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Showing posts from January, 2014

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 a