My friend Jim Knipfel died on October 7, 2026. Smart and funny as hell, also generous with his time and attention, Jim was the original blind punk. His voice has been in my head for thirty years. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
In 1996, between college and grad school, I lived in New Orleans. Back then I could see pretty well, and had to explain to people that I had an eye disease that made it hard for me to read normal print or recognize them on the street. After hearing this, one friend marched over to her place on Decatur and back to ours on Esplanade with a stack of New York Press broadsides. She told me to look for the column Slackjaw by Jim Knipfel—she thought he had the same eye disease as me. “And,” she said, “he’s one of my favorite writers.”
I put one paper after another onto the tray of my CCTV—an electronic magnification system consisting of a bulky screen and a camera that threw Jim’s words into giant white letters on a black background. I giggled as he railed against the Paralympics and made fun of his blindo—blind plus weirdo—mishaps. It was totally not PC, and exactly what I needed: finally a person going blind who did not give a damn about being inspirational. I was an instant fan. He was my first blind hero: a professional writer, openly blind, unapologetically unsentimental, and a really cool cat.
I carried those papers with me to New York, but I didn’t think of Knipfel much. I was absorbed in my new city, my ever-changing eyesight, plus Foucault, Derrida, etc. Then it was the mid-aughts, and I began slipping off the grad school rails. Started performing in the East Village and Lower East Side. Did someone mention Jim? Slackjaw? The New York Press? Perhaps it was just wandering around with my guide dog in his old stomping grounds.
I bought the paperback of Slackjaw, his 1999 memoir, and scanned it. Giggling all over again. Sometimes I’d get drunk and wander into the Mars Bar, hoping I’d run into him. Literally, I guess. How else would we find each other?
Another 10ish years went by. Alabaster and I were living in Denver, and I was writing a column for Catapult—A Blind Writer’s Notebook. I decided to write about ebooks and accessibility. I wanted to interview blind writers. I found Jim on Facebook. I messaged him and heard back from him the next day. It was so wild to talk with this person I’d had in my head for twenty years. He was just as funny and smart and cool to talk to as he was to read.
I would agonize over my emails to him for at least a year after that, feeling like a dorky little kid who was sure that at any moment he’d realize I wasn’t cool enough to hang with the big boys.
Around that time, his friend and fellow blindo Andy Slater reached out, and we became friends. Through them I met Andrew Leland. We sometimes joked about putting together the Monsters of Blindness tour. I thought we would be a band. Andy told me the other day he thought we were just going to be like a traveling variety show. A circus? Anyway, it was a good title for something.
It was also around that time that I won an Awesome Foundation microgrant to commission four blind writers to write for Aromatica Poetica. I was super stoked when Jim sent over his piece, “Stench No. 7.” Flexing my fledgling editorial power, I suggested another title. I’m not going to tell you what it was. He slapped it down. Thank goodness.
After I sold the book that would become There Plant Eyes, we emailed a lot. He listened to my whining about my editor—but only when it was cultural ignorance, like when I told him she’d never heard of Mr. Magoo! Not so much sympathy for my feathers ruffled by edits and such. Just keep writing was the message.
He told me how he had to rewrite the entire draft of Slackjaw a couple of times. That sort of thing was fortifying for a green writer with basically no other professional writer friends. And he was so generous with his time—always read whatever I sent.
He sent me stuff too—articles I’d draw on for my book. But I kept going back to Slackjaw. One of my favorite moments got cut when the time came for my own rip-the-guts-out revision. It involved this delightful passage:
THE DAY BEFORE I launched official Blind Man Training, a fellow at work asked me what my trainers would do to me.
“First thing, I imagine,” I told him, “is they’re going to give me a tin cup full of pencils and station me on the corner of Forty-Seventh and Fifth, just to see how much money I can make.”
“Then you know what they’re gonna do?” he said. “They’re gonna take your hat away and hide it somewhere on the block. And they’re gonna say, ‘Okay, blind guy, here’s your cane. Now find your hat!’”
