Bill Knott made himself out to be a sad sack who compensated for his burlap psyche by donning intriguingly tailored hairshirts. He was also a hilarious, renegade kook, whose copious poems often catch fire from their frictions. As if taking cues from both Berryman’s Sonnets and The Dream Songs’ Henry after cutting his teeth on Surrealism in the late 1960s, Knott expressed his sense-of-self-as-schlimazel with increasing dexterity and wit to achieve an aesthetics of exquisite haplessness. I Am Flying into Myself (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), edited and introduced by Thomas Lux, offers a sanitized sampler of Knott’s life’s work. It returns to deserving circulation mostly the most refined poetry of a half-century corpus distinguished by crude flourishes. I Am Flying into Myself is especially valuable for its inclusion of brilliant poems composed during Knott’s final decade—that is, since 2004 when, allegedly with regret, he allowed Farrar, Straus and Giroux to publish The Unsubscriber.
That collection, his eleventh and best, displays Knott’s quirky combo of erudition, self-deprecation, and excess in its concluding section, “Poems After, ” which responds to works by an international array of artists and writers. His gloss on the title of “Transhendeculous, ” for example, is clever but also patently obsessive: “Trans(from poetry to music/from Pater to Mater)hendec(-asyllabics)ulous(ridic- of no-brow me to adumbrate the Great Pate). ” Among homages to Borges, Bashō, and Braque, “transversions ” of Trakl, as well as allusive addresses to Alfonsina Storni, José Lezama Lima, and Magritte, Knott reverses the vectors of surveillance in “Archaic Torso of Apollo ” to devise his own sonnet, “Sureties. ” According to Rilke’s sublime logic, the lack of ocular points of origin distributes and magnifies the moral insistence of the god’s gaze: “You must change your life. ” Knott irreverently figures the truncated sculpture’s self-containment after “A tortoise that has retracted everything / Into its obdurate lair. ” Then, imagining “you ” as an assailant who seeks to further vandalize the artwork, he declares that only by assuming the artwork’s divine indifference to human mutability may one attract its notice:
You dance like wallpaper thawing its father
And still you lack that proof-in-all, that aloof
Olympian ennui, the sniper’s prize.
As long as change is your life it will shun you.
No shot will shut your target torso.
The poem’s coup de grâce depends upon the reader’s recognition of that last line as not a reassurance but a threat. To Knott’ s way of thinking—held over from what prompted him to title his second small-press collection Auto-Necrophilia—we are willing Semeles, eager to be offed in trade for proof of an eternal being’ s attention.
I can’t account for this excerpt’s opening simile, but I can say that it’s typical of the zany risks—sudden swan dives, or cannonballs, into the deep end of Dada—that distinguish even Knott’s later poetry from that of pretty much every other postwar American. Knott debuted in the Nixon era as an angry, lovelorn surrealist whose most compelling poems’ brevity preempted others’ enervating lack of follow-through. What distinguishes the gems among his mature poems of the 1980s onward is their fusing of keen, metaphysically extended conceits with demotic language, lowbrow concerns, deliberate figural imprecisions, and flights of inexplicable fancy. The subtitle of Knott’s first volume, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans (1968), pays impish homage to the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos’s Corps et biens (Body and Goods) (1930). With its refinement, however, Knott’s lyric craft increasingly resembled that of Salvador Dalí’s painting Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936). Whereas photo-realists depicting layered architectural angles or art brut painters of slovenly scenes create little tension between form and content and thereby risk having their artistry ignored, Dalí’s exacting presentations of fictive grotesques bring new images into the world even as they heighten appreciation for his technical mastery. Knott’s structured abjectness arrests our notice similarly.
Knott’s revision of Rilke also evades the allegory in the original of the poet’s fraught inwardness. Among Boston’s literary circles especially, Knott was famous—or infamous—for a diffidence that could burst from all the borders of itself like a supernova of paranoid belligerence. Almost everyone who supported him emotionally or artistically—say, by publishing his poems—got burned. I’m thankful that the anecdotes of annoyed but friendly and admiring fellow poets, a lover, and preternaturally forgiving editors which Steven Huff assembled in Knowing Knott: Essays on an American Poet (Tiger Bark Press, 2017), relieve me of any incentive to let critical focus founder among such stories here. Even so, citing some biographical details and autobiographical poems may help account for the morbid, misanthropic lyric persona we find elsewhere. In I Am Flying into Myself the go-to poems on this score are “The Day After My Father’s Death, ” “Christmas at the Orphanage, ” and “The Closet, ” an elegy for his mother. She died in childbirth when Bill, according to Lux, was seven; three years later Mr. Knott, a butcher, drank poison. By then young Bill was already being bullied in an Illinois orphanage; from there, he was sent to a state mental hospital for some months, lived on an uncle’s farm for a couple of years, then joined the Army and stood guard at Fort Knox until he was honorably discharged at twenty. Around that time he lost track, forever, of his younger sister.
