The Crown Prince of Bad Judgment

In March 1948, Look magazine sent 19-year-old Stanley Kubrick to Kane County, Illinois, to document Mooseheart, an orphanage 40 miles west of Chicago. Kubrick was sent because he was young and wouldn’t cause much distraction while taking photographs of the children, some of whom were nearly his age. If you read the text of the Look article (which Kubrick didn’t write) or watch the promotional film Mooseheart created in the 1940s, you’d believe the facility was a mid-20th century utopia, rife with enough work, crafts, and farm activities to transform indigent juveniles into good American taxpayers.

Kubrick, genius photographer that he was, cut through the facade. In the only color group portrait he took for that assignment, the children look lonely, sad, and confused. A little girl in the back covers her eyes with her tiny hands. It’s entirely possible that one of the children Kubrick captured was the poet Bill Knott, who was sent to Mooseheart in 1947 at age seven. Knott’s heartbreaking recollections in “Christmas at the Orphanage” are as obvious as Kubrick’s photo: “I knew exactly what it was I missed: (did each boy there feel the same denials?)” Knott missed his mother, who had died in childbirth the year before, along with her baby. He also missed his father, a butcher who killed himself by drinking poison three years after Knott was sent to the orphanage.

A terrible childhood is no prerequisite for becoming a great poet, but it doesn’t hurt. And Knott’s childhood was dreadful by any standard. Distraught by his father’s suicide, he was eventually sent from the orphanage to a state psychiatric ward in Elgin, Illinois, where he was bullied and abused by older men until his uncle rescued him. After a brief stint working on his uncle’s farm, he joined the army, was honorably discharged, and spent nearly the next decade employed as an orderly in a Chicago hospital.

It was at this hospital that Knott began writing what became his first book, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, published by Big Table Books in 1968 and recently reissued by Black Ocean. The Naomi Poems is among a number of groundbreaking American poetry collections that appeared in 1968, including George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, Etheridge Knight’s Poems from Prison, Lorine Niedecker’s North Central, and Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger. What makes Knott’s collection distinctive is its undiplomatic insistence that the aesthetics of poetry cannot be sealed off from pressing political concerns. He goes so far as to address American poetry’s potential complicity in political oppression.

The book is named after the poet Naomi Lazard, whom Knott met in the early 1960s at a poetry workshop run out of the University of Chicago, taught by John Logan. There he was introduced to French surrealism, which influenced his poetic sensibility and persona. “Corpse and Beans” is a transliteration of the title of Robert Desnos’s 1930 collection Corps et biens (Body and Goods). This early avant-garde movement permeates the collection in which Breton-like, fantastical images conjure “a magic field” and poetry inhabits “the space / between a sleepwalker’s outheld arms.” Thomas Lux, Knott’s longtime friend and editor, called him a “hard-core, card-carrying Surrealist.”

Knott was a lifelong autodidact and, other than this workshop, had no formal education in poetry. Wanting to match the drama of his upbringing, he wrote The Naomi Poems under the hyper-Romanic pen name “Saint Geraud,” a virgin who supposedly died by suicide at age 26 two years before the book’s publication. In later interviews, Knott made two declarations about why he used the pseudonym: first, he was worried he would get drafted and therefore couldn’t use his real identity, a dubious explanation considering Knott names himself in the book. Second, he was young and pretentious.

In subject and style, The Naomi Poems is anything but pretentious. Almost half the poems are simply titled “Poem” or “Prosepoem,” and all are written in the straightforward idiom made famous by the New York School. Thematically, the work is a combination of erotic poems to Naomi and other lovers, short existential meditations, Vietnam antiwar avowals, and polemics directed against the institution of poetry itself, a subject he took up obsessively later in life.

What sets Knott’s love poems apart from the work of his hippie-era peers is how he melds aspects of traditional romantic poetry with lines that swerve into the rebellious and humorously smutty. “Love—A Poem” begins

I lay in her humus breaths
And she was fulfilling her essence
As music perfume wine of future loves
Whose birth she was lighting in me

and ends with the line, “to read the future, gaze into your crystal asshole.”

