Metzger Karmiol has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature and teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico. In this essay, she discusses Addonizio's poem as a conduit to understanding the common sentiment of fear and the emotional toll exacted when the illusion of safety no longer exists.

One of the ways in which poetry speaks to its reader is through its ability to reach deep inside that reader and stir memories, and sometimes fears, of an event or time already past. Film does this, of course. Sitting in a darkened theater also gives filmgoers the opportunity to immerse themselves in a world they might otherwise never experience. For the film audience, however, the experience will be the same, or at least similar, for each person viewing the film. That is, unless a film is extremely abstract, most viewers will respond with similar emotions. Most people will react to the villain and identify with the heroic lead in the same manner, or perhaps the plot will be familiar in some universal way and thus instantly recognizable to the audience. Regardless of the content, a connection, a common experience, is fostered among the members of the audience. Poetry creates a connection between art and audience as well, yet a difference exists with respect to the commonality of experience. With poetry, each reader's experience will be unique, as a poem can suggest various images or realities, depending entirely on each reader's individual experiences.

Addonizio's poem "Knowledge" is a prime example of a poem that can mean different things to different people. Is the poem about terrorism as mass murder, or could it be about the particularly cruel murder of just one innocent victim? It might also be about the random murder of office workers by a deranged individual. Regardless of the specific intent of the poem, which only Addonizio can address, the knowledge that a new danger has emerged in the world, even when that world is strictly a personal one, will have an impact on every person who reads the poem.

For some people, "Knowledge" may bring forth images of the many genocides of the past fifty years—the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia—all of which left legacies of hate and horror in the late twentieth century. For others, the poem will suggest a more immediate, personal tragedy, such as the death of a child or spouse as a result of the actions of another person. Interviews with Addonizio suggest that the poem was possibly inspired by terrorism. For those who have lived under the threat of terrorism since 2001, Addonizio's poem recalls the devastating destruction of the World Trade Center complex on September 11 of that year. Her opening line, "Even when you know what people are capable of," may leave readers recalling the shock they felt as they watched and then rewatched the collapse of the twin towers on that sunny morning. That tragedy was clearly not an accident but the deliberate murder of thousands of innocent people. The resulting shock was profound in large part because of the absolute evil of the event.

Indeed, evil speaks to Addonizio. In a November 2000 interview for the literary newspaper Poetry Flash , she explained to Leza Lowitz that evil is "one of the things I obsess about. Evil and suffering and power—all of that." She further noted that the "whole question of good and evil" is a theme she pursued ever since she became aware that, eventually, innocence "is going to be crushed, somehow." According to Addonizio, people have to come to an understanding of the cruelty of the world...

Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, he explains that "Knowledge" breaks from the common poetic practice of using direct experience to convey thoughts and emotions, managing to be powerful even while filled with abstract concepts.

Throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries, poets, critics, and teachers have held the position that sensory experience is the standard by which to judge effective poetry. Beginning writers, in search of the techniques that will make it possible for them to communicate effectively with their audiences, are continuously exhorted to "show, don't tell." Beginning readers, who are not trained in the skills needed to extract meaning from the raw situations presented, end up confused and wishing someone would explain to them the mysteries of a poem that refuses to make clear its point.

This emphasis on physical imagery derives principally from the theoretical scaffold built by the poet T. S. Eliot, who, in his 1919 critique of Shakespeare's Hamlet (quoted in Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction), proposed that effective writing relies on an "objective correlative": that is, he suggested, a specific object or sequence of events must be used, instead of generalized and vague language, to evoke consistent responses from all readers, regardless of their personal histories. Eliot's point, which has since his time become almost universally accepted, is that it does no good to write with words that talk about ideas or emotions, because they mean different things from one person to the next. For example, one reader might imagine that the phrase "I hate this" to mean a burning, seething animosity toward whatever the object is, while another reader might take the phrase to imply just a mildly strong dislike. To convey the desired message, the writer would be better off showing an action toward the hated object, such as glaring, striking, or destroying. Abstract terms are too removed from actual human experience to make readers feel emotions deeply: a poet trying to communicate on a level that strikes readers emotionally would do better to write in terms of things that can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted. These are the ways all people, regardless of their intellectual practices, know the world.

