Ask Knott What Poetry Can Do for You
Bill Knott is a cross between Yorick & Radiohead. Quite chopfallen, he once was full of japes & gambols. His last “official” book was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, but he now prefers to self-publish his sonnets & sell them for a song. His body of work—almost all of which he generously sent me recently in the form of generic samizdat-styled booklets created by Lulu.com (see photo)—constitutes one of the bravest & most exciting projects in recent contemporary poetry. But he enjoys pretending that everyone, including him, thinks he is a talentless hack.
A friend gave me a copy of The Quicken Tree several years ago. I was hooked before I read a line. Poetry books come with a page of “acknowledgments,” a stale genre that usually begins “Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals, in whose pages some of these poems first appeared, sometimes in different form.” Knott’s read (I’m paraphrasing, since I lost the book in Chile during an embarrassing incident involving Kent Johnson’s inability to ask directions): “A few of these poems appeared in various ephemera, but truth in advertising laws compel me to admit most of them were rejected by every single magazine to which they were submitted.” This attitude is everywhere in his annotations, his blog posts, his irascible comment-box appearances—it’s neither self-pity nor masochism, but schtick, Rodney Dangerfield for the post-au courant set. Some of the Lulu books are prefaced by two pages of anti-blurbs (”[Bill Knott is] incompetent” & so on), many of them wrenched from the context of appreciative reviews, by the likes of Christopher Ricks, Stephen Burt, & Robert Pinsky, that appeared in such backwater rags as The New York Times Book Review, Poetry, The Washington Post, & The New York Review of Books. He won a Guggenheim fellowship in 2003, & was asked to put together a “240-page selected poems” for FSG. He turned them down.
You can take or leave the schtick—I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused. The poetry is something else again, a wooly melange of Celan & Cylon, often deliberately stilted but always rudely alive. Blasts of multisyllabic babble—
is there no way to un-one-way my maze
its name in mine each stream subsumes
this vanish vanquish suite of time’s motifs
chance chain quotably quiet quantumswhat for to endure days gone by noon
what else to tweeze the moon’s lesser tints
to build bridges that make the sea blink
to drink up all the teaspoon stirs unclear
—give way to demented imagistic communion wafers:
No wonder rivers run
to patent their innocence.Aquarium emptied into a syringe,
each jab adds another
fish to our flow.
The markings on a butterfly’s wings are “blueprints for a building on fire”; “hospital animals / start to carve stale stemcell / messages into the grass”; “the barber slaps my face with minnows / to show how localized desire is”; “Many schools of fish are swifter / than the surface knows for sure / up there where thoughts occur.” Paging through these fourteen collections of poems written over five decades (there are several repetitions from book to book), I experienced that unmentionable reaction that all critics recognize but are too sophisticated to confess to: Jesus Christ, this is poetry.
I wish I had saved a poem Bill published a few years ago on one version of his blog, long since deleted, a brilliant, ramshackle environmentalist rant, not included in any of these books, as far as I can tell. But I’m very glad to finally track down a line I’ve remembered since I first read it in a friend’s book in the mid-nineties. I’ve recited it often over the years, but haven’t been able to find it again until now, when it strikes me as a perfect summation of the contradictions of Bill Knott’s very real achievements: “Rilke described angels as ‘bright souls without any seams’ which beats to hell anything I could come up with.” I wish he’d let FSG do the selected, the talentless hack.
What a great post!
I’m sure Bill K. will selectively select from it and create a blurb that make it sound like you want his eyes to fall out.
I remember two poets who inspired me back when I was a football player at Pewaukee HS: David Shapiro in an old issue of Poetry magazine, and Bill Knott, as St. Geraud, in one of those Intro anthologies. I can’t remember where I got that, but I still have it.
Nice, MR, very nice.
And thanks for “chopfallen.”
>I’m sure Bill K. will selectively select from it and create a blurb that make it sound like you want his eyes to fall out.
If he does, I hope he somehow manages to incorporate this bit: “Jesus Christ, this is poetry.”
Thank you, sir Baird. You can thank the Bard for “chopfallen.”
If he does, I hope he somehow manages to incorporate this bit
Here Bill, I’ll trade you for a book:
“Jesus Christ…is [a] poet….Bill [Knott]…is…hell.”
Oh, Bill.
http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2009/11/plus-ca-change.html
For the record, I am not jeering at you! I come not to bury you but to praise you!
Anyway—if you’re reading, Bill, I tried to send you a message at Facebook, but you deleted yr account. I can’t fault you for sticking to yr schtick, but this post is an appreciation of yr poetry, & I intend neither ridicule nor mockery nor scorn—but I think you know that. Thanks for the kind words on yr blog, which I will assume are sincere!