This penchant for filth arises again in “Mozart,” in which Knott imagines the composer “kissing a woman’s cunt.” If it seems odd to picture the 18th century musician performing oral sex, just know that it gets weirder. Knott follows this by positing a question: “were you never afraid of kissing your own slimy, shrunken pate emerging from within?”

Knott’s imaginative spaces exude a sexual energy that lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretation. Take the first lines of “Eternity”: “I stick my head into a womb and make faces at the unborn / I walk down my dead ends to the beach.” It may be difficult to believe, but “Eternity” is also a love poem which includes the line, “A kiss restores wombsight to our limbs / It has been found / What / It has not been found.” Unlike psychoanalysis, however, meeting with the unborn, or so-called “wombsight,” results in a “dead end” in which traumas from the past are neither clarified nor resolved.

Not all of Knott’s love poems run so deep. Some appear to be the products of a man in his twenties with too many lovers. There’s the poem “To What’s-Her-Name,” as well as “Poem for Irene Keller who asked for one,” which ends, “Chimera dressed in chimeras: if you were this poem / I would not be its writer.” Ouch. If you need to ask a poet for a love poem, he contends, you may not get what you desired. 

The intense sex drive that propels his erotic poems also invigorates his antiwar poems. In “Nuremburg, U.S.A.,” he writes, “If bombing children is preserving peace, then / my fucking you is a war-crime.” But his antiwar poems also double as harsh critiques of poetry’s limited ability to address the political. “To American Poets” opens:

There’s no time left to write poems.
If you will write rallyingcries, yes, do so,
otherwise write poems then throw yourselves on the river
 
to drift away.

Of the Modernists, the generation writing before him, he states: “Pound’s or Williams’ theories on prosody don’t meet the / cries of dying children / (whose death I think has no caesura).” Knott’s generation inherited a poetics inadequate to contend with Vietnam. Contemporary poets are able to craft only “rallyingcries,” which he deems deficient.

In a 2007 blog post, the poet Ron Silliman declared Knott “the crown prince of bad judgment wedded to an otherwise razor mind.” This statement is a reaction to Knott’s propensity to condemn his peers, which was often perceived as self-destructive and counterproductive. Here are the lines from “I Don’t Know” that got him into trouble:

I don’t know but I can’t see much difference between John
           Ashbery or Donald Hall or Barbara Guest or David
           Wagoner or William Meredith or Anne Sexton or
           Sandra Hochman or Thomas Clark or Kenneth Koch
           or others writing
a poem . . . and a U.S. aviator dropping a bomb on Viet-
           namese women
and children: both acts in these hands are in defense of op-
           pression and capitalism

The aggressive pessimism of likening a Barbara Guest poem to an American bomb killing Vietnamese children didn’t win him any points from the American poetry establishment, but his view that poetry demands more than mere aesthetic expression when written from inside an oppressive system is less controversial today. It isn’t lost on me that Silliman’s blog is now housed on the UPenn site, stamped with institutional approval, whereas Knott’s internet archive—containing his blogs dating back to 2006, plus PDFs of his books and much else—is maintained by one of his fans.

While Knott may have alienated his peers in what Charles Bernstein dubbed “official verse culture,” by the 1970s and ’80s his irreverent style, trickster persona, and anti-establishment ethos were precisely why he found fans in the emerging punk rock scene. In their novel Inferno (2016), Eileen Myles calls Knott a “genius” who lived in a “hovel” and looked “generally greasy.” They also remark, “people claim that Bill Knott was the inspiration for punk.” Perhaps Knott’s connection to punk rock explains why the foreword of the reissued Naomi Poems is written by Richard Hell, a pioneer in the punk movement known for his bands Television and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Upon encountering the collection at age 18 or 19, within a year of its release, Hell says the book felt “like an infection or injection.” He was captivated by its “all-pervading condition of longing, adoration, fear, and fury, lurching from near-worship of ‘Naomi’ into anger and despair at, among much else, the bloodthirsty American military and their corporate cohort.”

