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Control…
Back from a visit to Taos with an extra day tacked on for prying open the inner fist, only to find why police sirens were whooping in the streets last night. Adios, Bin Laden! On the other hand, there is also Bill Knott’s latest post to keep in mind—an entry reposted from late summer 2008. Lest you think he’s making up this avant-garde-CIA-shill hobnobbery, see here and here. Politics.Read More
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Amateurs and Canonizers
Bill Knott demonstrates how to read a poem. Compare his ever-the-amateur reading (amateur in the old sense of someone doing something purely for the love of it) with this reading of Rae Armantrout by professional critic Marjorie Perloff: Knott’s reading is all about discovery, while Perloff’s is all about canonization. The point is not to say we ought to replace Perloff with Knott, but to suggest we ought to replace Perloff’s intentions with Knott’s intentions whenever we read. That is, we ought to read as amateurs, not pros.Read More
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A Vexing Issue
Bill Knott is a glass-half-full kind of guy. Hell, he’s a glass-with-a-finger-of-ammonia-and-vinegar-in-the-bottom kind of guy, as this post shows. But he raises a legitimate and vexing issue. What happens to the papers of artists who are not connected? The ones who aren’t affiliated with a university, or who don’t have a family that recognizes the value of their work.Read More
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A World of Things
Bill Knott asks some important (to the extent that poetry is important) questions here and here. His focus is Objectivism (the Zukofsky/Williams/Reznikoff/Oppen Objectivism, not the hilariously stupid “philosophy” cooked up by that maven of selfishness, Ayn Rand), one of the root assumptions of which is the notion that content doesn’t matter. In fact, Objectivist poetry exalted a world of things, a world without meaning—except for the significance imposed upon it by the poet.Read More
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Hysterical
Starry Knott Bill Knott is at his dyspeptic best in two recent posts (here and here), but the second is a good deal less funny and a good deal sadder. Recalling Jessica Smith’s post about the cruelty of many comments posted to Ron Silliman’s blog (not Silliman’s fault, I’m sure everyone agrees), Knott lists a number of nasty, cruel, arrogant and/or pointless statements from reviews of his first three books.Read More
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Neophobia
An especially piquant post today from Bill Knott re: Ron Silliman’s neophobia. Neophobia is a word brandished by Captain Ron (see here and here) to scare us all into liking the poetry he likes—or even better, to submit to his characterization of the tribes available for poets to choose their “heritage” from. As a Scotch/Irish/English/German mutt, I have little instinct for “heritage” of any kind, and feel a special antipathy to being told that I need to choose a tribe, much less being told what tribe I belong to.Read More
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More on The Poem in Its Skin
I mentioned Paul Carroll’s The Poem in Its Skin in the previous post but forgot to scan the cover. So here it is. I have to scan it because it’s out of print, along with all of the books from Carroll’s Follett Books imprint, Big Table Books. Via Big Table Carroll published the fat and important anthology The Young American Poets (1968), as well as the first collection of W. S.Read More
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Neglect
I’ve been pondering a statement made sometime back in a blog post by Bill Knott: “I don’t believe there are any unjustly forgotten 20th Century USAPO—the myth of the unjustly forgotten dead poet.” I love Knott’s contrarianism but wonder about this notion, especially today when I’ve run across a lovely glimpse into one of William Blake’s notebooks, housed at the British Library. The Library’s introduction notes, “William Blake is famous today as an imaginative and original poet, painter, engraver, and mystic.Read More
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Yes I had to Look Up “Emunction”
Here’s one of the most interesting literary sites I’ve run across, Digital Emunction—discovered, as is often the case for me, thanks to Bill Knott. Knott, by the way, misrepresents Michael Robbins’ post, which is fundamentally a tribute to Knott and his work.Read More
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For Whom Do Poets Speak?
Linh Dinh is right, of course, in this powerful brief statement on poetics, which takes as its touchstone a powerful stanza by Czeslaw Milosz. The question is why. Why do we (poets, yes, but citizens as well of a system—there are no nations, really, not anymore—designed to maintain the hegemony of a mendacious, thieving elite) … why do we tolerate and even promote poetry that is superficial, trite, and purposely “uncreative,” utterly lacking in scope and depth? Why do we write about what we wish rather than what we know? I’m not talking about politics, per se.Read More