A wonderful tribute wonderfully misread by Bill, as you note. Is he being willful? Or a skillful self-promoter? It hardly matters. He’s among the most entertaining poets alive, blog or no blog, and perhaps something of a performance artist, eh?
Indeed, if he hadn’t responded like that I suppose I would’ve been disappointed—assuming, always, that he truly appreciates the spirit in which this was written.
MR, you should be able to fix those excerpts from the poems, by using the visual edit (rather than the html) & aligning them left - I think?
Why do they need to be “fixed”? They look fine, no? I used the “quote” feature.
Maybe it’s just my machine… they look like forced justified, spread out to the right margin, all except the final line of each stanza. Maybe I’ve got the website page set incorrectly myself… anybody else have this problem?
p.s. I’m not “logged in” to DE. I’m seeing it like a visitor. I guess.
Oh, that’s not what they look like here—it must be to do w/ yr operating system.
I had the same problem with the entries I added to Lumpy Corral. Was able to fix it by selecting the entries & making sure they were aligned left.
I’ve seen this a lot at DE, not just at your post. I wonder if it is just my machine? It’s not that old…
Anyway, shd have BACKCHANNELED this - sorry to interrupt the conversation.
The same plugin that gives us clean hyphenated and justified blocks of text will sometimes–depending on your browser–work havoc on lines of poetry. That’s also why the odd spaces turn up when you try and cut and paste into comments.
For Bill Knott:
O truant Muse what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends;
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
Make answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say,
‘Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed;
Beauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermixed’?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for’t lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
To make him seem, long hence, as he shows now.
- William Shakespeare
Sonnet 101
i find his poems are a lot more interesting when you replace each word with a different word
I find the same thing about yr comment!
A performance artist he may be, but I don’t know… the response on his blog is such an astonishing misreading of your post, Michael - and furthermore, so nicely fulfills the predictions that he would react in this way - that it comes across as deliberate self-parody. Just how far is his tongue in his cheek?
There could be “The Sons of Bill” School: Poets who publish their own nondescript-looking books and send them off, like paper boats, for free (the School could have its own POD outfit, actually), refusing contract and commerce as a matter of principle and pride. The School could maintain its own collective blog, too, with regular, histrionically campy posts about neglect and failure and treatment most unfair. And they could write blurbs for one another, as well, about how minor and worthless all their poetry truly is, how anyone would really have to be more or less bonkers to care. At home, above the writing-studio desk, each poet could tack-up a list of sayings by the Master (a quasi-Saint figure to them)–powerful aphorisms of resignation and self-disgust as constant reminders of The Way.
The point is that such a School, over time, would surely end up attracting more readers and critics than ho-hum Lonesome Dove-type poets ever would, they with this or that standard title from FSG, or Pitt, or wherever. In fact, it would probably be so successful a means of “proceeding” that observers could scarcely be blamed for thinking it had all resulted from some well-wrought marketing plan.
Seriously, what about a School called the “Sons of Bill”? I’m almost surprised there isn’t one already.
Cy, I have to assume—I have to hope, at any rate—that Bill’s tongue is so far in his cheek that it has burrowed through it, looped around the back of his head, & is licking his other cheek. If not, he is the only one to whom it is not obvious that this post is a celebration of his work.
Kent, I would take yr intriguing proposal more seriously if you were a poet rather than a writer of mediocre prose & viciously unhappy blog entries. (Cheer up, blog entries!)
MR said,
>I would take yr intriguing proposal more seriously if you were a poet rather than a writer of mediocre prose & viciously unhappy blog entries.
I hasten to point out that MR is slyly quoting, word for word, from Franz Wright’s unhappy comment about me, under my “Poets on TV” post.
In other words, MR means to be funny.
Of course, humor can be true, too, and the doubled humor he no doubt means is that it’s sort of funny that the “funny” statement is viciously true. (A winner of the Pulitzer Prize has said it after all. Who can argue against such authority?)
Hey, look at me! I’m starting to sound like Bill Knott.
It occurs to me that Bill & Franz are mirror images of each other—where FW is all self-aggrandizing puffery & curdling machismo, BK directs his anger inward. The one has a laughably inflated notion of what he has accomplished, the other a laughably deflated notion. The difference is that Bill is essentially likable, & is generous & probably completely self-aware, with a healthy store of irony.
> mirror images
Yes, wrap-around mirrors at the tailor, Kent standing on the riser having his seams chalked…
“The difference is that Bill is essentially likable, & is generous & probably completely self-aware, with a healthy store of irony.”
- he probably eats a lot of oatmeal, too, which is always good for poetry.
“oatmeal … is always good for poetry”
Hey! It’s more effective than digital emunction…
Is it just me or has Bill’s blog vanished?
Oh dear.
He kills off his blog(s) from time to time.
This has nothing to do with the poetry printed within them, written by Knott or anyone else.