Star Black, Knott’s former partner, mentioned to me in a phone conversation that Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth exchanged poems and music with Knott. When I reached out to Moore via email, he recalled that he asked Knott to open for Sonic Youth in the early 2000s but the poet “demurred.” He went on to explain that Knott’s “self-negating” and “sardonically humorous” style coincided with the emergence of the punk sensibility, which positioned itself firmly against the free love values of the 1960s. Moore says he first learned of Knott through Hell’s Television bandmate, Tom Verlaine:

We would scour New England bookstores for poetry publications . . . Richard Hell loved to sing the virtues of Bill . . . Richard and Tom had always pointed to Bill's voice as being significant to their own writing when they roomed together in the early ’70s writing and publishing poems in journals such as Buffalo Stamps (using their pre-punk names Tom Miller and Richard Meyers).

Buffalo Stamps was a limited-run, low-budget, mimeographed journal published by Simon Schuchat, a University of Chicago student connected to the St. Marks poetry scene. Magazines like Buffalo Stamps provided venues for young writers to experiment with the content and mode of literary production. While Knott never published in Buffalo Stamps, he did publish in other similar experimental magazines in the 1970s, such as Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff’s Oink, and The Milk Quarterly, edited by Richard Friedman.

After publishing The Unsubscriber (2004) with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Knott began to self-publish his work compulsively, which was easy to do with the rise of internet print-on-demand services. It’s possible that his turn to self-publishing allowed him to reclaim the outsider impulses of the small magazines of an earlier era. Certainly, he felt self-publishing was a more authentic way to connect to his readers, as evidenced by the care he took in sending his books for free to anyone who asked. In his self-published books, Knott frequently remixed poems from the 1960s to the 2000s without regard for the chronology of their composition. He often arranged his collections by theme, as in his A Salt of Seasons: Winter Spring Summer Fall Poems (2012), in which he says he “tried to select poems in which each season and its attributes are intrinsic of content.” In Aloft: Poems from the Heights, another self-published book from that year, he curates poems constellating around themes of space, comets, birds, and summits. Perhaps this constant rearrangement of poems was a way to express his desire to undermine the notion of an “official” bibliography.

When Knott was unable to produce a selected poems for FSG, embracing rejection became an all-encompassing identity. John Skoyles, an English professor and poet who worked with Knott for over two decades at Emerson College, told me that Knott taped rejection slips all over his office door, which attracted the attention of university administrators. Skoyles recollected that Knott’s students loved him, but that his blog posts were sometimes troubling.

In a 2008 post, Knott wrote (in all caps): “Blog poet Bill Knott contemplates suicide, asks his readers for help in planning the demise.” Understandably distressed, his students took their concerns to the college. When Knott was confronted, he updated his post (again, in all caps) to say that he would wait to kill himself until after he retired:

P.S. As I state quite clearly below, this particular crusade will not commence till after May 2008, when I retire from my teaching post . . . I’m looking to the future here: I have no imminent plans or means to accomplish the eventual goal stated below . . .  

In May 2024, I had lunch with the poet Mary Ruefle in Bennington, Vermont, and asked her if she knew Knott. Black Ocean’s website lists her, along with the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and the writer Denis Johnson, as having been influenced by him. She told me that while she didn’t know him personally, Knott left several self-published books in a common area at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she taught for many years. She walked over to her bookshelf and pulled out Babel on the Table (2005), whose title is handwritten in red crayon. She opened the book to the first page and read it aloud: “It should be obvious that if I could have found a publisher, I wouldn’t be printing it myself; no-one wants the humiliation of being a vanity author.”

We both laughed. All four volumes she owned contained iterations of the same message.

 “Nobody wanted to take the books,” Ruefle added.   

