-
Friday Notebook 01.06.12
I launched into three new classes this week (the first time I’ve taught so many at one time), so my notebook is thin—but rich. It’s full of poems by Louis MacNeice, whose Collected Poems, 1925-1948 I’ve been reading with great pleasure. How I would love to have his facility with cadence and his ferocious clarity about the historical moment in which he found himself! Here are a few I especially admire.Read More
-
MacNeice Contemplates the 99 Percent
Louis MacNeice It was something of shock to encounter the 99 percent—not the phrase, but the demographic—deeply considered in the third section of Louis MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal (see Katy Evans-Bush’s excellent essay about it here), published in 1938. I had read the poem in my callow youth, but my ignorance of Britain between the wars was like a featureless river stone upon which the poem could simply not get a firm grip. I remembered it mostly for its tone—personal, notational, meditative, acerbic and humorous by turns—and didn’t appreciate exactly what MacNeice was trying to tell me.Read More
-
Panem et Circenses Redux
Bill Knott’s post entitled “i told you so” consists of a single link, which leads to an article in The Independent that begins this way: For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art—including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko—as a weapon in the Cold War.Read More
-
Down Along the Cove
There’s a wonderful new batch of poems over at Salamander Cove, including some by my friend Joel Jacobson and a few by the inimitable Bill Knott. Excellent editorial work by Cove creator Annie Wyndham.Read More
-
Knott on Brimhall
This post shows Bill Knott at his think-out-loud best. Even though he critiques Traci Brimhall‘s poem, he honors it with his close reading. I’m about half-way through Knott’s massive (400 page or so) Collected Sonnets, 1970-2010, and I have to say that the subtlety of his music is one of his poetry’s greatest pleasures. That means, from a poet’s point of view, one can learn from him—and learn things to be found nowhere else.Read More
-
Friday Notebook 08.19.11
Above and below,before and behindthe late summercrickets’ delirium: a void their layeredmonochordial praisepours and keepson pouring from— * what happens I wonder to all of the garbagethe New York barges disgorge in the ocean to all the ten-thousand-year radiant poisonsboiling in hundreds of puny cooling pools what happens when at last we accept there’s nowashing the whiff of apocalypse out of our clothes * Bill Knott is Victor Borge playing for laughswhile contemplating a page of Kierkegaardhe read before sinking into last night’s insomnia.The thought of it casts a sickish light on his handsas they prance over the ivories.Read More
-
Friday Notebook 08.05.2011
When it comes to a person’s opinions, we’re generally less interested (or should be) in the opinions than in the quality of the thinking that led to them. Poetry is the opposite; for readers, the end result is everything. Only scholars and other poets care how many drafts Yeats went through to arrive at “The Second Coming.” And it almost certainly didn’t matter to Yeats how great a struggle the poem involved, once the poem was done.Read More
-
Advice for Mister Knott
Bill Knott poses a thorny question here: Having seized control of his work, and in the process pissed off Farrar, Straus and Giroux‘s Jonathan Galassi, who balked at letting Knott’s last FSG volume The Unsubscriber go out of print, so that Knott could begin publishing poems from it via Lulu; having run into the perplexing situation that critics won’t review his self-published volumes, and bookstores won’t stock them, nor libraries swell their shelves with them; having, that is, had a poetic reality check, Knott is now wondering whether he should not, in fact, offer his almost finished Selected Poems (selected,…Read More
-
Bob Dylan Called This Kind of Thing a “Truth Attack”
We live, of course, in a nation addicted to lies. (Hence, Julian Assange is a “terrorist”, Obama a “Socialist”, etc.) Doubtless Bill Knott will be dumped on for this—and he does seem to confuse City Lights publications with New Directions, unless I misread his postscript—but the core of his post is (it seems to me) undeniable. How refreshing to know that someone has the courage to say so. In the midst of his attack, Knott notes that he continues to read Ferlinghetti “with admiration” and (presumably) Prévert, whose work I quoted here not long ago.Read More
-
Addendum to the Previous Post
Bill Knott has been thinking along some of the lines mentioned in the previous post, though he’s pondering Creeley-Duncan as opposed to Creeley-and-his-wife’s phone log….Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
