In the past couple of weeks Bill Knott has posted a new book of his poems, which is available for cheap at Lulu.com, as well as even cheaper in the form of free PDF downloads. It’s called A Salt of Seasons: Winter Spring Summer Fall Poems (with an Appendix of “Nature” Poems). Here’s a sample:
WINTER REGRETS
The snow on my ladder’s rungs
seems to be stepping upward,
returning to that cloud which hangs
framed in the faded cardboardof an old calendar landscape
whose dust holds the days I desire
to live in, fixing to climb up
past that summer sun and hammerthe scene in whole. I didn’t haul
my ladder in and now it’s too late—
I turn from the window and starelost at a vista of August air
tacked, half-peeled from the kitchen wall.
All the undone chores must wait.
Knott also recently posted a collection in progress, which for now has one of the best titles of all time, Dropping Sylvia Plath on Hiroshima. When he stops noodling around with it I’m sure he’ll put it on Lulu too, but in the meantime it’s well worth reading, even on the eye-stinging screen, even in its unfinished state. Here’s one from the book to ponder:
MEMOIRISM
My bio is buttered by mother, my auto
by father. First, father autobio’d mother,
who then bio’d his auto in her ms. son,
the misery one. Non-bio exploits I abhoras does every contemporary litterateur
adhered to being, that sole mode: we know
that those who imagine their works not
as me or I should be forced into therapymade to take psychotropic drugs. No
exceptions are allowed: I too must join
the rest of you in this rendered real, thisoverratio of truth to fable, I too must tell
lifelike anecdotal excerpts from my actual
personal past spiced with empirical detail.
Now be honest. Is there anyone in American poetry who sounds even remotely like Knott? And if there is, why aren’t they conspicuously acknowledging their debt to him?
Just for the record, I have never ceased (since I was in my late teens) to celebrate Knott's unique and inimitable genius–people who now believe they are discovering this strange obscure great poet do–I cannot comprehend any other explanation–either because like all young people they live in the hallucination that nothing existed on this earth before their birth, or, if they are older,
I see that trying to use my keyboard as I am–explanation in latest post at Rho–is causing some curious misspellings among other things, but what I came back here for is:<br /><br />"Loud as a ball bounced off a statue of Zeus."
That one poet, Joseph, is James Bertolino, and it may well be that what he meant was just what you here have made clear.<br />-<br />And, o yes, the Boaton Popa.
Interesting comment, Brian. The secret poetic paternity linking Knott to Franz Wright may be why they've occasionally duked it out in public (verbally only, far as I know). If only Leslie Fiedler were alive and interested in poetry!
thanks for the links!<br /><br />appreciate it——
I doubt there is anyone who could, although there is one poet who has said that there could not have been a Franz Wright without there first being a Bill Knott.<br /><br />My apologies about the memory lapse.