reconciliation

*
Josh Corey has an interesting column here about Robert Duncan's reliance on/adherence to the ubermythological:

http://joshcorey.blogspot.com/2011/06/all-duncan-all-time.html

...

And here John Latta in his blog yesterday is noting:

[Frank] O’Hara’s remarks (to Edward Lucie-Smith, in 1965) about Creeley and control (versus “the sort of tumultuous outpouring of images which then get themselves together into being a poem, somehow” wherein “you do have the excitement of seeing whether you’re really going to get it to be a poem or not”). O’Hara complains how the minimalisms of Creeley (and Levertov) end up “making control practically the subject matter of the poem. That is your control of the language, your control of the experiences and your control of your thought.”: And: “the amazing thing is that where they’ve pared down the diction so the experience presumably will come through as strongly as possible, it’s the experience of their paring it down that comes through more strongly and not the experience that is the subject.”

*

O'Hara the maximalist perceives correctly how very different his practice is from Creeley's—

And Creeley (or so it seems to me) unlike Duncan is not stuffing his verse with mythological figures or references—

is not constantly plucking items from the "myth-kitty" as Philip Larkin calls it—

both O'Hara and Creeley are doing what Larkin advocates: taking their matter, their subjects from the daily life around them, what lies before their immediate eyes—

waylayers of what Bonnefoy calls

herméneutique sur le vif ....

/
Maxi versus mini is one way of arranging your poets in contrast:

another might be pro-myth versus anti- .

Which would place Larkin closer than Duncan to Creeley/O'Hara (and bring the latter nearer together) . . .

///

p.s.

Today (Thursday June 30) the Harriet blog is quoting Charles Bernstein:

"everyday life, that great Creeley theme ..."

—Exactly. Everyday life. Couldn't have phrased it better myself—

"Everyday life" is the great theme not only of Creeley but also O'Hara and Larkin—

but can anyone claim the same of Duncan? Surely his great theme(s) transcended (or sought to) the everyday, the quotidian—

the myth-kitty was never far from his hand, was it?

/
p.p.s.

of course O'Hara stuffed—or peppered might be the better verb—his poems with all kinds of referents, from movies to myths—

but can you imagine him writing something like Duncan's "Achilles' Song"— a persona poem, a dramatic monolog spoken as the Greek hero,

especially as seriously as Duncan does it on page 100 of his Selected Poems (New Directions, 1993)?

"Duncan," the backcover of this book proclaims, "was a poet of cosmic imagination."

Duncan: cosmic; O'Hara: cosmopolitan.

Not to mention the mask of 'comic,' which surely O'Hara/Creeley/Larkin all wear at times in their work,

but Duncan? Ironic, sardonic, satiric, yes, perhaps, occasionally, but does his verse ever stray into the lowbrow demotic of slangbent humor?

...

reprint from old blog—though the question is still relevant, i think

*

Regional, racial, ethnic, gender, generational, thematic, etcet:

if you look at the dozens and hundreds of anthologies of contemporary USA poetry published over the past two/three decades,

you'll find compilations of poems or poets gathered and linked to represent many categories of differentiation and distinction,

with one exception. There are no anthologies based on class.

Why is there no anthology of rich poets, poets who came from a background of wealth and privilege. Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Louise Gluck, William Matthews, Richard Howard, C.K. Williams, Russell Edson et al.

Class is the most important influence on the lives of USAers,

the significant marker which defines who each of us is.

Our culture at its deepest level is founded on class, on its financial and educational inequalities.

We face and interact daily with the continuities and conflicts of class.

It touches and permeates us in every way, in every aspect of our public and private systems.

But in poetry it doesn't matter?—why? because Art exists in a realm separate from Life?

*
Maybe one of the reasons there has never been such an anthol would be the prohibitive cost of obtaining rights, since, not so ironically, rich poets like Gluck and CK Williams demand exorbitant fees to reprint their verse; your average anthologist has to pay through the nose.

Though of course with POD, anyone anywhere can publish rather cheaply a book collection of Gluck's poems as a private pirate edition and distribute copies of it to the void without ever paying a cent to her richness, if anyone anywhere were of a mind to, that is.