Another friend of mine had an even better pencil-vending idea. “You know what you do? You take one of those pencils, see, and jab it into people’s eyes when they stop, and say, ‘Ha! Now you can go sell pencils, too!’”
It’s good some people can have a sense of humor about my troubles.
I worked that bit into an article I wrote for Literary Hub about the blind pencil vendor. It was my first published piece about photography—my current project. I had pitched it as “A Pencil in Your Eye.” That title did not stick.
In our last email exchange, I told him how two friends independently reached out to say nice things about him. I quoted one of them: “His deadpan humor is amazing! Also, he makes all of your seedy New Orleans band stories sound like God‘s work. I’m so glad to have a not inspiration porn disability representation book in my canon.”
“Well, pass along my thanks to your friends,” Jim replied, “who are clearly rare souls blessed with refined taste.”
Description: A movie poster for Noogie’s Time to Shine, composed of film stills in green, blue, and sepia tones, separated by thin yellow lines. A large portrait of a mustached man dominates the left, surrounded by scenes featuring FBI agents, stolen money, a getaway van, a revolver, and a cat: “NOOGIE’S TIME TO SHINE… On the lam with 3.2 million in stolen twenties. And a cat. Some of this story is mostly true.”
He also told me about the screening of Nooggie’s Time to Shine—pleased that it’d been in a big old movie palace, and I shared my piece in Art in America about three of my key photos.
Somehow nine months slipped by and now he’s gone. I’d been meaning to reach out—to say hi, to see how he was doing, but also to tell him about the way my photography project has morphed. Grown scrappy. How his dark humor still influences me. I wanted to tell him that it’s his pencil vendor that helped me unlock an important moment in my verse lecture—what turned out to be my first punk poem.
I think I was nervous to say the word poem in conjunction with him. I guess I never totally stopped feeling like the kid sister. This is not the first time someone died leaving me feeling stupid for being afraid to show them something that I wish I had.
I would have told him how having his voice in my head makes me better.
So yesterday, the morning after learning that, as one friend put it on FB, “Jim Knipfel has left the building,” I asked Alabaster to walk with me to Tompkins Square Park and record “A Pencil in Your Eye,” about the blind tenement dwellers of the Lower East Side as depicted by Jacob Riis. And generously sprinkled with the dark humor—like fucked up fairy dust—of my friend Jim Knipfel.
“A Pencil in Your Eye”
A pencil in your eye
cries the blind man,
joy in my heart
where the sun ne’er shines;
a pencil in your eye
cries the blind man,
for today I leave
my lamp post
to get what’s mine!
On a fine June day,
we send the children out to spy
for the gray-coat bearing
the postal card command:
Get thee to
Superintendent Blake!
We tip our pencil
boxes, making room
for clanking coins;
take up our tapping
canes, throw ropes
round the dogs;
an army we are,
five hundred strong,
march uptown
to 11th street;
children, wives, and landlords
following at our feet;
here comes Huckster
Pat, his trinkets
packed away; there goes
Jimmy McBride,
father – he says –
of notorious Blanche
Douglass, and the marks
and reporters believe.
A pencil in your eye and
a beggar test to take:
Are you blind? says he,
and destitute?
You know me, sir,
to be so sir,
these ten years since;
What’s that sir,
locked up? Heavens no!
And yes sir I swear,
nary another charity
has touched me this year.
So go on and check me in
that nice black book;
and I bless you,
Mr. Blake
in your iron cage,
for giving me this –
my one and only –
fine payday.
Children, wives, and landlords
are now tucked away;
fiddles and growlers
are all that remain;
and a pencil in your eye
cries the blind man,
joy in our hearts
where the sun ne’er shines;
a pencil in your eye
cries the blind man,
for today I left
my lamp post
and got what’s mine.
*For Jim’s self-authored obit visit HERE*
*For more on Jim and blind punk, visit HERE*