Casey Kaplan
Jason Dodge in Conversation With Caroline Knox
I will meet Caroline Knox for the first time face to face on Saturday, but I have known her somehow over the years through her work. A friend was looking at the covers of the new 500 Places volumes, and instead of opening a book he asked, “What are Caroline Knox’s poems like?” and I thought of her book Quaker Guns, and how a Quaker and a gun contradict each other until it is a log covered in tar that only looks like a cannon, and then I thought, Yes! That describes her work somehow. Then I remembered her poem “Flemish,” which is set up like a postcard. There are two Flemish paintings, a recipe for strawberries, an inventory of the items in the two paintings, and the simple phrase ‘“Oh Flanders! A / Benelux country, a Low Country.”
I truly hope everyone has a chance to read Caroline Knox’s poems. It was a thrill for me to be able to chat with her for this piece.
— Jason Dodge
Caroline Knox What in your work of art and sculpture turned you to publishing and to publishing poets, rather than to another art, like music or cooking? And what directed you toward the poets once you started on this?
Jason Dodge My relationship to literature has been, you could say, single-minded. Because I don’t really have the ability to read so much. I think this is the case for many artists, that a lot of us found visual arts because they were something that gave permission to a different kind of brain. While my disbelief cannot be suspended by a novel, I can handle the intensity and the complexity. So, poetry has been my sort of singular relationship to literature for a long time.
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