///

these pages are from about 4/5 years ago:

*
some of the worksheets from my transversion of a Follain poem, with a brief preface:

*
. . . . from Clive Wilmer's review (TLS June 1/07) of the new Ted Hughes compilation Selected Translations. . . . :

"Daniel Weissbort, who edited this selection, tells the story of Hughes taking another poet's translation of a work by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhasz and, without any knowledge of the original language and no Hungarian speaker to advise him, turning that version into a thrilling poem that drives the existing versions off the map."

*
Like Hughes in the case of Juhasz, my transversions are based not on the original, but on translations. . . .

But of course my parlor pastiches will hardly "drive the existing versions off the map." Nor is that their aim, really . . . they're more like exercises, as painters and composers will often attempt "variations on" . . .

*
In the case of this poem "by" Jean Follain, I have worked from translations by Merwin and Romer (they are appended here below my drafts). I'm assuming both their versions are accurate literal renderings of the original's content. Reading them, you can see what I've changed or added, in particular how I've "put back in" references to the biblical characters Adam and Noah, which Follain carefully left out.

It may seem odd that I've taken a poem which is not rhymed even in the original French version (I don't have the Follain text, but based on every poem of his I've ever seen I'm confident this one is similarly not end-rhymed)—why have I taken a vers libre and done this to it. But his poems are often sort of sonnety in their way. Stephen Romer writes: "[Follain's] poems, very rarely more than fifteen lines or so in length, are vignettes . . . " This is from the Introduction to 20th-Century French Poems (Faber, 2002) edited by Romer (see below for more Romer-on-Follain). That "fifteen lines" phrase struck me, and I suddenly wondered if the typical Follain could be read as a sonnet in subterfuge, and if so why not try doing a transversion in that mode . . .

As a further incentive, I worked to make each line decasyllabic.

*
Note: the drafts appear here in reverse, sort of, with the most recent ones above the earlier . . .


*
THE RETURN (after Follain: from Merwin/Romer)

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
in ways for the stranger who's late to come,
but he whose force was never sure of home
may not even pause when faced with its gates.

Clothed wholly in the mendicant's threadbare,
his headwear the tin lid of a trashcan,
he will know to announce himself as man
the prodigal: Hey guys it's me! But where

the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat burrs dark
and the pig guards the last milk it laps at,—
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can augur storms, they have formed their own ark.

Unyielding the response to him must be;
the same it has been since edenity.

*
*
Perhaps for the stranger who's late to come,
It seems for the stranger
At times for the stranger
In ways for the stranger who's late to come,

Ostensibly the stranger late to come,
The one whose force was never sure of home,
Who may not even blink before its gates—

Will he know to announce himself as man
He will dare to announce himself as man
Will he dare to

May not even wince/smirk as he nears its gates—
May not even wince to approach its gates
May not even pause to approach its gates
May not even wink or pause at its gates
May not even pause or blink at its gates
May not even blink at breaching its gates
May not even blink as he gains its gates
as he goals its gates
entering passing
May nonchalant pose before its gates
May strike a nonchalance before its gates
May not even blink when faced with its gates
May not even blink as he nears its gates
May not even blanch when faced with its fates
May not even care when faced with its gates

*
the mule grubs for food, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule mulls root-cud,
the mule cuds up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
thorn-roots/ weed-roots / wheatshoots /
the mule grazes grass /
the mule drools cudstuff,
the donkey drools cud,
the mules grubs for / spuds for grub
the mule digs / probes / roots for fodder /
the mule gnaws barley, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps root-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps herb-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses herbs, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule sniffs herbage, the mare's coat burrs dark

the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat grows dark,
the pig guards the meager milk it laps at,—
the pig guards the milkcurd it laps at,—
where the pig guards the weak milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the bare milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the meek milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the mild milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the last milk it laps at

The mule chews herbs and the mare in her dark
Coat broods, where a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
Can foretell storms, they have formed their own ark.

can augur storms, they have made their own ark
they have cast their own ark.
they have borne their own ark.

where the dog bears a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms, they have found their own ark.

the mule gnaws herbs and the mare's coat grows dark—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms—they have formed their own ark.

the mule gnaws grass and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig slurps the milk it sips at—
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms—this farm is like an ark.

coat nods and the pig smears the milk it laps at;
coat broods and the pig laps at a milkmat
coat broods and the pig licks at lumps of milkfat

the mule gnaws herbs and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig swigs curds of milkfat—The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come

where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
can foretell storms: they have formed their own ark.

