Matthew Salesses is author of the forthcoming novella The Last Repatriate, and two prose chapbooks–Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). You can find some of his stories in Glimmer Train, Witness, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, The Literary Review, and Quarterly West. He is also a columnist and fiction editor for The Good Men Project. He lives in Boston.

I asked him to write a few words about Bill Knott’s poem “The Enemy.” Here is the poem:

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 >

Catistentialism is nothing more than their attempt to ruin a coherent couch, as mine is now littered with hair, hair balls, passive aggressive affection, and evil looks. Man plunges into the couch next to cat, and into despair. To have a cat fight catistentially, which is talking at one’s mirror regarding a neglected litter box, is not to use the word in its original sense. To show that God doesn’t exist may be to show that each unique defecus combed and mined from a litter box does, each piece’s existence preceding its essence. Now that we believe God doesn’t exist, we are assured that our despair can only be mitigated by feeling hairs which have yet to be collected into a hair ball by a brash milk lapping tongue, asexual at best, whose host’s eyes see straighter than the author’s.

READ MORE >

Against, perhaps, better judgment, I’m going to go ahead and say some words on the fly here. They will be perhaps less coherent even than most of my posts, but whatever. It’s friday and almost the end of the work day so I doubt many people will read this. This is really scattered. I mean I guess the point of this post is that I like the internet more than bookstores.

I love books. I will honestly, undoubtedly, be one of the last people who own an eReader. I was basically the last one of my friends to own an mp3 player, so this is probably not surprisingly to anyone who knows me. I’m not against technological advantages, not at all– rather, I hate spending large amounts of money on things. Right now, I could buy 20+ books for the price of an eReader, so because I have little patience and have more interest in the books themselves than keeping up with technology (or even the convenience, or whatever), I would actually rather have 20 new books than an eReader. But, really, this isn’t a post about eReaders.

I want to talk about bookstores. READ MORE >

Irony is a smart people excuse for looking stupid. Talking Heads made nice songs, and so did MC Hammer, but you’ll only see one in some art chick’s iTunes library, the bichromatic spectrum of roots and highlights in her hair, the slow erosion of nail polish marking an idea she had three weeks ago one night reading Derriduh for class. Orwell said something about there needing to be opposing classes for a society to function, but my googlefingers are tired, and only Joyce can make up words like that. You may ask yourself, where is that large automobile? First, it’s called a Bentley, and ’twas inside MC Hammer’s garage before he spent all his money on fabric. (In the disclosure, is foreclosure, hence its closure.) Rap stars enjoy walking around showing off their mansions, huge ass freezers full of nothing but popsicles, the former which record companies lease per month, until the sales drop. Snoop Dog encouraged me to drop it like it was hot, but I simply dropped it like it was a hernia. The university is a cultural war zone without fatalities; the only collateral damage is a bruised ego and a secret asshole, whose soldiers come out firing blanks in cafes and open mics, the worst ones holding clipboards on sidewalks, in need of a shower. High brows listen to music inside their heads, low brows rub it with their ass. Problem is we all monobrow, fucking monkeys who just recently upgraded from sign language. Each side needs the other, so when you walk down the street, you can wear your team’s t-shirt, identify your party at a bar, go up to them and say stop making sense. Remain in light, speak in tongues, dance like there’s an angry handjob inside your pants. Point to the atoms between you and your enemy and say you can’t touch this.

Just returned home, having spent the past few days helping my brother move to Chicago. After we unpacked the moving truck, we hit up a few bookstores. Here’s what I thought about them:

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Spring is coming. Spring is here. It’s raining and the grass is once again buoyant. Speaking of rain: weather scares me.

Growing up, my parents taught me that if I get rain on my head and I don’t immediately shower to clean it off, I’ll get sick.

This makes very little sense. Rain ought to be clean. It ought to be a pure – if not the purest – form of water. Certainly, it ought to be cleaner than the water I get from my green showerhead, which is still city-treated water, gone through further treatments via the showerhead.

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