Jeff Alessandrelli on Not Meeting Bill Knott

Is it for the best that Jeff Alessandrelli never met Bill Knott? It's hard to say. But at Literary Hub, he surmises this much, writing "I didn’t really know Bill Knott, not at all. We never met—which was for the best. But literarily and otherwise, his life deeply impacted my own." Let's start there: 

Actually meeting him would have ruined it; old saws like you should never meet your heroes because they’ll only disappoint you are, occasionally, still taut and sharp. Our brief correspondence was enough. It provided the generalized contours of the man without embodying the specific, the actual. I’m sure he had a limp handshake and a vacant, stare. Sweaty palms; bad, baggy clothes. I’m glad we never met.

And even in his death I’ve been avoiding him. Although I knew about it, was in Washington D.C. with nebulous plans to show up, I didn’t attend the 2017 AWP “A Tribute to Bill Knott (1940-2014)” panel. This pains me only a little—the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference is no doubt something he abhorred. And I’m sure a panel devoted specifically to other writers talking about him and his work would have publicly horrified him—he would have said as much online, I’m sure—and privately tickled him. Like all great poets I believe that, above all else, he wanted to be read. But Bill Knott was unlike so many other great poets.

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Entitled “fuck you poets house,” a post from one of Bill Knott’s blogs, dated April 29, 2011:

fuck you, Poets House snobs— vanity books “will not be accepted”— you won’t “accept” my books? Fine . . .

Per their website, Poet’s House is “a 70,000-volume poetry library in New York City. Free and open to the public, Poets House’s collection is among the most comprehensive, open-stacks collections of poetry in the United States.” Circa February 5th, 2017, searching for Bill Knott on the Poet’s House website yields no results.

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Knowing absolutely nothing about poetry, contemporary or otherwise, I first came to Knott’s work in 2006, on the recommendation of Michele Glazer, one of my professors (and eventually my thesis advisor) at Portland State University, where I was a first-year M.A. student in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry. Though I was enrolled in a graduate program in poetry writing, I knew little to nothing about the genre. Upon my graduation from the University of Nevada-Reno in December 2005—Literature Major; American History Minor— I had largely applied to Creative Writing programs on a lark. All four of those programs were in the Pacific Northwest, where, because of the rain and the breweries and Powell’s Bookstore and Elliot Smith and Modest Mouse and the rain and the breweries, I wanted to live.

(This is not, I later found out, how other MFA students approached their graduate program applications. Instead they researched and thought about who they wanted to study with, how their own work might fit in with each professor’s teaching style and overall creative schematic; or where they could get the most graduate-assistant fellowship $; or how their personal and creative lives might intertwine with their fledgling professional careers upon their MFA graduation. Not me, though. I wanted to mope, rainily, and drink beer.)

Read on at Literary Hub.