Bill Knott Week: Last Postings
Best Deal on the Internet:
If you send your mailing address to notknott@gmail.com, Bill Knott will send you a one-of-a-kind staplebound edition of his poems, with handmade cover art.
James Wright on Bill Knott, from Wright’s collected letters:
New York City
September 6, 1975
September 6, 1975
D. Groth,
You kind letter made me happy. Poetry is a strange adventure: at crucial times it is––it has to be a search undertaken in absolute solitude, so we often find ourselves lost in loneliness––which is quite a different thing from solitude. America is so vast a country, and people who value the life of the spirit, and try their best to live such a life, certainly need times and places of uncluttered solitude all right. But after the journey into solitude––where so many funny and weird and sometimes startlingly beautiful things can happen, whether in language or––even more strangely––in the silences between words and even within words––we come into crowds of people, and chances are they are desperately lonely. Sometimes it takes us years––years, years!–to convey to another lonely person just what it was we might have been blessed and lucky enough to discover in our solitude.
In the meantime, though, the loneliness of the spirit can be real despair. A few years ago, when I lived in St. Paul, Minn., I received unexpectedly a short note from a young poet* who was bitterly poverty striken in Chicago. READ MORE >
Bill Knott Week: An Essay by Peter Jurmu
Some notes on Knott from Peter Jurmu:
When What You Really Really Want Is To Cover Territory
Sex on Quicksand: Collected Short Poems 1960-2009, like Breccia (or An Incomplete Inventory of Dorian Gray’s Closet—cover pictured above—that phone number is the request line for a Boston-area oldies station, WODS— READ MORE >
Bill Knott Week: Q&A with Kathleen Rooney
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 >
Bill Knott Week Begins Today
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 >
Weekend Writing Prompt: Make it rain.
Hiphop has moved—swaggered, even—on from the 2006 rules and regulations. Sure it has. So—yes, I guess—we’re well past making it rain on country’s exotic dancers. Or, well, they’re well past it, those who make themselves their livings rhyming over a usually 4/4 beat.
But maybe you don’t have to be. Over it, I mean. (I mean, who are you to follow the moving-on happenings in the game of being on the grind, right?)
So this weekend when you sit down to do a little writing, do it with a little of the lesson somewhere in Ms. Hoang’s earlier-today lovely disorganalia on overwriting by going in on a story and overwriting it to the point where you move past a disappointing lack of discipline to that moment where excess overwhelms all its many sins and leaves one’s writing in a pure state. Pile on the muck until the muck becomes the point and the muck becomes the beauty.
And if you don’t feel like making it rain in that way, make it rain like this:
READ MORE >
some things that i ate this week and a review of how they tasted
slapshot (starring Paul Newman): I was the coolest guy that ever lived and you were a hair stylist and the goalie in our love was from a foreign country and would yell at us and then the factory closed down which made everyone in town sad because people would soon be really poor and they would have to kill themselves, but it was okay because I was still really cool and this guy from Princeton was good at hockey even though he had dad issues and then the owner gave birth to three retards that liked to punch things so the team started winning again and I slept with the wife of the other team’s goalie and then someone said ‘Faggot’ and another guy said, “This one time I was in Florida and the snatch was crawling out my boobs.” And the guy from Princeton became in touch with his feminine body which made you raise your eyebrows and I raised my eyebrows and then we looked at each other long and hard and you said, “New York City,” and I said, “Minnesota,” and our love was still a goalie from a foreign country but it had grown into a shape that smelled like three retards born out the ass of a nation of absurdity that sometimes laughs when people say, “Faggot.”
the external combustion engine by Michael Ives: Some kids were in the park doing bad things. I yelled at them. You told me not to yell at them. There was something interesting in our shared thoughts, but the afternoon didn’t quite go as planned. I think you went into the movie business and I went into education. Someone either you knew or I knew got me a job at a school where someone I knew once went, but I think it was only temporary. The world is going to end. This makes me upset because I can’t do anything but watch it end and I wish that instead of doing this I was looking at you as you watched the whole thing end.