While this is standard practice in modern poetry, there are, of course, exceptions: rules are made to be broken. One particularly successful exception to the rule about showing and not telling is Addonizio's "Knowledge." Readers who have a general familiarity with Addonizio's work know that she is best known as a sensualist, a writer not afraid to address her poetry to the basic, less-refined aspects of human behavior, particularly erotic behavior. As such, she might be expected to use physical imagery even more than the average poet in relating to the audience. But there is a social aspect to behavior that erotic poetry must address, and to the degree that this is her subject matter, Addonizio is something of a sociologist. She concerns herself with objective reality, of course, but there is also a strong vein of the theoretical throughout her poetry. This is taken to an extreme in "Knowledge," where the subject matter is the process of abstract intellectualization itself: despite the basic tenant of the objective correlative, this is a poem that cannot reach out to readers by bringing them to a common ground in the physical world.

The poem concerns the acquisition of abstract knowledge: the kind that is not gained from immediate personal experience but is instead brewed within an individual's mind, developed by musing on implications echoing from previous experiences. Over the course of twenty lines, Addonizio discusses the capacity of humans to arrive at shocking realizations, so shocking that they can change a person's view of the world. But the poem itself does not contain anything shocking. Instead of hitting readers hard with the direct experience of the sort of "terrible act" that can remind one of long-lost innocence, move one to tears, and make one reconsider one's deepest cynicism, she merely refers to an act and tells readers to accept that the act is indeed terrible. Each reader is free to imagine what that terrible act might be. When Addonizio gives a list of "clear-sighted adjectives" cribbed from the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, it contains words that are not comfortable, but that does not mean that they are powerful, either. "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short" may bring to mind the unwanted facts of life, but they are not words that force readers to take life's horrors to heart.

The benefit of this is that readers can fill in the poem with their own sense of what is shocking. The drawback is that the poet loses control of the meanings that readers take from it. Abstract language raises the likelihood that the different possible readings will produce interpretations of the poem that are not within the range of the poet's intention. Because the poem is built on abstractions, it can mean different things in different circumstances. Addonizio seems to welcome this span of meaning, taking the risk of diverse feelings about the poem as a price that has to be paid if one is to explore the topic of abstract thought at all.

One reason "Knowledge" is able to operate without giving any of the specific "endlessly apparent / and relevant examples of human cruelty" that it talks about is that it is carefully, meticulously structured. The words that make up the poem may not be the jarring physical experiences that Eliot required, but they are indeed evocative of a certain kind of intellectualism that people use to avoid thinking of reality's horrors. When Addonizio refers to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's phrase about "blind, impersonal will," she uses words that sound as if they should mean more but end up hollow. All of her references to philosophy, in fact, serve to establish the world of this particular poem as being far removed from experience. Other words that Addonizio has chosen, including "terrible," "overwhelmed," "innocence," "hope," and especially "quotidian," are so abstract that they do not even pretend to come close to hands-on experience. If the poem were trying to follow Eliot's theory, it might be deemed a failure, but Addonizio makes it clear with her word choices that she has no interest in being held to such a basic rule.

While the words used in "Knowledge" might be overly intellectual, Addonizio gives the poem a musical cast that makes art of them. For one thing, the use of "even" throughout the first half of the poem makes the poet's controlling hand obvious. It acts as a sort of musical refrain, clarifying the distinction between art and thought. Addonizio also makes strong use of the second-person "you" voice. Common enough in poetry, the second-person form of address is seldom as necessary as it is in this poem, where the poet needs to do all she can to make readers connect personally with the presented ideas. Finally, there is the poem's unmistakable, undeniable sense of rhythm: Addonizio does not deal here with any standard pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, but the frequent caesuras, or pauses, give the words a lyrical cadence that abstract language about an abstract subject generally lacks. Addonizio makes use of anything that can slow the reader down—commas, dashes, periods, and line breaks—to make readers feel her verbal artistry even if they are not aware of feeling it.

