from bad bad to worse

*

I have become the epitome of everything wrong in writing—

For example,

when the moralist Craig Morgan Teicher wants to insult a young poet, he uses his pulpit at Publishers Weekly to tar him or her with me—

2 examples: the first from his review of Chelsea Minnis's book "Bad Bad":

"Petulant, clever, sometimes funny, sometimes irritatingly flippant, Minnis's poems will inspire questions as to whether this work qualifies as poetry at all, though some readers — fans of, say, Bill Knott, at his silliest — may find much to like."

The second, again from a review in PW:

"[Karl] Parker is one of the oddest poets you're likely to meet. . .  No poet has had this kind of simultaneous reverence for and disregard of the poetic tradition since Bill Knott." 

/

—and here from another censurer, this tweet:

26 May Daniel Casey ‏@winslowbobbins
 

Bill Knott is Tao Lin in 30 yrs

/
Daniel Casey must really despise Tao Lin to say something this vicious.  To forecast such a horrible fate for this or any young writer seems kind of hardhearted and punitively pessimistic wouldn't you say.

Think of the sad miserable future Casey is predicting for this young writer Tao Lin: 30 years from now he will be detested, scorned and ridiculed by everyone in the literary establishment, his books will be rejected by every publisher, his work will never appear in anthologies, he will be blacklisted, declared persona non grata, etc., etc.  He will be unemployable.  He will never be invited to give readings or participate in conferences at the AWP or the PSA or Poets House or any other locus of lit-world power.  No magazine will publish his work.  His name will be a curse-word used to condemn other writers.  In short, his life will be the same as mine has been for as long as I can remember. 
 
/
It seems the worst insult you can apply to a young writer is to associate them with me.

Imagine how hurt and humiliated Minnis and Parker and Lin and others must feel to read such a cruel invidious comparison.

/
And then of course there's this:

"Bill Knott, the crown prince of bad judgment."

—Ron Silliman, Silliman's Blog, June 26, 2007

/

Yes: if you want to slashtag the wrongness and badness of any writer, just invoke my name.  You can't damn them worse than that.

///

ad/verse

*
A poem by Glenn Shaheen, from the Spring 2012 issue of Ploughshares:
 

ISRAEL

Steam lifting from the highways, ascending
to the heavens beneath the misery of commute,
fires below the pavement. I have become

a better driver by the standards of Houston.
I will hurt somebody if they deserve to be hurt.
No, ok, no, but I’m an expert in menace. All

this blinding steel and glass, we’ve made
the world a brighter place. They tell me Israel
is a great problem. I don’t care. They tell me

it is our final hope. The world is a maze of
definitions and borders, problems, signs painted
in an array of colors scientifically chosen to

arrest the vision. Israel is a place that rolls
from the tongue. There are no enemies unless
you make it so, unless you inch menacingly

over the paint. The album is criticized for its
lack of structure, for the singer’s refusal to
repeat herself. Hold me, hold me, the heater

is broken, cars are being pulled over outside.
Adults are in the park, groping casually over
glasses of wine they’re not supposed to have.

It’s all true, I am weak. Give me a nation
to hate, to love, to touch and trust the borders of.
Come here, entreat me - inside of you, on you,

what difference does it make. Nobody to call
and nobody who would come out. Come forth,
fond wrench, and do something different to me.


/


I hope to write some thoughts about this poem in an upcoming post . . . thanks to Mr. Shaheen for allowing me to reprint it here.


///

addendum to previous post:

/
I don't know what I can write or if I will be able to ever write again before I die.  Many poets are quelled by old age, I think many or perhaps even most poets do slow down or cease in their 8th decade, which is where I am—


Philip Larkin couldn't write any in his last years.  Old age dries one up, you don't see many poets my age (72) or older publishing new books.  The body wears out, the mind loses its sharpness.  


The willpower that sustained me even 2 or 3 years ago is diminishing with every day it seems.  


The artwork I'm trying to do is a substitute effort to stay in a creative mode, and hopefully that urge will yield some verse, but I just don't feel the force that propelled me in the past to wake up every morning and go to my typescripts and notebooks and from those drafts work up lines and stanzas.  The stamina is not there anymore, nor the desire.  

(And why write poems whose reception will inevitably be this:
 http://knottpoetry.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=20,

and this: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2012/03/critany.html
)


/
Probably successful poets are more immune to these inertias of old age— 


C.K. Williams has an interesting essay entitled "On Being Old" in the current American Poetry Review about his similar situation of being an aged poet, and about how good he is at coping with it: 


but he doesn't mention the one thing which I think is most relevant in his case, the one impetus which eases and facilitates his ongoing career, and which endows him with the strength and the confidence to keep writing, to continue practicing his art: surely that unique privileging factor is his spectacular success as a poet—


I quote verbatim the bio note below his essay:


"C.K. Williams has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize; The Singing, which won the National Book Award for 2003; and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987.  He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets."


