{"id":107724,"date":"2017-02-14T13:39:20","date_gmt":"2017-02-14T18:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=107724"},"modified":"2017-02-14T13:39:20","modified_gmt":"2017-02-14T18:39:20","slug":"crazy-beautiful-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/14\/crazy-beautiful-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"Crazy-Beautiful Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill Knott\u2019s primal poetry.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Bill Knott, from the cover of I Am Flying Into Myself<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I met Bill Knott in late 1968, or in early 1969, at William Corbett\u2019s house, a gathering place for poets in Boston\u2019s South End. I\u2019d read Knott\u2019s highly acclaimed first book, The Naomi Poems<\/em><\/a>, from Big Table, in the spring of 1968. It was published under the pen name Saint Geraud (1940\u20131966). I was immediately struck, poleaxed, by the emotional power of the poems. Mostly short, intense lyrics, they were unlike anything I\u2019d ever read and moved me to the bone. I felt, before I\u2019d read Emily Dickinson\u2019s famous comment, as if the top of my head was taken off. Many were love poems. Most were written in his early and mid twenties. There was urgency, a longing, a wild and plaintive high-note sound that was maybe particularly attractive to a twenty-two-year-old man. Forty-seven years later, as I stand on the terrible threshold of senescence, Knott\u2019s poems still lift the hairs on the back of my neck. His anguished poems about the war in Vietnam were among the first I\u2019d read on that subject, and I still believe them to be among the strongest. It is the war that my generation either can\u2019t forget or refuses to remember (sometimes both).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, he also wrote in one poem that he couldn\u2019t see the difference between several prominent American poets and \u201caviators dropping a bomb on Vietnamese women and children.\u201d This was egregiously rude, of course, and flat-out dumb, not to mention self-destructive, and added more to the controversy of early Bill Knott.<\/p>\n

By December 1970, Knott was living on a couch in the kitchen of the apartment my college roommate and I rented in Somerville, Massachusetts. Sometime in early 1971, he published his second book, Auto-necrophilia<\/em><\/a>, also with Big Table. This was a thinner book than The Naomi Poems<\/em>. He was flat broke and needed the\u00a0eight-hundred-dollar advance\u2014enough to eat and pay rent for several months.<\/p>\n

My college roommate and friend, Joseph Wilmott, and I started a small press (Barn Dream Press) around this time. Between 1970 and 1974, we published two of Knott\u2019s books. The first was Nights of Naomi<\/em>, published in early 1971. By this time, Knott had dropped \u201cSaint Geraud\u201d but, still claiming posthumousness, was now Bill Knott (1940\u20131966). The second book, Love Poems to Myself<\/em>, was published in 1974 under the name he used for the rest of his life: Bill Knott.<\/p>\n

William Kilborn Knott was born in Carson City, Michigan, on February 17, 1940. He died in Bay City, Michigan, after failed heart surgery, on March 12, 2014. When he was seven, his mother died while giving birth; the child also died. His father, a butcher, died by drinking poison three years later. Knott told me that he believed his father\u2019s manner of death caused the chronic stomach problems he himself suffered throughout his life. When his father died, Knott was already in an orphanage (for reasons \u201ctoo complex to explain\u201d) run by the Loyal Order of Moose, in Mooseheart, Illinois. There, for several years, he was bullied and abused. He was sent for a year to a state mental hospital, where he was also bullied and abused. His uncle got him out, and he lived on the uncle\u2019s farm for a few years before he joined the U.S. Army in the late 1950s. He served his full enlistment and was honorably discharged in 1960. A great deal of his service time was spent guarding our nation\u2019s gold reserves at Fort Knox. He liked to say the greens and fairways of the officers\u2019 golf course were always dry and snow-free in winter, the heat from the bullion in the vaults beneath keeping them so.<\/p>\n

The last time he saw his younger sister, Joy, was when she \u201cgraduated\u201d from the orphanage at nineteen. He had a niece and nephew he never met.<\/p>\n

