Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of short fiction. Recent stories and essays were published in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, Surreal South, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. With Elisa Gabbert, she is the author of That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008). Her prose collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs is now available from Counterpoint Press. She lives in Chicago, where she works as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at DePaul University, and where she will be the Writer-in-Residence at Roosevelt University for 2011-2012.
Q: You’ve told me, more than once, that Bill Knott was a formative figure in your development as a poet. Why and how?
A: First, I have to get something out of the way because Bill is unflagging in his commitment to reading—and potentially weighing in on—practically every single statement uttered about him on the Internet, and that something is: Hi, Bill! Hope you’re well.
So: Back in 2001, when I was in my senior year of undergrad, my then-boyfriend, now-husband, Martin Seay introduced me to Bill’s work by way of Selected and Collected Poems, published in 1977. It had an ugly-attractive, sleazy-cheesy seventies cover and the poems inside were similarly repellant-yet-alluring. They made me feel weird and I could not stop thinking about them. After that, I sought out The Naomi Poems and fell totally under their spell; the fact that almost every aspect of the book (from the Corpse and Beans pun in the title onward) was in questionable taste was compelling. And even though, as I say above, Bill is obviously still alive, one of the things that drew me to his work was the way he “killed” himself right from the start, publishing The Naomi Poems in 1968 as being by St. Geraud, “a virgin and a suicide.” By killing him “self,” Bill sort of set himself free. I’ve written about these ideas elsewhere, but the metaphor of a person’s books as being their ghosts (as Christian Hawkey says in Ventrakl: “Books—of the living or the dead—are the truest ghosts among us, the immaterial made material”) and the notion that a poet is always already dead are appealing concepts to me, and Bill’s poetry helped me think about those ideas before I even know what they were or how to label them or why I liked them.
Anyway. I was trying to decide where to get my master’s and wanting to study with Bill was huge among my reasons for deciding to go to Emerson College. See? Formative.
Q: What is your favorite Bill Knott poem?
A: At the risk of stating the obvious, I have to say that by saying what my “favorite” Bill Knott poem is, I’m not trying to assert that it’s in anyway the “best.” But this is it, from page 49 of The Naomi Poems. And it is not even the first poem on the page. There is a poem above it called “Poem” (which is something he told us, as his students, never ever ever to title a poem):
Nuremberg, U.S.A.
In this time and place, where “Bread and Circuses” has
become “Bread and Atrocities,” to say ‘I love you’ is
like saying the latest propaganda phrase…’defoliation’…
‘low yield blast’.
If bombing children is preserving peace, then
my fucking you is a war-crime. READ MORE >
original book cover art (part of a series of handmade and staplebound books) by Bill Knott
Bill Knott, born in 1940, is a vital and idiosyncratic force in American poetry. His first book of poems, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, was published in 1968 under the fictitious persona of Saint Geraud, a poet who had supposedly committed suicide two years earlier. His subsequent books have appeared under the imprint of presses large, medium, and small, from FSG to Random House to the University of Iowa Press to Salt Mound Press. Many of his books and chapbooks, especially in the last twenty years, have been self-published, or, more recently, made available for free electronic download at Lulu.com, a situation Knott half-balefully and half-gleefully describes as “vanity publishing” in interviews and on the blogspot blogs he carefully maintains.
I first became acquainted with Knott’s work during a 25-city READ MORE >
This week I noticed a correspondence between the opening sentence to Great Expectations and the opening of Lolita. I’m interested in the idea of Nabokov stealing from Dickens, a writer he admired and about whom he lectured at Cornell.
Here is the opening of Great Expectations:
“My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.”
