More on Bill Knott, from John Cotter

Why isn't Bill Knott better known? John Cotter has part of the answer, at least, at the Poetry Foundation.

Bill Knott is probably the closest thing the American poetry establishment has to a rebel. Over the course of his career he has published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, BOA Editions, and Random House, but his most recent books are all self-published. Among them, Collected Poems 1960–2013 is a coffee-table-sized edition; its contents were simultaneously (and briefly) made available in their entirety on Knott’s website before it was taken down, along with poems from a smaller but still considerable collection, New Poems from the Last Six Years. Because they are as cheaply produced as possible, and promoted only by Knott himself, the new books (containing no index or table of contents) stand as a kind of rebuke to the gorgeously produced, deckle-edged volumes from major publishers, and also to the often fetishistically beautiful volumes by smaller presses. They are brutal packages for an often exquisite art. 

My Pore Non-Blogging Persona Has Something Impotent Ta Say

Hi. nice to see you.

This is an issue near and dear to me, like a deer I shot.

But I've never shot a deer.

And this is why you should never trust a poet, or rather, you should not believe a poem's content is coterminous with the poet's life experience.

I am not writing an autobiography in my poems.

If I could even decide what I was trying to do with/in a poem, I would be happy. I try not to think while I'm writing or afterward. Or at all, except maybe when revising.

More articulate poets--Lynn Melnick/Cate Marvin/Amy King--than I have discussed this. See here and here and here.

Some excerpts out of context, but piquing nonetheless:

After a poetry reading I gave a couple of months ago, a stranger came up to a male poet I read with and asked him how he landed upon his chosen form for the lyric, “I”-based poems in his book. The same stranger then turned to me and asked, ostensibly in earnest, if I was “okay now.” My poems had him “worried.” I will generously assume the worry was one of concern and not prurience. Apparently he mistook my poems as a cry for help rather than, say, you know, art.

To insist on imposing an author’s lived life onto his or her work is an act of anti-reading, a demonstrated refusal to authentically engage with the thing itself that’s been built out of language.

Furthermore, such an approach diminishes the intellectual pleasures that are so fully available to the perceptive reader. My advice: don’t try to find the author’s life in a piece; rather, look for your own.

Many bad readers are bad writers. They have yet to form a sense of what they need to provide to their own readers. In short, they are poor listeners. Incapable of understanding what it means to be an audience, they serve no audience.

FOR THE SAKE of contention, and because my "I" is garnering a reputation lately of refusal (I just made that up!), I want to come at this subject from the wrong end — the un-cool, un-PC end — of the stick. The division between the poem and the poet happens to be, for me, as real as the fourth wall. It doesn't exist, but we all agree to respect it for the most part, until somebody throws a rotten apple or answers the persona during her performance.

Likewise, I take dirty pleasure in knowing things about an author, whether a fiction writer or a poet, and sometimes I try to ferret out how those details might manifest or take hold in the author’s work. It's unfair to do, I know, but because I'm not terribly invested in my own history, I don't mind if others attempt the same connections with my own work, assuming they bother about my boring details at all. Fair is fair, and I'm no hypocrite.

Until I am.

Poetry from Adrian Louis

This is how a poem means, goddamnit. From Toe Good Poetry

In those years of your dying

I remember our little green

desk lamp, its chain broken

so it had to be turned off & on

by twisting the bulb in its socket.

Sometimes it went off by itself

& we’d be engulfed in the dark

poverty we were born into.

That was how I wanted it to be

when your breathing stopped.

Quick, painless, silent, poor.

That is how I wanted it to be.

I wanted to be unable see

your face & then I could lie

& tell myself I was too old to

be afraid of the dark, too old

to fear Satan’s python penis

splitting the atoms of our soul.

It’s been six years since you left.

I sit beside myself, brought here

to these Midlands of the mundane

by the shibboleth of the Chevrolet.