the pig laps up a milklet;
the pig laps a milk tricklet
the pig drinks at a thin spigot

coat broods and the pig licks a butterpat
the pig drinks thin its milkfat
Coat broods a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Coat broods and a meager milk is lapped at:
Coat broods and a meager milk gets lapped at;
Coat broods and a meager cream goes lapped at;
where the pig finds meager milk to mouth at
where the pig looks for meager milk to lap at
where the pig pursues a meager milk to lap at—
where the pig finds/has a meager milk to slurp at/splurge at
to lunge at/ to surge at/gush at / gnash at / nosh at/ gorge at
where the pig roots a/roots for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig has a meager milk to nose at—
where the pig roots out meager milk to lap at—
where the pig drools for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig hogs the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig hunches over
where the pig hoards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig defends the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is afraid someone will steal the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is jealous /cautious/ wary/

*
The donkey nibbles through sweets/hills/mallows of thistle
And the mare in her dark coat deepens/becomes/
The mare as her dark coat grows to leather;
the pig burps after milk in a trickle,
the starfaced dog, the cat uninured to weather . . ./

the starfaced dog, the cat who weeps at weather . . .
the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to weather . . .

the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to storms.

Coat broods and the mild pigs-milk is lapped at
and the mare in her dark coat—and the pig
who burps his meager milk—and then the dog
with starred brow—the cat sensitive to storms.

the donkey nibbles thistle and the horse
stands in its dark coat and the pig burps at
his meager milk and the dog and the cat
bare starry foreheads and bark at storms.

can fore-sense storms and the dog's forehead
bears a star.

the cat can fore-sense storms
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms

the donkey nibbles grass and the mare _____
in her dark coat and the pig's milk mustache

*
WELCOME

The sun has washed with white the farm too late /of late
Always for the stranger at last to come, /too late to come

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
Stunned if the stranger should finally come
But he whose roots were /force was /never here at home
May not even blink as he nears its gates—

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come

*
So their response to him will be the same
It has been for ever before he came.
It has been ever since before he came.

These animals' response/answer to him will be
The same it has been since antiquity./eternity.

So therefore/even their response to him will be
So the only response to him will be /must be
The same it has been since they left that sea.
The stark response to him will be
The stolid response to him will be

*
/the stranger of me to /that stranger of mine to come
Always for the stranger I am to come
/ never mine

Wearing a rubbish-bin's tophat/tin cover as crown,
Wearing a trash can's tin cover/ coverlid as crown,
He will know to enter/declare the scene his own,
Declaring again/in first-person Friends I am here. Where
in first-person Friends I am here. There where
Declaring Friends your Noah's here! Where
Loud prodigal: Friends I am here. But where
Mere prodigal:
Forked prodigal:

He will know to announce himself as man
The returning prodigal: I'm here! Where
Comeback prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and proud: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and loud: Friends I am here! Where
The prodigal pride: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal with pride: Friends I am here! Where
Pride and prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Pride prodigal:

/
THE RETURN (after Follain: from Merwin/Romer)

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
in ways for the stranger who's late to come,
but he whose force was never sure of home
may not even pause when faced with its gates.

Clothed wholly in the mendicant's threadbare,
his headwear the tin lid of a trashcan,
he will know to announce himself as man
the prodigal: Friends I am here. But where

the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat burrs dark
and the pig guards the last milk it laps at,—
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can augur storms, they have formed their own ark.

Unyielding the response to him must be;
the same it has been since edenity.

*
*
Perhaps for the stranger who's late to come,
It seems for the stranger
At times for the stranger
In ways for the stranger who's late to come,

Ostensibly the stranger late to come,
The one whose force was never sure of home,
Who may not even blink before its gates—

Will he know to announce himself as man
He will dare to announce himself as man
Will he dare to

May not even wince/smirk as he nears its gates—
May not even wince to approach its gates
May not even pause to approach its gates
May not even wink or pause at its gates
May not even pause or blink at its gates
May not even blink at breaching its gates
May not even blink as he gains its gates
as he goals its gates
entering passing
May nonchalant pose before its gates
May strike a nonchalance before its gates
May not even blink when faced with its gates
May not even blink as he nears its gates
May not even blanch when faced with its fates
May not even care when faced with its gates