Originally published in Becos (1983) but omitted from collections since, “The Closet ” is raw and disconcerting, aptly claustrophobic. (Editor Jonathan Galassi singles out the elegy as a motivating factor in his signing the small-press poet with Random House two decades before he again reached out to Knott, this time from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) Recalling his mother’s closet, a personal space nearly emptied “after the hospital happened, ” Knott adopts the present tense to submerge readers in a toxic gumbo of his bereft childhood self’s saccharine pathos and the adult poet’s embittering knowledge. “Three blackwire hangers ” remain, like
Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be
Themselves, in basements, glovelessly scraping uteri
But, here, pure, transfigured heavenward, they’re
Birds, whose wingspans expand by excluding me. Their
Range is enlarged by loss….
The poem concludes with haunting predictions vowed with the benefit of hindsight: he will dream of “obstetrical / Personnel [who] kneel proud, congratulatory, cooing / And oohing and hold the dead infant up to the dead / Woman’s face as if for approval. ” Having pulled the avian hangers from their imagined perches, the poet-to-be “shall find room enough here // By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow. ”
Such abnegation is Knott’s master trope, an unshakable pun on his name. Whether range-enlargement or growth reliably follow from it is doubtful. Knott’s capacity to undermine himself was great. But some of the reagents that mixed so caustically in life made gold in the poet’s crucible. The title poem of The Unsubscriber, reprinted in I Am Flying into Myself, suggests that Knott eventually outgrew the logic of growth by self-exclusion; the so-called outsider poet calls himself out as reluctant to exclude himself by revoking a “de facto ” membership. He has remained in that “vain solipsistic sect, ” that “lyric league ” of youthful naïfs well past his naïve youth. That’s what the lyric endeavor is about, after all: keeping faith in the world as one knows it through a child’s original, sensuous experience, holding out against its translation into fungible concepts. While most grown-ups lack patience with self-discovery’s inefficiencies, Knott stoically acknowledges, with the critical neutrality of second-person self-address, his paying of dues without apparent reward. He is not an unsubscriber because he has let his subscriptions lapse or refused to belong to any club that would admit him; he is unwilling to under-write, to make too little of anything.
That said, Knott’s evocative density—his affinity for knots as well as nots—amounts to his making a lot of few words. At 45 lines, “The Closet ” is among this posthumous volume’s longest poems. Having initially made a name for himself—or for his pseudonym, Saint Geraud—on the strength of aphoristic poems as brief as a single line, Knott never really mastered long-form momentum. Some readers may crank more than once through the adolescent, “pornocoiled ” fantasies indulgently recalled in the 77-line sentence that is “Mrs. Frye and the Pencilsharpener. ” Fewer will want to trudge twice through the 106 fricative-fretted couplets to which “Overnight Freeze, ” formerly published as one succinct quatrain, has overgrown. The tensions that animate Knott’s “great mismatchings ” are more readily felt when set forth in shorter forms like the single ottava rima stanza of “Night Thought, ” wherein pajamas (“floppy statues of ourselves ”) are said to caricature our bodies as the dreams we have while wearing pajamas caricature rational day-thoughts. Less comically exacting—indeed, floppier—than those of Byron’s Don Juan, the octave’s polysyllabic rhymes (pajamas–unserious–posthumousness) diminish its would-be monumentality, burlesquing the form; the concluding couplet commends such slackness, as it “mimics the decay / that will fit us so comfortably someday. ” Knott’s craftiness rewards this kind of reading, attuned to prosodic minutiae, but it’s nearly impossible to sustain across discursive sweeps.
Fortunately, over a third of the 152 poems in I Am Flying into Myself are what Knott called quatorzains, taut fourteen-line poems that range from the one-word-per-line “Quickie ” (which likens poetry to “sex / on / quicksand ”) to the only slightly less skinny “To Myself ” (which likens poetry to a magic carpet so long as you are “willing / to pull that rug out // from under / your own / feet, daily ”) to more conventional sonnets of strictly rhymed decasyllabic lines. When the American Poetry Project’s American Sonnets: An Anthology appeared a decade ago, it was disappointing to find that the chronological cutoff narrowly excluded Knott because, with Frederick Tuckerman, Frost, Cummings, Millay, and Berryman, he is truly among the nation’s most inventive and nuanced masters of that not-so-fixed form. Like “Night Thought, ” “The Sculpture (To —— ) ” exemplifies Knott’s brand of the burlesque; apparently composed after Becos but in time to be included in both of Knott’s 1989 books, the sonnet endangers the bounded shapeliness of sculpture and sonnetry by suspending formality at the local scale of diction and syntax. One might have thought that sequences like “Molding fast all the voids the gaps that lay ” and “we were told to kiss hug hug harder ” would be improved by the addition of commas, or that phrases like “some sort of glop ” and “state-of-the-art polymer ” were anathema to lyric. With Gertrude Stein he wants the lack of such punctuation to innervate our engagement, so that we feel those voids and gaps, that hardening hug. Insofar as the thwarting of grammar registers initially as negative, it ends up only securing the idea that salient negativity—including the space that remains between embracing lovers—represents what their love overcomes:
We stood there fused more ways than lovers know
Before the sculptor tore us away
Forced us to look at what had made us so whole.