By the early 1960s, Knott was living in Chicago and working as a hospital orderly. He took a poetry workshop taught by John Logan, and a little later worked with Paul Carroll, editor of Big Table Books. Some of the poets in Chicago who knew Knott at the time were Charles Simic, Kathleen Norris, Dennis Schmitz, Naomi Lazard, and William Hunt.<\/p>\n

In 1964, James Wright received a letter from Kenneth Rexroth asking if Wright could recommend some younger poets to him. Wright wrote back about \u201can unmistakably beautiful, deeply fertile, unaffected, marvelous poet \u2026 A\u00a0young man of about 25 years of age who has the wonderfully unpoetic name of Bill Knott.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enough has been said about a letter Knott wrote to a magazine, in 1962 or 1963, under a fictitious name, saying that Bill Knott was dead and died \u201ca virgin and a suicide.\u201d It was despair and a youthful affectation. And let literary history acknowledge this obvious fact: being a young poet, particularly a young male poet, is almost a disease, a cement mixer of joy ripsawed by a realistic sense of the impossibility of the task! Knott said he used Saint Geraud as a pen name because even though he was honorably discharged from the army, he never reported for reserve duty and thought the army might track him down and make him return to active duty. When he told me this, I remember thinking, Of course, the army has a special unit scouring first books of poetry looking for reprobates like Bill.<\/p>\n

When asked, years later, why he used a pen name, he said it was because two poets he admired\u2014Pablo Neruda and Paul \u00c9luard\u2014were pen-named poets, and that made him feel justified. We should look at the pen name in a similar manner as the fake suicide letter: so what!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Saint Geraud, by the way, was the name of a character he lifted from a nineteenth-century pornographic novel, the kind in which it takes forty pages to get the top button of a woman\u2019s blouse unbuttoned.<\/p>\n

I thought one of Knott\u2019s reasons for insisting that his name include \u201c(1940\u20131966)\u201d made some odd sense: He believed all Americans, not just combatants, were casualties of the Vietnam War, because, as Americans, we all shared the responsibility for and were all wounded by that illegal and immoral war. Hyperbole, of course. He knew where the real blame lay: \u201cthere are the destroyers\u2014the Johnsons, Kys, Rusks, Hitlers, Francos\u2014then there are \/ those they want to destroy\u2014lovers, teachers, plows, potatoes.\u201d Therefore, Knott said, all Americans should declare themselves dead and live and write from then on posthumously. Hyperbole, ditto. It\u2019s a metaphor of the absurd, but it\u2019s a readable metaphor. It\u2019s satire, bitter satire you can taste on your tongue. It\u2019s funny and dead serious: \u201cLike a spigot on a corpse.\u201d Or, a little more gently, \u201cLike a water-lily on crutches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilmott and I started Barn Dream Press with little money during our last semester of college. Wilmott went into the printing trade, and we published, during a four-year run, several broadsides, chapbooks, and three full-length books, by poets such as William Matthews, Charles Wright, Marvin Bell, Paul Hannigan, William Corbett, Helen Chasin, and Michael Palmer. We started working on Knott\u2019s book Nights of Naomi <\/em>in the fall of 1970.<\/p>\n

I was hired as a night watchman at a local college, which provided two meals a day and pilferable light bulbs and toilet paper: I had the keys to everything. It was around this time that Knott lived on a couch in our kitchen for a few months. I\u2019d get home about one A.M. Knott would invariably be watching old movies on two black-and-white TVs, a smaller one on top of a larger one. He got up constantly to change the channel on one or the other, while keeping the sound on only one TV.<\/p>\n

By late January of 1971, Knott had moved to an apartment deeper into blue-collar Somerville.<\/p>\n