After so many decades have passed by with writers being told to "show, don't tell," it is only right that a talented poet should feel free to flout that rule. In a poem like "Knowledge," in which the subject matter is itself abstract thought, Addonizio is practically obliged to tell and not show. Stripped of the techniques that give poetry its immediacy and make it a moving experience—that is, unable to appeal directly to the senses—Addonizio uses other poetic devices that subtly remind readers that this is, after all, a poem and not an essay. The fact that she does not feel the need to show, and is successful without doing so, is a clear indicator that in art rules are made to be broken.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on "Knowledge," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Holmes is a freelance writer and editor. In this essay, he considers the contrast between the tone and content of Addonizio's poem.

One of the advantages of the poetic format, in relation to standard prose, is that it generally allows for a greater range of expression in fewer words. Many novelists have certainly defied the conventions of syntax so as to communicate their ideas most effectively. In Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac, the icon of the beat generation, crafted sentences spanning entire paragraphs and characterized by indifference to proper grammar and the widespread use of hyphens to reflect the digressive rhythm of his thoughts and actions. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian Gabriel García Marquez concludes with a forty-nine-page chapter that consists of a single sentence punctuated almost exclusively with commas, as indicative of the manner in which the main character gets swept up in his own life. With poems, meanwhile, a reader may expect to need to spend considerable time with the text in order to grasp nuances of form and language. Addonizio's twenty-line poem "Knowledge" consists of only two sentences, the first of which is seventeen and a half lines long. As such, the reader may expect that unconventional structure to serve a particular purpose, and the contemplation of that purpose may prove enlightening.

Indeed, given the length of that first sentence, "Knowledge" has an undeniable breathless quality about it. Addonizio repeats a number of words and phrases, perhaps less to specifically emphasize those phrases than to impart a certain emotional enthusiasm. The first and second lines both begin with "even when," while "even now" appears in lines 5 and 13, "even" in line 15, and "now" in line 18. The term "as though" appears in lines 6 and 8, and "thought" appears in lines 8 and 16. Apart from the title, the word "know" appears in lines 1 and 2 and twice in the last line. Meanwhile, readers cannot forget that they are being addressed by the narrator of the poem, as "you," in some form, appears sixteen times. Thus, the reader may imagine the narrator to be delivering the poem with particular effusiveness, as if unable, or unwilling, to separate her thoughts into smaller, more coherent units; in interviews, Addonizio has professed her fascination with the social setting of the bar, and one might imagine her passionately addressing a friend at length over a drink in the manner of this poem.

Yet the content of the poem seems to belie that impression regarding the tone. The "you" of the poem is assigned a fair degree of personality. This subject is understood to be socially aware, being familiar with the "endlessly apparent / and relevant examples of human cruelty" from both historic and current events. The subject is also versed in philosophy, having studied the German Arthur Schopenhauer and the Englishman Thomas Hobbes. The narrator initially suggests that the "you" has spent his or her "whole life believing that humanity / was fundamentally good"; however, in further suggesting that this subject has "never chanted perversely, almost gleefully" the list of negative adjectives associated with Hobbes, the reader has no choice but to believe that the "you" has, in fact, chanted those adjectives just so. That is, the adverbs "perversely" and "gleefully" seem to have been chosen to reveal that the "you" did once sink into such a pessimistic state of mind. The remainder of the poem suggests that despite the worldly knowledge already possessed by the subject, she may still find innocence she did not know she still possessed to be "shattered" by some additional revelation.

Given the intricacy of character assigned to this "you," the reader may understand the person in question to be the narrator herself, in the sense that one may address another as "you" merely to universalize one's own experiences. Indeed, in an interview with the Rock Plum Salt Poetry Review, regarding a poem found in one of her earlier collections, Addonizio remarked, "If you take the 'you' as a second-person narrator, then it's potentially the writer." She further stated, on the other hand, that she hoped that the reader would "start to feel like the 'you' is you … on some level." Thus, she establishes here that she has been inclined to employ the second person as a way of depicting herself while also connecting with the reader.

