A Conversation with Julia Caroline Knowlton

Mark Danowsky: Travel seems very meaningful to you. Can you talk about why travel, maybe especially international travel, is valuable?  

Julia Caroline Knowlton:  I am very fortunate to be able to travel a lot, thanks to my work as a professor.  I have led eight student trips to Europe and Africa (Bénin Republic). I went to Japan as a visiting professor (2005) and traveled to China as a participant in a faculty academic program (2008). International travel allows me to slip into other cultures and languages, like slipping on a new or spectacularly different pair of shoes. I am fascinated with the themes of disappearance and absence in poetry (more on that later in this interview); travel represents an act of disappearance from one place into an appearance in the next place. This may be odd, but I love being anonymous in new places and I love the anonymity that urban environments create.

My absolute favorite thing to do in life is walk around Paris as a flâneuse. A flâneuse is the female equivalent of a flâneur, a person who walks or strolls with no true destination, observing urban life, participating but also remaining somewhat detached. For centuries, women were not allowed to roam around in public. (It is still dangerous for women to do so in many places, or even downright forbidden.) The poet Charles Baudelaire extolled his existence as a flâneur. Contemporary social media allows for an online experience of this, but of course it is not the same. Also, paraphrasing Eliot, coming home after a long period of travel allows me to see my familiar home for the first time. It opens my eyes and mind.

MD: What life experiences have most shaped your writing?

JCK:  Childbirth and illness; childbirth because it is pure, forceful, natural creation and illness because it led me to an encounter with my own ultimate disappearance.  

MD: What do you believe is the role of the poet?

JCK: Hard question. I believe the poet exists to record language in ways that transcend the quotidian.

When I did my MFA at Antioch in Los Angeles, Ilya Kaminsky gave a talk in which he repeated the crucial nature of the poem, which is to imprint language beyond its daily or utilitarian function. I knew this, but his insistence convinced me even more. Poetry that reads like a regular conversation in verse form, devoid or symbol, metaphor, and above all image, does not appeal to me personally. For me, a great poem pushes language to the edges of its own possibility, toward visual expression.  This is in part why I am rather obsessed with painting and sculpture. The 19th-century French Parnassian poets saw a poem as a thing sculpted out of that "block of marble" which is language.

MD: Who are your favorite poets and writers? What about visual artists?

JCK:  My favorite poets are Dante, Merwin, Hirshfield, Olds, Seuss, Mallarmé, Keats, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Gwendolyn Brooks, Terrance Hayes, Marie Ponsot, Jane Kenyon, and Marie de France, a medieval poet who wrote the first verse texts in Old French rather than Latin.  For visual artists, oh the list would be impossibly long.... I recently saw the Monet/Mitchell exhibit in Paris. Joan Mitchell was extraordinary.  The paintings of Agnes Martin move me. Berthe Morisot is a heroine of mine.  Camille Claudel also. Claudel endured the cruel fate of many talented female artists, in an extreme way.  I have written poems dedicated to Morisot and Claudel. I love the thick brushstrokes of Manet. Jordan Casteel went to Agnes Scott, where I teach. She is extraordinary.

MD: Can you talk a little about your connection with French culture? How has this impacted your outlook on the world and your writing life? 

JCK: I began learning French as a child, in a public school system. Without realizing it, I went through a doorway into a linguistic room of my own.  French became an alternative linguistic space for me, in which I could be on my own, or hide, or explore and wander. Being bilingual is a huge part of my life, from the mundane to the (rare) sublime. Think of choosing between two desserts in a restaurant, both delicious, then think of being able to have both all the time! Some people assume I must love everything about France and French culture, and that is definitely untrue. That being said, after decades of speaking, studying and teaching French, there are still moments when I am moved by a new turn of phrase or idiom or cultural moment.  It is a constant adventure.

MD: When do you find yourself coming to the page?

JCK: I wrote a poem about Thanksgiving when I was about eleven. It was sing-song and rhymed and I loved writing it. I loved the invention. I believe that was the point of origin. I wrote a poem after my grandmother died, at around age sixteen. My mother typed it for me, and typed more of my poems. We sent them off to Seventeen magazine and the editor bought a couple of them! That was also a beginning.  I am still grateful to my mother for taking my work seriously and typing up those poems.

MD: What is the role of writing in your daily routine?

JCK:  I am a "fits and starts" kind of poet.  I do reserve the early morning, which is the time in which I am writing out my replies to this interview. It would serve me to be more disciplined, but in truth the main discipline I have is to protect my time from 7 am-9 am.  I do believe that physically showing up to the empty page or empty screen at around the same time does invite the elusive muses.

MD: Do you have any writing-related habits?

JCK: The only thing I would add to the above is: coffee and total silence.

MD: What are the most enjoyable aspects of the writing process for you?

JCK: The most enjoyable aspect is the unusual surprise of recording something within language beyond me, something I had not planned, something I do not fully understand.

MD: What is the spark that begins a poem?

JCK: I will often have one line turning around in my mind like a caged animal pacing its cage in a zoo. I'll hold onto it in my mind until it releases itself. Less often, I'll begin with a title in the same way.

MD: When do you decide a poem is complete? Is this related to a sense of satisfaction or closure?

JCK: Hard question. I do my best to revise well. I can be lazily satisfied with an early draft. One of my mentors at Antioch, Terry Wolverton, really pushed me to revise more.  The final line is an obsession; I always think of a gymnast "sticking the landing."  Sometimes I will "tie up the end" of a poem with a rhyme.  But this tying up should not at all be similar to tying a bow on a gift. It should be more odd and have more of an edge.

MD: What advice do you have for poets/writers and other artists?

JCK:  Never give up. It sounds trite but it is true.  Write for the pleasure of writing. And if you want to publish, begin with journals that publish much of what they receive, and work up from there, toward the more selective journals or reviews. 

MD: How has your life changed since the pandemic?

JCK:  Like all of us, it changed me a lot.  Ironically, I relish my solitude even more than I did before.  I lost a close friend to COVID and am still haunted by an inability to feel that loss fully. I feel some survivor's guilt. Lastly, the pandemic has apparently removed my ability to cry.  I want to cry but I cannot. Is it numbness? I'm working on a poem about that; it is called "Trying to Cry."

MD: Is there anything on your mind, in general, that you’d like to share with other writers and readers?

JCK: Hmm. I would say, people and situations will let you down but language never will.  Language is a constant companion and a source of endless adventure, exploration and solace. My favorite poems are like my best friends.  I would also say, as writers and readers we are lucky that our endeavors are nearly free.  An actor needs a stage, maybe a costume, an audience, a playwright, etc. etc. All the writer needs is paper and pen/pencil or a laptop. 

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Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is a poet and Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her poetry includes an American Academy of Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She is the author of four books. She is writing a new book of poems in the form of biographical sonnets.