Nights of Naomi<\/em> was printed by letterpress on fine watermarked paper in an edition of a\u00a0thousand copies: 874 bound in blue paper, 100\u00a0hardbacks bound in dark blue boards numbered and signed, and 26 hardbacks lettered A<\/em>\u00a0through Z<\/em> signed with a personal inscription by the author. Typical: \u201cLarry, thanks for bailing me out of jail that night in Albany.\u201d Neither had Larry bought the book nor had Knott spent a night in jail in Albany. We later published a second edition of a\u00a0thousand copies with a completely different design and this time with offset printing.<\/p>\n

When Wilmott and I got the first hardcover copies from the bindery, we took some to Knott\u2019s apartment. It was still cold, probably March 1971. After much banging on the door, he finally let us in. All the windows were boarded up from the inside. His phone and electricity were cut off. The only room he used was the kitchen. All four burners of the gas stove were on for heat. There was a mattress on the floor. He sat on it. I forget where, or if, we sat. We handed him a copy. He flipped through the pages for a few seconds and then tossed the book over his shoulder into a pile of trash surrounding an overflowing wastebasket! He made an excuse about needing to work, and we were back on the street.<\/p>\n

A few days or weeks later, Knott explained to me that he\u2019d been expecting \u201ca crummy mimeographed book.\u201d He said he was overwhelmed by how good it looked. He said he couldn\u2019t believe we cared enough about his poems to make such a well-produced book. (He might have also, legitimately, felt we weren\u2019t capable of producing such a book.) Bill had serious self-esteem problems\u2014and who wouldn\u2019t, given the hand he had been dealt. It became clear to me years later that Knott was then profoundly clinically depressed. It\u2019s my feeling that he lived with various levels of depression (I don\u2019t know if he was ever treated for it) for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n

It should be noted that, in an age of massive self-medication, Knott very rarely drank alcohol, and he stopped even occasional use of cannabis by the early 1970s, because he felt it was interfering with his automatic writing exercises. The one substance on which he seemed to have a dependency was Lipton instant ice tea. He drank it constantly, with tap water, no sugar, no ice.<\/p>\n

Nights of Naomi<\/em> was one of the few books of American hard-core surrealism I\u2019d read. By hard-core, I mean blunt-force surrealism, I mean there was nothing neo-surreal about it. It was straight from the surrealist manifestos, but entirely his own. The poems are violent, dark, and guttural. I remember Knott telling me at the time that he refused to read or write or look at art that wasn\u2019t surreal. He was still only twenty-nine or thirty, and surrealism is a young man\u2019s game. Only months later, he left fundamentalist surrealism behind but always maintained high levels of unpredictability and verbal (as well as aural) imagination in his poems. He was frequently playful, often with heart-tearing (\u201cas quickly as the rumor of meat \/ up and down a soup-line\u201d) insight, and always original.<\/p>\n

In the fall of 1973, we were both teaching at Columbia College in Chicago. That Thanksgiving, we were invited by a colleague to share dinner with her family and a few others. Just before the turkey arrived, Bill excused himself from the table. The host waited for him to return before he started carving. Bill didn\u2019t return. A few days later, I went to his place and asked him what happened, why did he leave? He said it was too painful for him to be in a warm family situation.<\/p>\n

In early 1974, Barn Dream Press published another book of Knott\u2019s: Love Poems to Myself<\/em>. The title isn\u2019t narcissistic: the love poems in the book are dedicated to women he loved. Patrick Botacchi, another college friend, also in the printing trade, joined our publishing venture. Love Poems to Myself<\/em> was printed offset but was still very handsome. It had a striking four-color cover, which was very rare in those days for a small press. When Knott first saw this book, he didn\u2019t toss it over his shoulder. Instead, he got a legal-aid lawyer and attempted to sue us. I\u2019d said to him in a letter that we\u2019d use a painting by a very good painter, his girlfriend at the time, on the cover. Due to a miscommunication, Barn Dream used another design. Nothing came of this lawsuit. Knott told me later that the lawyer had said: \u201cSue them for what?\u201d A few times, when I\u2019d run across the book, particularly in the Boston\/Cambridge area, the covers were torn off. I don\u2019t remember this incident changing our friendship. I saw him very frequently in these years\u2014in Boston\/Cambridge, Ohio, Chicago, Iowa, New York, at the MacDowell Colony. We corresponded regularly.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spoken of Bill\u2019s eccentricities, even some mistakes he made. I haven\u2019t gone into any analytical reasons for why I love his poems. The words analytical<\/em>\u00a0and love<\/em>\u00a0seem incompatible to me. I haven\u2019t said much about why I loved him, the man. I want to make it clear that his idiosyncrasies and even his suffering made up only a small part of the man I knew. In my opinion, Knott did not become an exceptional poet because he was an orphan, because of abuse, because of poverty, because of illness, because of any kind of suffering. Everybody<\/em> suffers. Knott became an exceptional poet despite those things.<\/p>\n