From there, however, the reader may notice inconsistencies regarding the subject. As noted earlier, the "you" is said to be versed in the cruelties of history and the work of at least two renowned intellectuals. Addonizio herself was born in 1954, making her fifty years of age at the time of the poem's publication. Thus, not only did she live through the politically disgraceful and widely inhumane Vietnam War, but she also would most certainly be familiar with the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust of World War II. While one could be aware that these wars took place without realizing the extent of the atrocities therein, the reader may have difficulty believing that the macabre Addonizio would lack that knowledge. (In "One Nation under God," also from What Is This Thing Called Love, one stanza, presumably with heavy sarcasm, reads, "And speaking of executions. How many / have there been lately? Not nearly enough.") With respect to the philosophers, understanding the scope of their work necessarily requires a certain distancing from the emotional trials of humanity, which makes their being mentioned in this poem somewhat counterintuitive. In an interview with the San Francisco Reader, Addonizio remarked, "I'm interested in communication, and in talking about things that are common to people's experience." In "Knowledge," if she means to speak of innocence and to connect to people with lingering innocence, the two philosophers are likely to be entirely unknown, weakening whatever connection she is seeking—unless, of course, she is seeking merely to impress her readers by mentioning such names.

Given the scope of understanding of both history and philosophy that the reader may reasonably expect Addonizio to have, the breathless, enthusiastic narrator originally envisioned, in light of the grammatical structure of the poem, would seem to be a fiction. No one familiar with the Holocaust, beyond the factual circumstances, could be genuinely "stunned" by any modern-day atrocity, unless he or she lacks the imagination to truly understand the extent of the horrors of World War II. Given Addonizio's age and poetic and intellectual experience, one may be unable to imagine her being at all naive.

Different readers may draw different conclusions from the evident contrast between the tone and content of "Knowledge." The more skeptical reader may simply perceive Addonizio as disingenuous, indirectly portraying herself, through the ambiguous "you" of the poem, as more emotionally innocent than she actually is. Another reader may interpret the tone of the poem to be substantially more complex than can be understood from the text alone. That is, if Addonizio were to read the poem aloud, she would perhaps employ inflection that the reader could not have anticipated; instead of emphatic, her reading might be understated, or melancholy, with pauses and pacing more protracted than the absence of terminal punctuation would indicate.

Yet another reader, perhaps favorably considering the poet's professed desire to communicate as effectively as possible with her readers, may conclude that she has adopted the perspective of the poem's narrator precisely because she believes that that sense of breathlessness will heighten the average reader's emotional response. In an interview with Poetry Flash, Addonizio stated, "I'm very attracted to formal verse because it's a way to put the brakes on the material; it's very comforting and ordered. Actually, I think it fits my personality very well, since I'm somewhat schizophrenic. I have a lot of chaos in me as well as a great need for order and structure. Using set forms can be a way to address that." Thus, while "Knowledge" is not an exceptionally formal poem, Addonizio perhaps envisioned its extended-sentence structure as most reflective of the sentiments she wished to convey, whether the sentiments are genuinely hers or not.

In the same interview, she commented with respect to her work, "There's a kind of tension between the impossible and the desire for something." That tension may be evident here, in that while she indeed already knows enough about the world to no longer be "stunned" by "some terrible act," she still idealizes the notion of innocence. The first sentence, spanning almost the entire poem, ends with the word "hope," which is then repeated three words later. Perhaps in her own sustained yearning for the state of innocence that all people pass through in the early years of their lives, Addonizio simply wishes to connect with those who are still especially innocent. She may wish to do this not only for her own sake but also to warn such people that one day they, too, will know better than to expect all human beings to deem life as sacred as they do.

