"quote from Pasternak (if the poet's chair is not empty, beware)," Bill Knott, 2009 (media unknown)

Steven Breyak lives in Osaka, Japan. He writes:

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 >