But she thought the writing was wonderful and took the collections home. She gifted me the books, including All My Thoughts are the Same (2005), in which I noticed Knott cleverly renamed the three-lined “Poem” from The Naomi Poems to “Minor Poem”:

The only response
to a child’s grave is
to lie down before it and play dead

The title change reveals the kind of wordplay Knott loved, but it also reflects his precarious self-regard. By 2005, he publicly declared himself a failure, or a “minor poet.” It’s hard not to think of the “child’s grave” in this short piece as a comment on his own childhood, which was, in a way, an early death. From his debut, he “played dead” by using the Saint Geraud moniker, bursting on the scene as a supposed “virgin and suicide.” Several of the other short, enigmatic pieces in The Naomi Poems display a similar combination of sorrow and wit, as in “Death”:

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

The movement of language is directed back into the body as human arms become the folded wings of a bird flying into an internalized oblivion. (The last line inspired the title of a posthumous edition of Knott’s selected poems, published in 2017.)

In a 2006 interview with Robert Arnold, Knott said, “Every child at the orphanage knew they were on an assembly line that would shoot them out into the bondage of lower-class robot-slots; army, factory, the meniality of a desperate dead-end life . . .” Because Knott’s early life took place in various institutions, and because their confines would have seemed insurmountable, it shouldn’t be surprising that he viewed the poetry world with suspicion and contempt. After all, institutions were his only experience of organizing the chaotic world, and those institutions did not treat him well. PoBiz, with its rules and hierarchies, class structure, and consequent inequalities, was something to decry.

In our phone conversation, Star Black said that Knott’s days were exceedingly regimented: “He got up. Went to work. Had a clock on his desk. Had breakfast at a certain time. His entire day was kept in order. He went to bed at 10.” Yet his poems are anything but restrained. Included in one of the self-published volumes Ruefle gave me is “At the Federal Censorship of the Arts Symposium,” in which he refers to poet Bob Hass as “Bob Halfass,” and an “homage” to Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” where he transforms the famous line “the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream” into “the only emperor I am / is a jack-off chump.”

It is a fool’s errand to attempt to isolate Knott’s poetry from his antics. He invited this connection from the beginning of his career and continued to cultivate it until all aspects of his poetry, from its production to its distribution, became extensions of his artistic practice. Like the Surrealists he admired, Knott loved to toy with readers. Homages (2005) begins with a few pages of conventional praiseworthy blurbs followed by a list of hilarious anti-blurbs: “[Bill Knott is] malignant—Calvin Bedient”; “Bill Knott’s poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake” —Ron Loewinsohn; “[Bill Knott is] incompetent”—Alicia Ostriker; “Bill Knott should be beaten with a flail”—Tomaž Šalamun,” and on and on.

Knott died in Michigan in 2014 after a failed heart surgery. The year before, like many poets Knott befriended online, I received a large box of his self-published books, each inscribed with a different message: “To Sandra, who is a much better poet than me,” “to Sandra, whose poetry will doubtless attract much love and many homages,” “to Sandra, with thanks for allowing me to send you these books—no one else wants them,” and “to Sandra, with apologies.” The back cover of Selected Poems 1960-2013 features a humorous reprint of a rejection letter of Selected Poems 1960-2013 from Four Way Books, complete with the rejection’s original typos and grammatical errors.

Even if I didn’t know what to make of the books with their unusual dedications, I recognized that the poet who sent them was an American original. Eccentric, perhaps, but I appreciated that he wasn’t spending all of his time currying favor with power. He was accessible and generous and proved that there are no rules for how to be a poet, which was validating for me as a young, single mother trying to make my way in the literary world.

Because Knott’s poetic career began posthumously as Saint Geraud, this minimalist gem from The Naomi Poems strikes me as another way that Knott’s poetry is “playing dead”:

Goodbye
 
If you are still alive when you read this,
close your eyes. I am
under their lids, growing black.

Embedded in this farewell is the somewhat-hopeful idea that poetry transcends the “dead end” life or “dead end street” that dominated so much of Knott’s psychic space. Poetry becomes the meeting of the corpse (death) and the bean (life), the poem “growing black” in the mind’s eye of its fortunate reader.