the box man by Kobo Abe: I was homeless or maybe you were homeless and at some point we decided to be naked and homeless together in a box, but another person wanted the box so you gave me some money and I gave the box to him, but he wasn’t who he said he was because someone had paid him to be them and they just wanted to smoke morphine all day so they kept paying him to be them so they didn’t have anything to do but smoke morphine and he was tired of being them so he decided he was going to be me which is why he made you pay me to be me and then I was no longer homeless and didn’t have to live in the small box but instead I lived in a really large box with you until you got tired of me and moved out of my large box.
babyfucker by Urs Allemann: A man was in a room that was the worst place to ever be and that man was me and maybe the room was me too but I was afraid to look at where I was even though you might have been in the room. I was very much in love with you or maybe you were on the balcony, but I just couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes because I was afraid I was doing the worst thing that a person could ever do and you would not be able to help me because I was touching the things that were bad to touch in the way I was touching them.
This Week in Ghost Writing
I don't know. Here's this guy covered in bees. What is happening?
1. A little while ago I put up a note about ghost-writing, wondering if anyone had done it or would. Since then I found out that Ben Greenman ghost-wrote Gene Simmons’s tell-all memoir, which sounds like fun in a weird way. In the interview they don’t ask any follow up questions which is ridiculous considering the title of the piece is “Ben Greenman Ghost-Wrote the Celebrity Tell-All for Gene Simmons.” All I can think of is a boy-faced Greenman trying to have a normal conversation with Simmons as he’s decked out in full KISS attire, or Greenman calling ex-lovers with cigarette-punctured voices to fact check which drugs they were taking when.
2. If you’re in the mood to get upset, have a look at this article about James Frey’s book-factory scheme. A friend who’s working on a book for them suggested I pitch one, too. It seems like basically a terrible idea. I feel greasy just thinking about it. Why are the MFA programs letting this crazy man into their classrooms? I do not know. I am currently abandoning hope. In general, I mean. All hope.
Will some of the trolls please have a look at the article and spew some much-deserved anger in the thread? Thanks. This one is ripe for a shouting match. (If only it were still Mean Week!)
A Sorta Mean Review of Grease Stains etc
This morning I woke up early and read Mel Bosworth’s book, Grease Stains, Kismet and Maternal Wisdom. I read the Aqueous Books version, the original one. Apparently there was some sort of disagreement between the publisher and author, though, and Aqueous dropped it. It was quickly republished and is available again here for only $3.95. I thought I’d pan it for mean week, sorta.
The book is a quick read and a good story. The earnestness at the center is keen, the elation and vertigo and palpable excitement of infatuation. I understood the feeling from my own personal experience, so Bosworth’s accomplishment is how he draws that feeling out, how the writing comes together to remind me of that experience. READ MORE >
What We Talked About This Week in LMC
We kicked things off and got lots of shot outs at awesome places like the LA Times, Bookslut, Omnivoracious, Impose, Bark, and others.
Tom deBeauchamp wrote about Bradford Tice’s How to Be American Boy.
Kevin Lincoln penned a letter to Padgett Powell.
David Peak had some observations about Ken Sparling’s Elrond.
Gian, the editor of NY Tyrant generously made a PDF of NY Tyrant 8 available so anyone can participate in this month’s discussions. If you’d like to access the PDF, you simply have to join the Google Group by sending me a message.
Next Thursday, at 8 p.m. EST, we’ll be chatting with Gian. Come with your questions about NY Tyrant 8! More details, Monday. Mark your calendars now.
Meanwhile, it’s the weekend. Get down with NY Tyrant 8. What piece did you enjoy most in this issue? Why? What piece did you have a problem with? Why? Let’s talk Tyrant.
This Is What Happens When After Being Dreadfully Cold All Week I Lie in a Hot Bath Trying to Write a Blog Post After Having Not Written One in Awhile
I almost told you, we must resist asking what it means when we haven’t yet determined what it is. But I grew bored; I’ve never been much lit up by resistance, a heavy sprinkler on the same clipped lawn. For what is there to resist besides the sun? I prefer insistence. To insist that we won’t know what it is; we will only run our fingertips through the traces. We turn from the spectacle not because it dazzles us but because we want to see the faces of our fellow theatergoers. The trouble comes when they too turn, and they face our glancing faces.
I hate them!
I mean it!