Indicative of these themes and Knapp’s voice, one of my favorite poems, “The Cemetery Is Full of People Who Would Love to Have Your Problems,” traffics a combination of overthe-top hyperbole and out-of-body imagery. With its sequential lyricism and brevity, I include the poem in full:
When you, like Lucifer, bear down from the west,
a comet hightailing for intergalactic destruction,
remember the promise of everlasting boredom,
your bones ground down to a fine, useless meal
that even the death birds won’t touch with their ten-
foot beaks, so toxic is your halcyon odor.
Think of those poor souls who’d gladly give
their rotting right arm for your general malaise,
your false sense of diurnal entitlement, as you
sweep porches and write your neatly lined poems,
most already two beats in the grave. Time
to worry more, for sooner or later you’ll pine
for the days of those panic-struck flights,
the nights that sent your bald heart fluttering
with the fear of wasting another year of your life.
The second-person point of view initially implies the reader as its subject, and the poem pulls us in by juxtaposing the “you” with grandiose interstellar imagery, creating a healthy buffer between the reader and the subject (particularly after the accusatory title). As the reader, I can handle being “like Lucifer” and enjoy “bear[ing] down from the west,” and by the time I’m told about my “false sense of diurnal entitlement”—while I’m not feeling great about myself—I can’t help but feel like the poet might have a point. Here, I am reminded of poetry as an indulgence, of a line by the poet Matt Hart, who wrote “Who has time / for poetry has more time than they deserve” (“Breaking Spring”). But the poem widens in the penultimate stanza as Knapp draws attention to the artifice of the poem in several ways: The implicit comparison of “sweeping porches” to writing gestures at the Sisyphean nature of the enterprise while “neatly lined poems” spotlights the conventional presentation of the poem we’re reading; at the same time “two beats in the grave” self-critiques the not-very-metrical, four-to-five-beat lines that occur throughout the poem. As the “you” of the beginning of the poem then becomes the poet, rather than the reader, the poet, reader, and speaker briefly conjoin, and earlier lines are recast. As the speaker self-effaces, space opens for the reader to join her in self-examination.