Who Shall Know Them?

by Faye Kicknosway

In a role-playing game the reader enters the Mampang Fortress, battles the evil Archmage, and tries to regain the Crown of Kings

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

b. 1936

Poet and visual artist Faye Kicknosway was born in Detroit and raised in Los Angeles. She earned a BA at Wayne State University and an MA at San Francisco State College.

Kicknosway is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including Mixed Plate: New and Selected Poems (2003), Who Shall Know Them? (1985), and All These Voices: New and Selected Poems (1986). Her work is also featured in the feminist poetry anthology No More Masks! (1973).

Threading together psychological narrative with mythic violence, Kicknosway’s poems reveal a filmic attention to the transformative possibilities of light and shadow. In a review of All These Voices, poet Jason Schneiderman observes, “Kicknosway challenges the dominance and trustworthiness of narrative in her poems of fragmentation, offering up constant revisions of where the gaze should fall.” Who Shall Know Them?, her book of poems engaging Walker Evans’s photographs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Kicknosway’s other honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She lives in Honolulu, where she has taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa under the name Morgan Blair.

(from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/f...)

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

According to the Author's Note, "The characters in these poems are imaged from the photos of Walker Evans, but they have nothing to do with the real lives of the actual people. I am particularly indebted to Walker Evans's photograph 'Bud Field and His Family, Hale County, Alabama, Summer 1936,' which he took for the Farm Security Administration collection now in the Library of Congress. I find the photograph deeply moving and the figures in it are not static to me, bu vulnerable and alive."



Kicknosway's poems are simultaneously as raw as Evans's depression-era subjects, and as eloquent as the photographic technique with which Evans has captured them...

I built it.
It was cardboard and unpainted. No rain;
only shelter.
I knew who it was and climbed its skirts;
gentle, so gentle.
I traveled it soft, dreaming.
Its skirts sand meat, and
its silence. It spat and spat, its heart
toothless.
I'm lunatic.
This one here, this little one,
thing:
no pleasure.
I can't rad this, it's a picture; here, you take it,
you read it.
Take it.
They lie bunched against their
dreams, everything alive, out of focus.
I breathe them.
I'm tired. Sweaty and thirsty. These children,
their metal eyes,
this picture, the odor of porches
turned solid.
I'm tired. Tired.
No food. My window is boarded closed.
But I hear
her flesh; it jumps at me.
It jumps

There is a noise like trains in the dark.
Dogs whine. She is soft, in miniature, her coarse

thick hair.
I see her everywhere,
on the heels of shoes,
her blue eyes. So large
and her lips. I'm not safe; this picture;
look at her.
The ceiling. She ducks her head. So narrow,
full of anger.
- The House in This Picture (pg. 32-33)


[...]
The man who took this picture
thought his mouth had disappeared.
In its place was a hole
that might as well have spiders
or mice living inside it.
He thought that if he spoke
he'd make a noise like bushes
scraping against the side
of the house, or like flies
worrying
at the sunlight
on a porch.
[...]
- Who Is She? (pg. 37)

As much as I enjoyed Who Shall Know Them?, my personal bias favors Kicknosway early Dadaist / Surrealist inspired poems, such as the poems found in A man is a hook, trouble and Asparagus, Asparagus, Ah Sweet Asparagus ...

1.
The man at the centre of this lettering
has an unusual face. His smile,
his unblinking eyes, don't look at them,
look instead
at his hands: one is clawed
and the other is human. It is not hair
covering him, nor is it fur,
it is the letters of the alphabet
which have been beaten
with short, spatulat sticks
into a fine dust; he has rolled
in it.

2.
Water enters,
scowling and impatient.
It has no spiritual justification
for its bad manners.
When it sweats, the air dies.

3.
(Hear the faucet?
It remembers.
And the onion in the sink, it
remembers, too.)

4.
In the beginning, the earth was hollow.
A can of soup rose up
from its centre. Pick axes, prayer,
the weather, nothing,
could destroy it.
It grew larger than the earth,
finally splitting the earth
in half. The halves revolved
in twin orbit. The can burned
and fattened. Clouds came.
Mountains sprang up.
- Natural History, Part I. (Asparagus, Asparagus, Ah Sweet Asparagus, pg. 23-24)

[Vieee · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars, adored the style and concept.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 K463w 1985