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‘When I write I take things from everywhere / like a magpie and twist them.’
The lyrical verve, wit and tenderness of Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend are signature qualities of Kenny Knight’s poetry. He writes about lived experiences noticeably free of the self-important theorising in plentiful supply elsewhere in the House of Poesy. This does not indicate any sort of abandonment of artifice, that necessity in poetry like this is of a different kind. The artistry here is absorbed in the exchanges of human voices and graced with a magpie poetics, ‘while the wind blows off the Atlantic/like one of Bob Dylan’s songs.’
This is also a world of the bright prospect at hand, of vivid childhood memory, rock'n'roll youth and intoxicating discoveries. It reaches out on ‘three thousand miles of soggy paper/a poem that begins in Honicknowle/ and ends on Olson’s doorstep in Massachusetts.’ This requires that the sea-soaked paper holds out long enough to get us there. We might just make it, transported by ‘that giraffe/driving a steam roller’ pausing ‘to let the shadow/of a crow and a swan/fly over the zebra crossing/outside the greengrocer’s/at West Park.’
Finally, Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend, is a poetry of a particular type of flaneur, aware of time passing and engaged in a dialogue with a multitude of personae, of the self and others. Here is the poet in Plymouth encountering Eric Dolphy, the undercover cop, Geoffrey Hill, Buddy Holly, the supermarket worker, Cy Twombly, Van Gogh, Ornette Coleman, Pink Floyd, Matisse and Don McClean.
