“under God” during The Pledge
every morning back in high school
when it crackled over the intercom
like a distant signal from space.
When HAL sings “Daisy”
slower and slower as he dies,
my son visibly mourns for him.
I mourn inside for the child
I once could hold entirely
in my arms. My son
leans closer to the screen
when the light show begins,
psychotropic streaks of color
illuminating his awe-struck
yet perfectly sober face.
I was high the first time
these lights transported me
to an otherworldly realm,
and laughed ecstatically
at the visions before me
like some possessed believer
enraptured in the presence
of his monolithic God.
When at last we reach the end,
that moment when the luminous
star child hovers over the world
like a miracle born
of a universe that created itself
out of nothing,
my son and I begin to cry,
together yet separate.
Kip Knott’s most recent book of poetry, Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on, is available from Kelsay Books. New work may be found or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Burningword Literary Journal, perhappened, and Typishly. More of his work may be accessed at www.kipknott.com.