Annie Wyndham at Salamander Cove has launched a remarkable “Featured Poet Series” with a capacious selection of poems and artwork by Bill Knott. I’m not sure how the poems were chosen, but they echo each other in interesting ways, and Knott’s art—which for me seems to spring from a sensibility similar to that of the great Max Ernst (though without his interest in the figurative)—accompanies but doesn’t comment on the poems. Knott is a juggler of words and colors, of sprung rhythms and wound-tight forms.
Annie deserves our thanks for putting his work forward in such a beautiful way. When you swing by the Cove, don’t overlook the fine video treatment of one of Knott’s sonnets by someone named Chelsea, whose childlike voice opens up the poem in unexpected ways.
pee est..<br />not to kickadeadhorse<br />however<br />here is one of my frog haiga:<br /><br />http://poetrywriting.org/Sketchbook3-8Aug08/images/EdBaker_04_moonbeyondfrog.jpg<br /><br />it was in Karina Klesko's Sketchbook magazine
Karma Tenzing did, also, a run of "frog poems" a-while back… (I got the original hand done version around here somewhere.<br />not only do "we" (who do) go through a thousand<br /><br />visions-and-revisions-&-variations on a theme <br />but (in my case) every poem/drawing has taken 71 + years to "get<br />here"<br />only to be glanced at for 14.37 seconds <br
Vassilis—though Knott himself has reveled via-negativa-wise in the attacks on him, many of them have been truly vicious and finally quite stupid. What inspires the vitriol? Well, as Kathleen Raine wrote of Blake, "Against the really new the passive resistance of every society is mustered." When Knott continues to publish in the face of that "passive resistance," the more
Annie also sent me a link to the Knott feature …<br /><br />and thanks for the "heads up" re the video<br />(I missed that)<br />and<br /><br />for link to his Collected<br />which<br />as you say<br /><br />in all-ways trumps ANY Selected<br />which is as far as I am concerned a step below an<br />Anthology or any Critical Scholarly Analysis …<br /><br />just present the work(s)
I had not heard of Bill Knott before and I can see why he might be looked down on disapprovingly but not by this poet. I find these poems nicely balanced, accessible but not simplistic.<br /><br>
Kudos to Annie for her fine presentation of this unjustly maligned-by-the-mainstream poet.