/
I envy Williams his success, which I think is the ameliorating mitigation that most enables him to persist as a valued poet with important work still to contribute,

in contrast to me and other lesser talents contemporaneous to him in years.

And of course I wish the poetry I wrote over the past half century had been good enough to merit the honors his work has—


but it wasn't, it isn't.   I wish that final outcome weren't so, but—


The verdict is in.  The poets of my generation have been evaluated and ranked.  Williams is in the top tier, and I—


well, I'm somewhere further down.  

(Trying to estimate the exact level of mediocrity on which my poetry has been shelved is a waste of time because in the long run, historically, only the uppermost poets remain in name: all of us below-fellows are soon forgotten, gone, goodbye.)


///

,,,

*
If anyone reading this has followed my posts on respectively my poetry blog and my art blog,

they may have noticed a decrease in the former and an increase in the latter.

I currently devote almost no time to poetry, and the meager creative energies I still have, sapped as they are with age, are spent on my sputtering artwork . . .

As I've pointed out many times on this blog and perhaps elsewhere, it has become more and more clear to me that my poetry is and has for the most part always been a failure—

I wish it were otherwise.  I wish my poems were in the anthologies, but they aren't.  Go look at the walls of Contemporary American Poetry anthologies—there have been hundreds of them published during the 40 or so years of my active career as a poet, and while I was fortunate to appear in a few back in the late 1960s/early 1970s, as time has passed my time has passed—you won't find my work in hardly any of the thousand relevant anthologies.

Maybe "thousand" is hyperbole.  But hundreds isn't.  It would be interesting to see a complete bibliography of anthologies published in the past half-century which include poetry by contemporaneous USA poets.  I'd bet my verse would show up in less than one-tenth of one percent of them.

In any case, I don't think I will write any more poems. The law of diminishing returns, old age, the loss of any valid hope for official recognition, the repeated failures that pile up and crush one's ego— 

I can't go on trying to write poetry which no one wants to publish (don't take my word for that, go look through the twenty pages posted here: http://knottpoetry.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=20,

and which no one (with the exception of a few isolated and insignificant marginalists) respects.  (Again, don't take my word for that: go read the facts yourself: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2012/03/critany.html
)

x

lines

*
I've been bothered by the thought that I wasn't fair to the young poet Traci Brimhall in a post about 6 months ago, in which I attempted to "correct" the line-lengths in a poem by her—


http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2011/08/this-is-good-poem-in-terms-of-its.html


—and I've been hoping to revisit the questions I considered then . . .


*
A while ago I tweeted that any line longer than the hendecasyllabic is in danger of being contaminated by prose—


I should have said, Any un-metered line longer than the hendecasyllabic is in danger of being contaminated by prose, 


because of course there are many great poems with longer lines which have no taint of prose, but they are usually metered (Yeats' "Innisfree" to name just one example)—


I say contaminated and tainted, but one person's poison is another person's metier.


To wit Montale: "A verse that is "also" prose is the dream of all modern poets from Browning on. . . ."


Thus:


Humdrum testaments were scattered around.  His head
Locked into mine.  We were a seesaw.  Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.


(the last 10 lines of John Ashbery's "And Ut Pictura Poesis is Her Name")


Compare that (which is certainly an example of Montale's "dream" come true, if anything is) to the first 12 lines of Brimhall's poem "Via Dolorosa":


We have been telling the story wrong all along,
how a king took Philomela's tongue after he had taken
her body, and how the gods turned her into a nightingale

so she could tell the night of her grief. Even now the streets
wait for her lamentation—strays minister to bones abandoned
on a stoop, a man sleeps on the ghosts of yesterday's heat,

pigeons rest on top of the church and will not stir until
they hear music below them. Inside, a woman warms up
the organ and sings Via Dolorosa about a Messiah

who wanted to save everyone from the wages of pleasure.
But how can I keep a man's fingers from my mouth?
How can I resist bare trees dervishing on the sidewalk?
... 