He follows an ancient poetic pulse and impulse: the poem, especially the lyric poem, and even more so the sonnet, \u201cis a small vessel that takes a turn a little over halfway down.\u201d Knott possessed a wide range of subject matter, a long working life, and a prodigious work ethic.<\/p>\n

In the late 1970s (we were on a subway in New York City, going uptown), he showed me a notebook that was filled, over and over, with different variations on two lines that later showed up in his great poem \u201cThe Closet.\u201d I wish I could remember which two lines, but I can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

He approached poems from many different angles and was (see above) a relentless rewriter. Once in a while, I think, he over-distilled certain poems. His humor is often biting\u2014and bitten, self-deprecating, self-denigrating, self-abnegating; darkly, darkly so, sometimes. But he also can be flat-out funny. I mean laugh-out-loud funny. He was a hard-core, card-carrying surrealist, a poet of stunning lyric tenderness, and he was a brilliant and innovatively traditional metricist. Sometimes all three at once.<\/p>\n

You will find many sonnets of many kinds in this book. There are also dozens of other examples of traditional craftsmanship. Like all good artists, he learned the rules before he began to bend and break them. Knott is a deeply American poet (he came from the heartland and returned there in his last years), but he loved to quote W. B. Yeats\u2019s famous exhortation, \u201cIrish poets, learn your trade \/ sing whatever is well made.\u201d I heard him say many times: \u201cPoetry is an art form, poetry is a craft.\u201d<\/p>\n

He loathed clich\u00e9s. He disdained preciousness. As dense as some of his poems can be, they rarely defeat comprehensibility. Some are so lucid and straightforward, they are like a punch in the gut, or one\u2019s first great kiss. There are poems in syllabics, in various rhyme schemes; and the longest poem in the book, about ten pages, is in seven-syllable lines of full- and half-rhymed couplets. In his so-called free-verse poems, Knott pays fierce attention to pacing, diction, tone, syntax, line breaks. And always: noises, sonics, music, sounds. He agreed with Robert Frost: \u201cWords exist in the mouth not in books.\u201d His intense focus on every syllable, and the sound of every syllable in relation to nearby sounds, is so skilled that the poems often seem casual: art hides art. He writes for the voice and the page, equally.<\/p>\n

As Thomas Wentworth Higginson said after reading some of Emily Dickinson\u2019s poems, \u201cWhen a thought takes one\u2019s breath away, who cares to count the syllables?\u201d Poems in this book will take your breath away, providing you have breath when you read them. Something Knott shares with Dickinson is a sense of compression, distillation, of trying, always, to make more happen with fewer words. He loved her poems fiercely and those, too, I think for similar reasons, of Marina Tsvetaeva, the great Russian poet: for their courage and imagination. Knott\u2019s poems think in images, in the \u201chigher algebra\u201d of metaphor. He loads his poems (see \u201cEvery Rift with Ore\u201d). His imagination is relentlessly poetic. He loved Paul Val\u00e9ry\u2019s supposed response to the question of why he didn\u2019t write prose: \u201cBecause I cannot stand the idea of writing a line like \u2018And then Madam put on her hat and walked out the door.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Knott often favors highly accented language (\u201cold woe clothes\u201d) and compound words (\u201cshroudmeal\u201d). Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: \u201cStress is the life of it.\u201d Knott loves play and puns that express mischief and\/or satire (\u201cRilkemilky,\u201d \u201cgangplanking,\u201d \u201cmal-de-mess,\u201d \u201cimmallarm\u00e9an\u201d). He liked neologisms and semi-neologisms. He is not averse to using a noun, such as \u201cprecipice,\u201d as a verb. Scientists now tell us this kind of verbal surprise causes little explosions in our brains. He liked, sometimes, to make the reader hear two words in one word, and to make both work in context.<\/p>\n