This pajama-and-polymer-glop poetics may be appreciated fully only by engaging a full poem. “The Consolations of Sociobiology, ” a timely response to E. O. Wilson’s controversial tome on the “New Synthesis ” of behavioral psychology and evolutionary science, exemplifies Knott’s mid-career shenanigans as well as the star-crossed fortunes of his then default persona. One of the sonnet’s pleasures is the puzzle regarding its antecedent scenario.
Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite
I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars
Through a narrow straw while the Coke in my lap went
Waterier and waterier. For days on end or
Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in
My case no fours to worship you: Amoeba Behemoth!
Although we can’t trace the provenance of the second, phatic epithet as we can the alliterative first, mapping “Stigmata ” to “scars ” and “stalagmite ” to “rooted, ” we can appreciate the latter as a grotesque expression of idolatry and a bit of phonetic fun: uh-mee-buh-buh-hee-muhth. Both epithets pair the small with the great. And certainly some low-budget, compensatory form of telescopy is underway with that straw, but to what end? Boethius’s early medieval De Consolatione Philosophiae begins with Lady Philosophy’s banishment of the poetic Muses, among whom the imprisoned author had “taken up melancholy measures. ” Knott not only updates Neoplatonism with sociobiology but also makes the latter’s spokesperson the would-be mate who rejects him, resulting in the stultifying scars.
—Then you explained your DNA calls for
Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely
So to speak its external expression etcet
Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be…
Ah that movie was so far away the stars melting
Made my thighs icy. I see: it’s not you
Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you
Over which you have no say says no to me.
Note Knott’s profligate dispersal of poetic Easter eggs: among them, a faux epiphanic “I see ” occasioned by its homophone icy even as this adjective qualifies the speaker’s spurned loins; also, the concluding chiasmus of “no say says no, ” which corroborates as significant the speaker’s self-correcting tic, heard earlier in the poem’s third sentence, whereby he twice flips the positive on to utter a negative no, rendering his hyperbole more pathetic without dampening it. He’s failing to thrive on the fitness landscape, and he knows it. Sad. Donne rarefied the crude elements of eros with his prosodic ingenuity and ductile figures; Knott’s conceits are no less clever or complex, but he reverses the alchemy, undoing Donne with bathos.
Nothing about this poem’s core concern requires that it take place at the movies, however. Like that line about “wallpaper thawing its father ” in the Rilke revision, like Cy Twombly’s scrawlings, the signature on this sonnet is distinctively illegible. Knott seems to have recognized the potential for an apt analogy: eschatological justifications for perpetually deferring gratification are to the equivalent selfish-gene argument as the heavenly vault (overhead, with its stars) is to the silver screen (across the lot, with its stars) and as infinite night is to caramel syrup. Moreover, the discontent one feels despite efforts to adopt a new perspective—jailed in Ravenna, unrequited at the drive-in—is like the chill, in the one case, of astronomical voids and, in the other, of a soda equilibrating in one’s lap. The poet-speaker intuits that he need not foreground the prosaic play-by-play. By distorting proportions and relaxing syntax he implicates the complex analogy within the sonnet’s texture, where it abides like a watermark. There’s even something about the repeated adjective waterier—its admixture of ordinariness and rarity, its nod to a lapsing, its insipid double-/Ər/—that lets Knott use it to mark this mode of making suggestive mistakes about scale as his own.
Louis Zukofsky drew from the calculus to define his poetics: “An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music. ” Knott’s version would be this:
kiss
∫
cough
And that’s not because, with Auden, he projects some prudish Time that spies from the shadows, interrupting lovers’ fun. Knott’s antipathy to established norms was such that, although he’d readily allude to Pater’s famed claim about art’s aspirations, he’d also then spurn music as a satisfactory goal. His yearnings are erotic, not melodic. Similarly, “speech ” is too plainspoken and hygienic to be his lower limit. Imagining lip-readers who move their lips as effectively captivated in a process “less translation than transference ”—he has in mind, I think, the physicality of reading lyric poetry—Knott writes of “even a cough, a kiss ” as “enunciations / which paraphrase the space which runs // through all speech though all tongues try / to gun that gap by perusing, musing / mere coherence. ” Given the syntactical complexity of this fragment, it’s evident that he wants us to read and reread, working out the sense in our mouths. He’s acutely aware that articulation—“mere coherence ”—often misses its mark. But even as language fails to convey certain nuances of intent, its sounds avail a sensuous surplus. As he implicitly argues in another of his stand-by sonnets “Depressionism, ” bombs sometimes fall shy of their targets, but by eschewing specific aims, the poet may fruitfully repurpose inconvenient craters. He may make gardens of depressions.
