Introduction
James Knight’s visual poetry occupies a restless territory where language refuses to behave as text alone. Drawing on Surrealist traditions of rupture, assemblage, and metamorphosis, his work treats words as physical matter, cut, scattered, reconstituted and capable of producing bodily and psychological effects rather than stable meaning. These poems do not depict dreams so much as enact convulsions: of syntax, of image, of voice. What emerges is a practice grounded less in reverie than in disturbance.
Across Knight’s work, figures appear as unfinished anatomies, while language behaves like tissue that can be split, stitched, or bled into form. Text and image are not hierarchically arranged but entangled, each exerting pressure on the other. This Surrealism is not nostalgic or illustrative. It is procedural, material, and often violent in its refusals, insisting on poetry as an embodied event rather than a readable surface.
Singing the Monsters, Knight’s current book-length visual poetry manuscript, extends this practice into sustained engagement with Beowulf. Rather than treating the epic as source material to be illustrated or modernized, the manuscript approaches it as unstable matter, an inherited text reopened through fragmentation, digital distortion, and formal risk. Monsters re-enter not as symbols but as mutable presences, shaped by the same Surrealist logic that animates Knight’s wider body of work.
Interview
Laura Kerr:
The mask reveals. The mouth was never enough.
When you enter the beak, what speaks?
There is a long history of poets who do not speak “as themselves,” but through the animal, the daemon, the altered body—as if the poem requires a different vessel.
When you become the bird, do you join a lineage or begin one?
James Knight:
One of the epigraphs to my book Cosmic Horror is Igor Stravinsky’s comment on the composition of his most famous work: “I was the conduit through which The Rite of Spring passed.” I see my work in the same way, in that it does not come from or belong to me; instead it uses me, just as DNA uses a living organism to survive and replicate.
The Bird King (the thing that writes and the masked performer) is a theatrical expression of something alien that speaks through me. I’m more ventriloquist’s puppet than poet. I think I can trace this back to my discovery of T. S. Eliot when I was 16; The Waste Land is the supreme act of ventriloquism, in which the poet himself is obscured by heterogeneous voices. (I’m aware that the opposite argument holds too: Eliot’s masterpiece is imbued with his personality.)
Laura Kerr:
CHIMERA 52 and the fleshy structure
The body appears in your work as unfinished, a site of becoming rather than belonging. Here, the body is spliced from cut text, stitched from memory, pigment, and wound.
Is this metamorphosis forward, or is it return?
James Knight:
It is a return to our raw, vulnerable animal state. Before I am a thinking, rational being, I am an animal. Eating, sleeping, defecating, etc., are infinitely more important activities than the making of poetry.
Almost all of my work has a somatic quality, embodying the physical reality of who we are and what it is to be a temporary, kinetic collage of skin, bone, blood, organs. Moreau’s Doctored Bodies and Beowulf express this physiological reality through the arrangement of signifiers in anatomical configurations, suggestive of animal life, reproduction, the hardness of bone and the slop of entrails.
Laura Kerr:
Your Surrealism is not the dreamscape. It refuses escape.
It is the convulsion of language as body.
What must Surrealism become to stay alive?
James Knight:
Surrealism must abandon the word Surrealism and its connotations. The minute a writer or artist thinks of themselves as a Surrealist, bad old habits dominate the creative process. A good example was the Chicago Surrealist group in the latter part of the twentieth century. Their figurehead, Franklin Rosemont, wrote poems that amounted to no more than an insipid pastiche of something André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and others had done much better decades before.
The spirit of Surrealism is one of revolt; ultimately it must revolt against its own mind-forg’d manacles and deadening conventions.
Laura Kerr:
The poem in your work is not written—it is assembled, sutured, unearthed.
Is the text trying to break through the image, or is the image trying to grow a voice?
James Knight:
I see no distinction between the act of placing letters and words into a sequence and that of marking a surface with colours and shapes, materially or virtually. The first book I remember is Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a narrative in which the poetic text and enchanting pictures are dependent on one another to shape the story and affect the reader.