*
the mule grubs for food, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule mulls root-cud,
the mule cuds up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
thorn-roots/ weed-roots / wheatshoots /
the mule grazes grass /
the mule drools cudstuff,
the donkey drools cud,
the mules grubs for / spuds for grub
the mule digs / probes / roots for fodder /
the mule gnaws barley, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps root-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps herb-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses herbs, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule sniffs herbage, the mare's coat burrs dark

the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat grows dark,
the pig guards the meager milk it laps at,—
the pig guards the milkcurd it laps at,—
where the pig guards the weak milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the bare milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the meek milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the mild milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the last milk it laps at

The mule chews herbs and the mare in her dark
Coat broods, where a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
Can foretell storms, they have formed their own ark.

can augur storms, they have made their own ark
they have cast their own ark.
they have borne their own ark.

where the dog bears a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms, they have found their own ark.

the mule gnaws herbs and the mare's coat grows dark—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms—they have formed their own ark.

the mule gnaws grass and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig slurps the milk it sips at—
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms—this farm is like an ark.

coat nods and the pig smears the milk it laps at;
coat broods and the pig laps at a milkmat
coat broods and the pig licks at lumps of milkfat

the mule gnaws herbs and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig swigs curds of milkfat—The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come

where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
can foretell storms: they have formed their own ark.

the pig laps up a milklet;
the pig laps a milk tricklet
the pig drinks at a thin spigot

coat broods and the pig licks a butterpat
the pig drinks thin its milkfat
Coat broods a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Coat broods and a meager milk is lapped at:
Coat broods and a meager milk gets lapped at;
Coat broods and a meager cream goes lapped at;
where the pig finds meager milk to mouth at
where the pig looks for meager milk to lap at
where the pig pursues a meager milk to lap at—
where the pig finds/has a meager milk to slurp at/splurge at
to lunge at/ to surge at/gush at / gnash at / nosh at/ gorge at
where the pig roots a/roots for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig has a meager milk to nose at—
where the pig roots out meager milk to lap at—
where the pig drools for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig hogs the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig hunches over
where the pig hoards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig defends the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is afraid someone will steal the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is jealous /cautious/ wary/


*
The donkey nibbles through sweets/hills/mallows of thistle
And the mare in her dark coat deepens/becomes/
The mare as her dark coat grows to leather;
the pig burps after milk in a trickle,
the starfaced dog, the cat uninured to weather . . ./

the starfaced dog, the cat who weeps at weather . . .
the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to weather . . .

the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to storms.

Coat broods and the mild pigs-milk is lapped at
and the mare in her dark coat—and the pig
who burps his meager milk—and then the dog
with starred brow—the cat sensitive to storms.

the donkey nibbles thistle and the horse
stands in its dark coat and the pig burps at
his meager milk and the dog and the cat
bare starry foreheads and bark at storms.

can fore-sense storms and the dog's forehead
bears a star.

the cat can fore-sense storms
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms

the donkey nibbles grass and the mare _____
in her dark coat and the pig's milk mustache

*
WELCOME

The sun has washed with white the farm too late /of late
Always for the stranger at last to come, /too late to come

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
Stunned if the stranger should finally come
But he whose roots were /force was /never here at home
May not even blink as he nears its gates—

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come

*
So their response to him will be the same
It has been for ever before he came.
It has been ever since before he came.

These animals' response/answer to him will be
The same it has been since antiquity./eternity.

So therefore/even their response to him will be
So the only response to him will be /must be
The same it has been since they left that sea.
The stark response to him will be
The stolid response to him will be

*
/the stranger of me to /that stranger of mine to come
Always for the stranger I am to come
/ never mine

Wearing a rubbish-bin's tophat/tin cover as crown,
Wearing a trash can's tin cover/ coverlid as crown,
He will know to enter/declare the scene his own,
Declaring again/in first-person Friends I am here. Where
in first-person Friends I am here. There where
Declaring Friends your Noah's here! Where
Loud prodigal: Friends I am here. But where
Mere prodigal:
Forked prodigal:

He will know to announce himself as man
The returning prodigal: I'm here! Where
Comeback prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and proud: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and loud: Friends I am here! Where
The prodigal pride: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal with pride: Friends I am here! Where
Pride and prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Pride prodigal:

*
*

W. S. Merwin:

Welcome

On the farm in its full color
it is on a day of bright sunlight
that one awaits the stranger.
Dressed in fine black fabric
and wearing a top hat
he will push the gate open
saying friends here I am.
The donkey nibbling the blue thistle
the mare in her dark gown
the pig drinking sour milk
the dog with the starred forehead
the cat who can sense a storm
before him will be the same
as in hard Antiquity.