Source: Michael Allen Holmes, Critical Essay on "Knowledge," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

In the following review of What Is This Thing Called Love, Scharper compares Addonizio's work to that of Anne Sexton in her focus on the theme of love, noting a cooler and less passionate tone in Addonizio's work.

One could say that Addonizio (whose Tell Me was a National Book Award nominee) celebrates love as "a side trip./ It wasn't love for eternity, or any such crap," whereas Anne Sexton celebrated love as a grand passion. Otherwise, their work contains many similarities. Addonizio's most recent collection looks at love in all its guises, especially those concerned with a disappointing love affair, as did Sexton's 1969 book, Love Poems. Mourning the loss of love as well as the loss of sexual attractiveness that comes with aging, both collections use slang, eroticisms, and the details of contemporary urban life as a source of imagery and a way into the mostly freeverse poems. Both poets also share a tone that is simultaneously angry, sad, and brittle, although Addonizio is neither as sharpedged nor as passionate as Sexton. Sexton cared about everything, perhaps too much, and her life and poems tended to boil over—tragically. These poems, however, are lukewarm and "cool" at their best. Suitable for larger public libraries.

Source: Diane Scharper, Review of What Is This Thing Called Love, in Library Journal, Vol. 129, No. 1, January 2004, p. 118.

In the following review of What Is This Thing Called Love, the writer speaks of Addonizio's poems as part intimate and candid autobiography and part "standup comedy," and notes their blues-like quality and references.

Unashamedly populist, and often charming, Addonizio's fourth book of verse explores the pleasures of sex, the pains of mourning, the efforts of raising a daughter and the difficulties of minor celebrity, setting all her musings and recollections in a style two parts confessional, one part standup comedy, and one part talking blues. Addonizio (Tell Me) makes reference both to famous bluesmen (Robert Johnson) and to their repetition-based forms. The first two parts of this five-part collection repeat single subjects as well: first the erotic life (a "31-year-old lover" "stands naked in my bedroom and nothing/has harmed him yet"), and then the dead ("no real grief left/for the man who was my father"). Exploring "the way of the world—/the sorrowful versus the happy," the rest of Addonizio's book takes up lighter, more varied subjects, often with a defter hand: "Tiffs Poem Wants to Be a Rock and Roll Song So Bad" self-mockingly "captures the essence of today's youth," while "This Poem Is in Recovery" promises "I'm not going to get drunk and take off my clothes/to sign my book for you." One poem adapts a form from Billy Collins, another responds (by name) to Sharon Olds: others recall the candid representations of (for example) Molly Peacock. Addonizio's in-your-face persona and her avoidance of technical difficulty should help her attract the wide audience she explicitly invites.

Source: Bowker Magazine Group, Review of What Is This Thing Called Love, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 250, No. 51, December 22, 2003, p. 54.

In the following review of What Is This Thing Called Love, Seaman calls attention to the "resonance" and "panache" of Addonizio's wide-ranging and ambivalent poems on love and mortality.

Addonizio's poems are like swallows of cold, grassy white wine. They go down easy and then, moments later, you feel the full weight of their impact. Her first collection, Tell Me (2000) was a National Book Award finalist, and any reader who enjoyed her candor and sexiness will find her writing here with even more panache and greater resonance. A smoky-voiced chanteuse, she sings the blues of lost youth and past wildness, protesting the assaults of age, the void left by a grown child and a deceased father, and the sorrows of loved ones battling disease. High heels and hangovers, horror movies and empty hotel rooms, regrets and resignation, elements all in Addonizio's articulation of lust, the quest for oblivion, and the body's unrelenting archiving of every pleasure and pain. For all their fleshiness, stiletto stylishness, and rock-and-roll swagger, Addonizio's finely crafted and irreverent poems are timeless in their inquiries into love and mortality, rife with mystery and ambivalence, and achingly eloquent in their study of the conflictful union of body and soul.

Source: Donna Seaman, Review of What Is This Thing Called Love, in Booklist, Vol. 100, No. 8, December 15, 2003, pp. 720-21.