Knott can be outraged (and outrageous), \u201cthorny,\u201d original, accessible, electrical, occasionally impolite, and heartbreaking. His love poems are exquisite.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of lines<\/em>, if lifted from Knott\u2019s poems, can stand, or almost stand, as poems by themselves. In fact, there are several one-line poems in this book and even a huge two-word poem (three, if you count the title).<\/p>\n

In all these crossings, these vectors, Knott\u2019s high imagination, great skills, singular music, and crazy-beautiful heart meet and often result in unforgettable collisions.<\/p>\n

As perpetually insolvent as he was in the years described earlier, Bill was also incredibly generous. One year (1979?), he got an National Endowment for the Arts grant and gave me a thousand dollars\u00a0(I didn\u2019t ask) because he knew I was broke. Although he was never a classroom teacher of mine, I learned more about poetry from him than from anyone I\u2019ve ever known. He had read all of English and American poetry. I\u2019m tempted to say twice. He\u2019d recite from Wordsworth or Shelley and many others as long as you let him. He was more familiar with foreign poets in translation than anyone else I knew. I remember him mock-raving about the above-mentioned Marina Tsvetaeva on a bus in Chicago. He was outraged that her poems were so hard to find in English. Other passengers seemed unconcerned.<\/p>\n

His deep admiration for the poetry of others is what helped him endure and continue to write so well, despite worsening health problems, to his own exacting standards, into his seventies.<\/p>\n

If someone ever does a concordance of Knott\u2019s work, I predict that his two favorite words will be clone<\/em>, as a noun or verb, and pore<\/em>\u00a0or pores<\/em>, as in those little entrances and exits in our skin. I loved his laugh: a kind of chortle, never too loud, unguarded. He never lost his flat Midwestern accent. His hands were beautiful. At least two different women told me this, and one compared his hands to those of John Donne in the anonymous portrait found on the cover of many of his collections.<\/p>\n

Knott published twelve print books between 1968 and 2004\u2014with small presses, university presses, and major houses. Sometime around 2005, he decided to forgo traditional print publishing and put all his poems online, for free. He also published many books through Amazon.com and sold them for the price of printing and mailing.<\/p>\n

Bill Knott could be the embodiment of the Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to be in a club that allowed members like him. With Bill, however, it wasn\u2019t a joke. I saw in him, most often, a kindness, an acute mindfulness of others, even a sweetness, much more than I saw anger or withdrawal or rudeness. Was he contradictory? All right then, he was contradictory.<\/p>\n

I believe Bill Knott stood out in the rain and was struck by lightning at least the dozen or two dozen times to qualify (using Randall Jarrell\u2019s formula\/metaphor) as a great poet. He is one, in a school of one, among the American poets. I believe this will become more and more evident, maybe even obvious (if these kinds of things continue to matter in our culture), as the decades, like barges, keep moving toward the sea.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Excerpted from\u00a0<\/em>I Am Flying into Myself<\/a> by Bill Knott, edited and with an introduction by Thomas Lux.<\/em>\u00a0Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thomas Lux (1946\u20132017)<\/a> was the author of fourteen books of poetry and one book of nonfiction.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bill Knott is a quintessential, almost primal lyric poet, primal in the sense that his poems seem to emerge from his bone marrow as well as from his heart and 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