*
by Stephen Romer:

Welcome

In the freshly whitewashed farm
it is a sunny day
to be waiting for the stranger.
Clad in thin black cloth
and wearing a top hat
he will push the gate
and say friends here I am.
The donkey grazing on blue thistle
the mare with a dark coat
the pig drinking thin milk
the dog with the starred forehead
the cat sensitive to storms
will be the same before him
as in hard Antiquity.

*
*
Here's Stephen Romer on Follain:

Follain catches the instant and preserves it in aspic, or behind glass that is absolutely transparent: the speaker casts no shadow on his poems, which are rigourly impersonal in presentation—not once does Follain use the personal pronoun 'je', preferring always the neutral 'on'. . . . Perhaps no other poet of the century can suggest, with equal economy, such vertiginous and often desolating temporal perspectives. Follain is also a crucial figure in providing a viable alternative to Surrealism, which he claimed to 'admire' but knew to be inimical to his own genius. . . . By reasserting the possibility of a poetry anchored in the world, and by inventing a new type of lyric poem, scoured of sentimentality and subjectivity, Jean Follain may prove, indeed, to be the major influence on the best [French] poets of the latter part of the century. . . .

(quoted from pages xxxiii/xxxiv of Romer's introduction to 20th-Century French Poems)

***

if knott, then not

*
here's Luke Hankins protesting a review by Joan Houlihan, over at the Contemporary Poetry Review site:

Luke Hankins says:

February 19, 2011 at 1:58 am

". . . I am quite surprised to hear your idea that end rhyme shows up mostly in light verse today, which I’m guessing must be based more on what you personally choose to read than on objective observation (exceptions, off the top of my head and in no particular order: Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, A. E. Stallings, Paul Muldoon, Ernest Hilbert, Ashley Anna McHugh, Melissa Range, Natasha Trethewey, Morri Creech, Erica Dawson, Adam Kirsch, Geoffrey Hill, Fred Chappell, Gjertrude Schnackenberg, Sherman Alexie . . ."


*
Gee I wish my 128-page book "Ear Quire: Selected Rhyming Poems" was good enough to have Hankins add me to that list of contemporary poets who use rhyme, but of course it's not.
Besides their poor quality, my rhyming poems can also be downloaded free (in PDF form) via Lulu.com, as can many other of my books,
and in a capitalist society merit/value is based on price:
if my books cost nothing, then ipso facto they're worth nothing.
Luke Hankins knows my rhyming (and nonrhyming) verse is worthless, and he's right.
///

update: by not including me in hits lst Hankins made me realize how worthless my book of rhyming poems was, and so I deleted it from Lulu,

//

soonest mended

*
http://kathleenrooney.com/news/bill-knott-week/#comments

///

thanks to Johannes Goranski for posting this on his blog

*

Montevidayo

• About
• Contributors

Atrocity Kitsch: Bill Knott and Daniel Borzutzky

by Johannes on May.16, 2011, under Uncategorized

This will be a short post but I wanted to say something about Bill Knott, not so much because he’s left grumpy comments on this blog but because I think he’s a fantastic poet and I wanted to join Kyle Minor’s Bill Knott Week at Htmlgiant, but I couldn’t because I was bogged down in work.

1.
First I’m going to make some generalizations about Bill Knott. I think Bill Knott is a great poet, one of my favorite American poets of the second half of the 20th century. I also think he’s incredibly important: important in the sense of very influential. I see his influences on heaps of poets. Yet, Bill Knott is also a poet who’s almost never mentioned as an “important poet.” When people mention their “influences,” he’s very seldom on the list, even when he’s an apparent influence. I don’t think that’s an unimportant point to make about Knott: it’s part of his authorship.