“Windowbeam, ” a quatorzain of seven couplets, provides an opportunity to appreciate what crucially has altered because it retains Knott’s misanthropy. An opening series of epithets reminiscent of George Herbert’s “Prayer (I) ” expands into Manichaean moralizing. Intrigued by a ray of daylight’s vulnerability to pervasion even as it invades a room, Knott asks the “sunstripe penetrant, ” “what made your phalanx fail: why can’t // its gallant-greaved angels’-armor / avert our dirt…? ” He answers that humanity, and thus the domestic space this side of the pane, is not only corrupt but incorrigibly corrupting: “each mote of us / holds abject thought that blots with dust // your gold-shed greatness. ” The former impulse toward self-censure persists but the inclusive pronoun shares any shame across a universal community, and the Hopkinsian exuberance of medial sound-play buoys the mood.
“Wishing Well, ” which attained its final five-quatrain form in the second half of 2010, is another of the most deftly realized new poems in I Am Flying into Myself. Here, again, Knott holds in check the emotional miasmas that formerly accrued to his use of first person. Tossing a coin in a well, one pays not for a wish, he suggests, but for the privilege “to smash apart that calm // gleaming ” surface and thus introduce to a static situation that other kind of change. One trades the coin for a “claim / on the future ” in which something new will happen. One buys time. Halfway through, Knott pivots from wish to the slant-rhymed guess, effectively reorienting the poem’s unknowable dimension from the temporal (“the future ”) to the vertical (“a depth I can only guess ”). If wishing is already a secular dilution of prayer, then a guess is that much more so, and yet the mathematical sublime resurrects transcendental considerations. The poem concludes in interrogative paradox even as it introduces the promise of a new exchange: of worldly lucre for solar luxury.
And even if it reaches that far,
plummeting through the rich
rings of its sinking to reach
a bottomlessness whose core
is death’s perhaps deepest ore,
there where the end gathers
will my silver ever bring me
any of the gold it shatters?
As it plumbs the narrow well of itself, the poem amasses sonic riches—the /Iŋ/s of plummeting–rings–sinking, the slippery sibilance of bottomlessness’s double suffix, the reverb of there–where and silver–ever—and accrues other interest. Even if little of the sun’s gold emerges as a return on Knott’s down-paid coin, however, I see such poems as gleaming yields on his lifetime investment; he made malleability valuable under the grotesque’s imprint and now remints it with a fairer face.
But my favorite poem in the volume may be “Merry-No-Round, ” a quatorzain of couplets that was also in The Unsubscriber. In I Am Flying into Myself, however, Lux has placed it immediately following a newer sonnet circa 2009, “There’s the Rub. ” In this Shakespearean context, “Merry-No-Round ” may be read as a telegraphic variation on Ariel’s progressive releases from incorporation in a blasted pine and from indenture as a minion entertainer to true freedom among the lighter elements. But it’s unencumbered by The Tempest; it isn’t an importantly allusive poem at all. Curiously, with Knott’s earlier raging and lusting, with the plaints of self-pity and slapstick profanity, much of his former allusiveness has flown as well. As the title suggests, the central image is a carousel’s:
The wooden horses
are tired of their courses
and plead from head to hoof
to be fed to a stove—
In leaping lunging flames
they’d rise again, flared manes
snapping like chains behind them.
The smoke would not blind them
As do these children’s hands:
Beyond our cruel commands
The fire will free them then
as once the artisan when
out of the tree they
were nagged to this neigh.
If writing poetry is like sculpting, then writing poetry as Knott does is like nagging neighs from knotty wood. To figure artistry as nagging is typical Knotty bathos: it is recuperated by the wit involved in deriving the pejorative verb for verbal action (nagged) from a pejorative synonym of the noun horse, nag, which probably derives from the onomatopoetic neigh. In “Wishing Well, ” certain rhythmic and syntactic flourishes—the fluctuations between seven and eight syllables, between three and four accents per line, and the anastrophe of “whether such a small as this / sacrifice is worth one wish ”— endowed with fluency a structure that had no correlative in its essentially static scene. Here, the mostly perfect rhymes secure couplets that close a bit earlier or later than one expects because the erratic rhythm conveys the muscular leaping and lunging and snapping of chains.
November 2017
This review was published in Issue 61:1.