But I may take up a mission here — whenever Lulu books are mentioned, whether self-published or by imprints (BlazeVox, for example) that use the service — I’m going to say:
Lulubooks may be the crappiest books ever made. Sorry to get bibliophilic here, but the curling covers on those books bug me to no end.
Why can’t they offer an upgrade, a stiffer paper for the cover, a higher quality paper for the innards — that the self-publishers could pay for?
(And just so I’m clear, this doesn’t mean that non-Lulu books are uniformly great. Speaking of which, I was just re-reading Dear Head Nation this week. The setting of the text on the rectos of that book is atrocious — the left margin is practically right in the dang gutter!)
While not having any experience of Lulu books myself, bad book design is a pet hate for me too. Especially margins in the gutter! And narrow right hand margins suck too.
I recently purchased a book by a NZ poet I like, printed by a small press - nice cover design, but lousy page margins and, incomprehensibly, the content page and titles were printed in comic sans… not a good look.
Lulu books don’t HAVE to look bad at all. I use the smaller pocket-size Lulu for my own books. I like the idea of real “pocket books”. So far I haven’t found the covers curling or anything like that.
I’ve purchased only a few books from Lulu (several of Bill Knott’s and most recently William Michaelian’s The Painting of You), and while Knott’s books are quite basic, Michaelian’s is beautifully designed inside and out, and the paper stock is as high quality as anything I’ve seen from a trade or university press. I may be wrong but do believe these on-demand printers are not responsible for the design of the books they produce. If the design is bad and the stock is cheap, it’s probably due to poor choices on the publisher’s part.
Over the last five years I have POD published five books of poetry (not Lulu) and have been more than pleased with the results. I did not select the page or cover stock but have had no problems with “curling”, flimsy pages or anything else. The product has been of good quality and professionally done. The best advice I would offer is ‘caveat emptor’
What I’d like to know is, Who the f is Michael Robins? To place such a judgement on me, what authority he must possess, what great things he must have done. I consider myself a fairly well-read person of contemporary literature of all kinds, and I don’t seem to come across him anywhere. Isn’t that strange? Franz Wright
Perhaps you let yr New Yorker subscription lapse? Or Poetry? London Review of Books? Plus you spelled my name wrong.
I also think you spelled “fuck” wrong.
Bill’s two blogs are back up. On Friday he said:
“I always think nobody reads this blog, so when I deactivate it for a while to rejigger and houseclean my confusante files, I assume nobody misses it—
or cares—”
Hmm, now he’s added a note about my “disdain & contempt” for him. This is a joke, right, Bill? You’re winking at me. You flirt!
And further willful misreading from Bill:
This is one of [Robbins's] many imprecations against me, as featured on his blog:
“Some of the Lulu books are prefaced by two pages of anti-blurbs (”[Bill Knott is] incompetent” & so on), many of them wrenched from the context of appreciative reviews, by the likes of Christopher Ricks . . .”
I can’t find my xerox of the Christopher Ricks review (The Massachusetts Review, Spring 1970 issue), but have ordered another one which should arrive in about a week and which I will then scan in its entirety onto this blog as a jpeg file, where anyone can make their own judgement as to whether it is indeed an “appreciative review” . . .
To say that “many of” the quotes I print in my LULU books are “wrenched from the context of appreciative reviews” is untrue—one or two of them may be wrenched thus, though I would dispute even that, and would claim that even those one or two are not inaccurate in spirit—
and then there’s this: in many of the LULU books I also include two pages of favorable blurbs and excerpts from reviews which actually are appreciative—
Does Michael Robbins consider these latter also fraudulent?
All the quotes I use are sourced, and all those sources can be checked out by anyone who wants the truth,
though I suspect that these sensationalist accusations of my malfeasance in this matter
are a paparazzian fanfaronade so coquettish in its hyberbole, so gossipy-glicksome,
that few if any will bother to seek out and verify the mere factual.
“Gossipy-glicksome” cheers me up.
Ah, Spring 1970!
Apropos of nothing, have you seen the years in poetry?
>have you seen the years in poetry?
If they are good & behave themselves, Santa might let them play in the Lumpy Corral.
I’ve deleted FW’s recent comments. Franz, if you want to actually participate in a civil discussion, feel free. If you’re just interested in embarrassing yourself, you can take yr train wreck elsewhere.
Henry, it would be a shame to lose that Dendron piece! It is highly informative.
I swiped it from my blog ca. 2007. Dendron doesn’t need any more publicity, it’s going to his head. Kentameter Johnson is about to publish a selected letters, “Blithewolde Dendron / Kentameter Johnson : a Season in North Dakota” with OUP. He’s got his own fluffy corral, believe me.
This is a good post. I like Knott the Poet, Knott the Blogger I don’t know about.
Johannes