In the oncologist’s waiting room

there are little green desk lamps

just like the one we had, but these

do not flicker like my health &

the health of all in this room

seem to be doing this morning.

Across the room an old coot

with solid black eyes blinks at me.

Death smiles from the blackness.

Death is dancing in his skull.

Black bats flutter out from

his eyes & infect any hope

we might carry.

ARIEL Available on Amazon!

ARIEL now on Amazon. Kindle and NOOK to follow.

One Good Response to Edmundson and that Harper's article (you know the one)

from Julia Cohen at http://onthemessiersideofneat.blogspot.com/2013/06/open-letter-to-mark-edmundson.html

Dear Mark Edmundson,

I read your article, “Poetry Slam,” in the latest issue of Harper’sand I’d like to respond directly to your “slam” of contemporary poetry by offering the same audience an alternative perspective:
Using only brief fragments of single poems from only 9 living poets (including 1 Canadian, 1 Irish, and 1 actually dead)(endnote 1), Mark Edmundson lambasts the current state of American poetry. I think it’s important to bring to the attention of a larger readership the recent misdirected and lazy criticisms lavished upon contemporary poets that distract from the depth, diversity, and relevance of the work itself. Yes, some readers actually seek out and find poetry that is intellectually, emotionally, and relationally vital.
There are two basic cause/effect accusations in “Poetry Slam” that are worthwhile to dissect to show the dubious connections and terrifying implications:#1 Because contemporary American Poetry is too “hermetic,” “private,” “oblique,” “equivocal,” it consequently “has too few resources to take on consequential events”:#2 Because Contemporary American poets lack “ambition,” they do not “light up the world we hold in common,” i.e. they don’t reflect my own worldviews that make me feel like there is a singular “fundamental truth of human experience.”Unfortunately, what emerges in this article is a desire for singular type of poem. A poem that a) provides unique images that simultaneously relate to obvious cultural referents (“the TV show, the fashions, the Internet”), b) sublimates most poetic techniques to present direct arguments in the form of revelations c) that respond to “the events that began on September 11, 2001 and continue to this moment.” In sum, every poem should be a humanist poem of epiphany with blatant political/cultural references to post-9/11 living. Oh yes, this sounds like a great way to enliven all American poetry!

More:

Poem Draft

Revere at 92 Degrees

Cops swirl the rotary like feral cats or cock-
roaches while in the beachhouse bathroom

someone is fucking someone or having it out
with their violent bowels at 10:30 AM.

If I were a horse I’d be split-hoofed but sedate,
a little out of my field lathered with ocean

spume the dirt of a thousand filled diapers
abandoned to sand or caught in kelp

washed up from Nahant or the Back Bay
or fuck--the Azores? England?

On the road opposite the beach cops stop
a latino kid on a skateboard (I don’t know

why it takes three cars) and send him off
in a different direction. My kids are yank-

ing at my shorts so we hit the beach sand
and broken bottles with the occasional

needle or nip bottle. It’s a grand public
place America’s first public beach.

A horse cop trots along the beach but
the horse leaves a sodden dump in

front of kids who have nothing to
do but play with it while their dark-

skinned mothers scream in three different
tongues to stop. The horse doesn’t seem to care.

Another Draft

Perverse Cowgirl

Know what you’re saying before
you say it. Your partner of choice
may have an opinion. You must
efuckingnunciate carefully so

that when you hop on or your
partner hops on there needs
to be between spasms a careful
avoidance of cramp. That’s when

you’re talking about something
else. A perverse cowgirl, though
is someone you want to be next
to you in the firefights of life

and the enrapturing
of the erotic. They are evil
when you need them to be
and crushingly familiar

with your Eros and your Than-
atos. If you have kink in you
they’ll bring it out. Bells on,
and maybe a bit of feathers

and the bedroom door firmly
set against the eventual creep
of your children who will see
something that takes years

of therapy to unsee and never ever
gets forgotten. On your deathbed
they will remember and before they
cry will think of you in lingerie. O God.