When an idea occurs to me, it’s always a body with a voice, a visual aesthetic, and an aural presence; most of the time, that aural presence is expressed visually, in the form of little black squiggles that form sounds in the mind of the reader.
Laura Kerr:
One of the strengths of Singing the Monsters lies in how it opens visual poetry outward, treating digital tools not as specialist equipment but as materials that can be taken up anywhere. When you write, “A visual poem can be made on a phone while sitting on the loo!”, extending Ducasse’s claim that poetry should be made by all, you frame digital practice as a widening of participation.
At the same time, this Beowulf is clearly the result of sustained craft, extensive photography, multiple apps, custom glitch filters, and careful orchestration over time.
When we celebrate accessibility in visual poetry, how do we make space for expertise without reinstating hierarchy? Is the democracy you’re pointing toward one of access to tools or access to the discernment that allows certain configurations to carry the intensity found here?
James Knight:
The hierarchies that exist in the world of art and poetry are established by powerful people who assert the superiority of one artist over another. Those powerful people are publishers, critics, social media commentators, and, to a lesser extent, readers. Unfortunately, I don’t see how we will ever reach a point where hierarchies disappear.
Access to tools widens participation in creative processes, which can only be a good thing, and I think a consequence of that participation will be, for some, a discovery of innovative methods and approaches.
Laura Kerr:
Your reimagining of Grendel’s mother as earth goddess rather than aberration is one of the most compelling achievements of the project, undoing the Anglo-Saxon moral frame and granting these figures genuine vitality.
Yet the visual language through which this occurs, glitching, liquefaction, fragmentation, explosive text, draws on aesthetics associated with breakdown and system failure.
Do you see glitch as a means of freeing these monsters from their original moral coding, or as translating their otherness into a contemporary register shaped by digital decay? What does it mean, for you, to “give new life” through instability rather than restoration?
James Knight:
It is never my intention to make work that is “relevant” or of my time, simply because I make it for myself and have no interest in fashionable themes. But the glitch has long bewitched me, and it felt perfectly natural to use it, with all its connotations of our fractured digital culture, when telling my version of Beowulf.
If I’m giving new life to Grendel and his nameless mother, that new life has to be unstable, dynamic, impossible to fix into a definitive image. I should add, though, that none of the monsters in the story (Grendel, his mother, and the dragon) are glitched. Grendel and his mother were made with acrylic paint and careful digital manipulation, while the dragon is a collage of photographed war machinery from World War I.
The environments in which they convulse and roar and seethe are glitchy, however. They inhabit a broiling world that collapses from one scene to another.
Laura Kerr:
The aleatory behaviour of your “Blood” filter—its capacity to bloom, contract, and rupture beyond your control—feels crucial to the work’s vitality, recalling oral tradition’s improvisation, where stories lived through variation rather than fixity.
At the same time, this unpredictability is mediated by proprietary software systems designed by others.
When you describe this process as play and discovery, how conscious are you of working within those systems? Does authorship shift when chance is technologically mediated or is the real measure simply whether the monsters are allowed to sing?
James Knight:
I’m very conscious that I’m using tools someone else invented, as we all do, all or most of the time, whether those tools are paint brushes or Microsoft Word. If there is any individuality in the way I use those tools, it’s in the way they seem to direct me to use them in unusual combinations. It’s never something that is planned.
Some words that have popped into my head look a certain way to me, and an app that might realise the aesthetic I have in mind presents itself.
As for authorship, I think we accord that notion far too much importance. I am not important: the work is.
Singing the Monsters
This interview forms part of my ongoing exploration of Experimental Poetry Criticism, attending to how visual poetry thinks: through process, through material choices, through the aesthetics of digital composition, and through questions of access and authorship in contemporary making.
You can find more of James Knight’s Poetry/Art on these links below:
Instagram- @jkbirdking
Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.
She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura currently serves as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.
For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.
Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.
She is also developing a body of experimental poetry
criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These
pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a
self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.