Here is the opening to Lolita:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
Note the correspondence between the two openings in terms of wordplay, the repetition of the consonant sound (p- and l-), READ MORE >
Last sentences are more difficult to evaluate absent context than first sentences, because first sentences are a handshake, a promise, an invitation, an opening. They are establishers of context. They mean in conversation with what follows them, but not only in conversation with what follows them. Last sentences mean only in conversation with what precedes them. Still, I think it is (or I hope it will be) a useful exercise to look at some last sentences absent context, and see what’s there. I plan to post about this matter again, and at greater length, but for now I want to just offer a selection of last sentences for your edification and mine:
“The widow begs you, therefore, if you ever pass through our village, to be good enough to spend the night in her house as her guest, and when you leave in the morning, to take the santuri with you.” – Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
“These spirits, they’d left her for good the morning that the news was broadcast on the radio that her brother had set his body on fire in the prison yard at dawn, leaving behind no corpse to bury, no trace of himself at all.” – Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker
The Week of May 2, HTMLGiant will be running a series of posts about the poetry and person of Bill Knott (he who painted what you see below.) If you would like to contribute an anecdote, some words about a favorite poem, an appreciation of a particular aspect of Knott’s work, a story about Knott as a teacher or public person, or any other Knott-related thing, please email your submission to: kyle (at) kyleminor.com
"Cover 6--03/15/11," media unknown, Bill Knott
Dear Bill Knott,
I love the free PDF books of your poetry. I have greedily downloaded them, even though I also have copies of your more traditionally published books. I’m writing to let you know that it would be really easy to make these already free books available for wider free dissemination on ebook readers including the Kindle, Nook, and SonyReader. Although there are sophisticated softwares that would make possible extravagant multi-platform releases, the easiest thing to do would be to make the poems available as .txt files in addition to the PDF’s you already share so freely. I ask because I would like to carry your poems with me everywhere I go. Probably I am not the only person who has this desire, but probably other people are too intimidated to ask, for fear that the request will be met with an entertainingly self-deprecating response on your blog. So I also ask on behalf of the others.
Your small but rabid readership awaits your next gesture of charity. Also, if you choose to make these files available, I will link them prominently here on HTMLGiant, and you will have an instant readership of 100-1000 new readers (estimated), many of whom will be encountering your poetry for the first time. Happily, would be my guess. Also, given the reprobate nature of our readership, many of those readers would likely send copies of the poems to friends without sending you a cent. I would imagine that this imposition of piracy and victimhood might also appeal to you. If you chose to receive it as a gift, I would request a reciprocal gift of more visual art, some of which I would promise to display prominently on the site in celebration of your work and in lament of your frequent dismissal of it, which may be sincere, but which is anyway wrongheaded, since you are one of the most important poets of my reading life.
Sincerely,
Kyle Minor
Reader
Toledo, Ohio
Very sad news today: Jeanne Leiby, editor of The Southern Review, died in a car accident in Iberville Parish, Louisiana. The preliminary news report comes from Avoyelles Today. A tribute from Alex V. Cook, a writer and friend, appears at his blog.
During Leiby’s short tenure at The Southern Review, she distinguished herself for the care and kindness she offered writers. Her short piece “Why I Call,” was her most public statement on the matter.
Condolences and best wishes in this difficult time go to the Leiby family and to Jeanne’s colleagues at The Southern Review and Louisiana State University.
(source: Wikipedia)
Instructions:
1. Don’t be lazy. This machine isn’t going to write your story for you. It’s just going to provide your parameters.
2. You can drink beer while working with the assistance of the machine. But cut the Bukowski crap, cowboy. You need to be sober READ MORE >
So there is a story in the book, about the Ottoman times when Bulgaria was under Turkish rule and the Ottomans forcefully recruited Bulgarian boys for their army; janissaries, who were made to deny their families and god. There is a story about Bulgarian rebels who fought for Macedonia’s freedom, about the aftermath of the Balkan Wars. Stories about the 1923 Communist uprising, about the events of 1944 when the Communist Party finally seized control of Bulgaria, about the so-called Process of Rebirth during which the Party forcefully changed the names of all Bulgarian Muslims to what were deemed “proper, Bulgarian” names. There are stories about things I myself witnessed and lived through: the fall of Communism in 1989, the results of this fall, or about the people who leave Bulgaria every year to make their luck abroad. READ MORE >