Chicago Review Singles Out Bill Knott's Selected

At Chicago Review, Andrew Osborn wrestles with Bill Knott's complicated legacy as a notoriously ornery person, the poet's tragic family history, and his celebrated poetry. All of this floats to the surface with the publication of Knott's I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960–2014 (edited by Thomas Lux). Knott died in 2014; Osborn writes "He was also a hilarious, renegade kook, whose copious poems often catch fire from their frictions." Let's pick up there: 

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, 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.

Learn more at Chicago Review.