“Part of you wants to believe this poem was written by a human”
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A review of Causa Sui by Elizabeth Knapp
by Gregory Luce
In Causa Sui, Latin for “self-caused”—or perhaps more accurately in the context of this book, “self-inflicted”—Elizabeth Knapp has given us one of the most important collections of poetry this year. Using a wide array of emotional tones and an equally varied set of forms and styles, Knapp engages directly with many of the issues affecting our nation and our planet as a whole. By turns humorous, sad, ironic, witty, angry, resigned, these poems are essential reading and vital acts of resistance.
Elizabeth Knapp is a professor of English at Hood College in Frederick, Md., and the founder of Hood’s low-residency M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. Causa Sui is her third collection. Her previous book, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak, was published in 2019 by Washington Writers’ Publishing House; her second, The Spite House, was released by C&R Press in 2011.
This is a collection that pulls no punches. The opening poem, “It’s Okay to Worry About the State of Britney Spears’ Mental Health” tackles a topic that in a lesser poet’s hands could easily have been played for cheap laughs or bathos.
“& by that I mean it’s ok to worry
about the state of humanity’s
mental health, Britney being
a synecdoche here, a part standing in
for a whole, & further, a metonym,
when she becomes the woman
who represents all women….”
It’s hard to imagine any poet more skillfully bringing together simultaneous celebrity worship and judgement, misogyny and the exploitation of women, mental health crises, and entertainment as distraction from existential threats:
“The metaphor could be stretched
even further to mean Britney
equals the earth in crisis—melting
polar caps and biblical floods….
Who cares about about
something as inconsequential as dying
as long as the music keeps playing?”
Pop culture references serve this poet well in several poems, including “I Teach a College Poetry Class in Which No One Has heard of Talking Heads”:
“I might as well be speaking Latin,
which, come to think of it, is sort of
what I’m doing, as I go along ad nauseum
about how they should stop thinking
with their brains & start thinking
with their ears. Stop making sense,
as David Byrne put it.”
Though it’s a somewhat light-hearted take on the necessity of other forms of thinking besides the intellectual when making art, one also detects regret at the fraying of cultural continuity between generations.
Another poem, “Is Poetry Dead,” tackles the perennial debate over the relevance of poetry in our digital age—a continuation of an argument that has in fact been going on through many ages.
“Poetry died a century ago with Eliot.
Poetry died the second you picked up
your pen. Dear poet born in the 20th
century, don’t you know nobody writes
poems using pens anymore?”
The poem concludes with a thought that should make any poet, indeed any lover of poetry, shiver.
“Admit it, part of you
wants to believe this poem was written
by a human, & part of you fears it wasn’t.”
In addition to the depth of thought and linguistic brilliance of these poems, note the poet’s skillful enjambments that drive each poem’s argument relentlessly, enhancing their rhythm and pacing.
These poems exemplify the poet’s ability to present multiple complex themes in a rich, yet conversational tone, a quality existing abundantly throughout the book. One section of the book, ironically entitled “We the People," comprises a series of centos (found poems) derived from the notorious Project 2025. They are all very short; here’s an example, “Ronald Reagan is,” quoted in full to give the (unsavory) flavor:
Ronald Reagan is
Our yardstick Our
wars are always
cold Opportunism
is the flag we fly
over the forests
we burn to make
room for our
unborn children”
One shudders to imagine the poet giving a close reading of the document in order to carefully stitch together phrases that enhance the already sinister intent of Project 2025.
One truly fascinating element in the collection is a series of semi-erasure poems scattered throughout that extract human language from ChatGPT outputs. It sadly is not possible to quote or even reproduce these poems that feature a few bold italic words representing the poet’s voice on top of a grayed out background of AI-generated text.
There is hardly any issue that this poet does not face up to, whether gender, race, climate change, or the rise of AI to name just a few. Her ability to weave these topics into poems that speak meaningfully to readers without falling into polemic or propaganda is possibly the most remarkable thing about Causa Sui. Despite the frequent grimness of the subject matter, the poet manages to inject humor or at least some irony into each poem.
I’ll close with the final poem, the title poem in fact, which offers at least a glimmer of hope:
“In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
postulates that all human activity revolves
around the subconscious attempt to deny
the reality of our own mortality….
Someday my breath will meet
the earth too, & every song I ever tucked
under my wing will open itself and take flight.”
Causa Sui is a powerful and necessary collection that demonstrates the ability of poetry to offer solace and fuel resistance, to mourn and encourage.
Learn more about Elizabeth Knapp, read some of her poems, and buy Causa Sui here.
Elizabeth Knapp is the author of two previous poetry collections, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2019), winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, and The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the De Novo Poetry Prize. She is the founding director of the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Hood College and lives in Maryland with her family.
Gregory Luce is the co-founder and poetry editor of Washington Unbound. He has published six chapbooks. He lives in Arlington and serves as Poetry Editor of The Mid-Atlantic Review and writes a monthly column for the online arts journal Scene4.