Now the content of Brimhall's poem seems to me, as I praised it in that earlier post, first-rate.  Intelligent, evocative, poignant, vivid— but the line-lengths, I thought and still think, were just too long—


The first dodecasyllabic line is perfectly fine:


We have been telling the story wrong all along


but the second line (to me at least) seems "wrong" in its 15-syllable length:


how a king took Philomena's tongue after he had taken


... Why didn't she stay with the line (or close variants of) she established so strongly with that opening, I wondered—


Especially since she is relying so heavily and prevalently and overtly and I might go so far as to say exclusively on traditionally 'poetic' techniques like rhyme and alliteration and sound-links—


tellING/kING  . . . wrong/along/tongue . . . tell/all/Phil . . . the sound-pattern of N's: been/wrong/along/king/mena/tongue/taken . . . 


/
I guess the question I'm raising, and which I have no prescriptive answer for, is whether a line of poetry in English can be lengthened effectively much further beyond the normative blankverse limit 


unless the poet is willing to "also" render her poem as "prose"— to somehow include prose qualities into its measures or proportions,


as Ashbery does with such genius.  It's not that he doesn't utilize standard verse-craft methods, but perhaps better than any other living poet he has successfully personified the modern ideal Montale contemplates:


"A verse that is "also" prose is the dream of all modern poets from Browning on. . . ."


I could go through the Ashbery poem line by line and show (to the extent I'm capable) how he does wield traditional poetic technique in subtle crucial and perhaps underplayed (sub-versive, as it were) ways, but my point is—


well, I'm not sure what my point is.  Something about the line in English verse, and how it can't be lengthened effectively beyond the default margin unless the poet writing it is willing to allow prose elements into it—


So that in the annals of this year be nothing but what is sobering:
A porch built on pilings, far out over the sand.  Then it doesn't
Matter that the deaths come in the wrong order.  All has been so easily
Written about.  And you find the right order after: play, the streets, shopping, time flying.


(last stanza of "The Ivory Tower" from Shadow Train)


/
But I don't want to impugn Brimhall for what I see as a problem in her choice of line-length for "Via Dolorosa"— She is obviously very talented, very gifted, and the poem in its entirety is quite admirable—I urge anybody reading this to access it via PoetryDaily and marvel at the ingeniousness of her argument and the skill with which she evolves and enriches her metaphors/imagery—


My questioning of her line-lengths is meant to apply generally, as to whether verse which relies as heavily as this poem of hers does on the intensification effects of rhyme/alliteration/sound-repetition/etcet—

(Look at her lines 3/4: BODy/GOD . . . nightin/gale/tell/nights.  And her second stanza: streets/heat  . . . strays/yesterdays . . . . stoop/sleep . . . the linking pattern of N's: evEN/laMENtatION/MINister/BONes/aBANdONed/ON/MAN . . . etc )

—whether a poem which insists on employing such a preponderance of verbally dense devices can or should—unless it is underpinned by formal meters—lengthen its lines to match those 


of a poet like Ashbery whose 'verse is "also" prose'—


which according to Montale, is "the dream of all modern poets from Browning on. . . ."


Back to my quibbling question:  


Can any un-metered line longer than the hendecasyllabic (or dodecasyllabic perhaps) 

be verse which is verse per se and not "also" prose?  


Or must such longer lines always be 'verse [which] is "also" prose'?


/
And, given that unmetered lines of such lengthiness can "also" incorporate standard features like rhyme/alliteration/assonance/etc, another question is: to what degree?—

how many tactile thickening tricks like internal-rhyme etc can those longer lines bear—

How many sound-links can you stick into them—

How craft-crammed can they be?


/
What unmetered line-length can sustain verse which aspires to be verbally dense intense intricate—

///

memorabilge

>

jeepers, 250 bucks for a 8.5x11 poetry-reading flyer? —
 
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=7827527992&searchurl=an%3DBill%2BKnott%26bi%3D0%26bx%3Doff%26ds%3D30%26recentlyadded%3Dall%26sortby%3D1%26sts%3Dt%26x%3D54%26y%3D14

/
I guess it costs so much because it's Berrigan memorabilia—

if the stigma of my name wasn't bringing down the price of this treasure, 

it'd probably go for 5 or 6 hundred or who knows how much 

this kind of Berrigan bilge is selling for these days—


/
Can't remember if this was the occasion when Big Ted ("Call me 'Big Ted'," he used to urge me every time we met)

gave me an inscribed copy of the first edition of his "Sonnets" book, 

which (a couple years later when I bothered to glance through it)

I threw in the trash—

///

But TWOHUNDREDANDFIFTY DOLLARS!?

Really? for a reading poster?  Some of my larger paintings are priced lower than that:

http://billknottartforsale.blogspot.com/2012/06/shysphinx-landscapes.html 

/
—of course any tattered poster or scrap of paper with Berrigan's name printed on it is worth more than an original artwork by me,

isn't it, 

even if the latter does include in its purchase price a free bonus package with at least ten copies of my poetrybooks—


///