2.
At the Htmlgiant special, there was a lot of comments made about the fact that Knott self-publishes his books and booklets. In fact, I first came across his work when one of my grad school classmates handed me a booklet. Perhaps this method of distribution could be said to be beside the point, but I think it does suggest something like an approach to writing/publishing that has something to do with his work.

Sure, a lot of poets have and continue to self-publish, including the best ones ever (Whitman, Rimbaud etc), but something that interest me about Knott’s self-publishing is the way it is done in such a make-shift way. Though the poems are great, the booklets look pretty un-fancy. Further, by self-publishing he kind of takes himself out of the “respectability game” – as a very influential and – to a lot of people – awesome poet, Knott should probably instead of going self-publishing (and in such a large quantity) try to edit himself and get people to write about him etc. This is especially true in this age of “too much”. But instead Knott aligned himself with the “plague ground.” (This can be seen as the opposite to say Kenny Goldsmith who’s made his anti-kitsch opposition to the shit, the “creative writing” and “expressionist” poetry of this plague ground a central argument for his own special-ness, his admirability.)

3.
I wanted to pick up on a few things Kathleen Rooney says in her interview about Knott. To begin with, she notes that Knott “kills” himself in his poetry; at first by inventing a persona (who not only dies but is also a virgin); and he names one of his books “Corpse and Bean,” further suggesting the deathiness of writing. For Knott Art and Death are fundamentally intertwined. It seems to me this deathiness, this self-killing is part of an engagement with kitsch, a disposability, an anti-immortality.

4.
Rooney also points out that Knott’s writing is fundamentally in bad taste in many regards. I agree: it’s maximalist, it mixes atrocity and kitsch (art is not only tied to death but violence). At the same time as it’s incredibly fun and interesting to read, it’s not the kind of poetry that people refer to as “the Greatest” or “Most Influential” (though personally I would pick it over just about any living poet’s work any day). It simply is “too much.”

Rooney points to the following piece of poesy:

Nuremberg, U.S.A.

In this time and place, where “Bread and Circuses” has
become “Bread and Atrocities,” to say ‘I love you’ is
like saying the latest propaganda phrase…’defoliation’…
‘low yield blast’.
If bombing children is preserving peace, then
my fucking you is a war-crime.

I love this poem too. Rooney thinks comparing killing children to fucking is in questionable taste, and I obviously agree. But I’m not interested in taste, in fact most great writing is pretty tasteless (Genet’s maximalist baroquery about smelly transvestite criminals with religious names is obviously the best example of this!). Part of what makes this of questionable taste (though this isn’t necessarily the same as “tasteless” which is usually easier to deal with, easier to discard or embrace, more stable) is that it makes this extreme comparison between sex and war crime – but, perhaps more so, because there is an implicit pedophilia in the statement. If Killing children equals fucking, then perhaps it also equal fucking children. And in the insistence on metaphors and comparison, the baroque literariness of it, there seems to be a connection too between art and pedophilia; art is crime, artifice – as JonBenet Ramsey with her adult make-up and Michael Jackson with his fake face showed us – is equal to a kind of molestation.

5.
Here’s another of my favorites:

(Poem) (Chicago) (The Were-Age)
‘My age, my beast!’ – Osip Mandelstam

On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
We wear masks on our genitals
You’ve heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews
History is made of bricks you can’t go through it
And bricks are made of bones and blood and
Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through
Except a piano with rabies
Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds
Vietnamese Cuban African bloods
Constellations of sperm upon our bodies
Drunk as dogs before our sons
The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough
Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano
The air over Chicago is death’s monogram
This is the Were-Age rushing past
Speed: 10,000 men per minute
This is the species bred of death
The manshriek of flesh
The lifeless sparks of flesh

Covering the deep drums of vision
O new era race-wars jugular-lightning
Dark glance bursting from the over-ripe future
Know we are not the smilelines of dreams
Nor the pores of the Invisible
Piano with rabies we are victorious over
The drum and the wind-chime
We bite back a voice that might have emerged
To tame these dead bodies aid wet ashes

American poetry obviously has a long and troubled relationship to politics, to atrocities etc. The New Critics had no problem with commemorating the confederate dead, but they didn’t care for “the excesses of the 1920s” (see Cary Nelson’s famous Repression and Recovery). By the time Knott wrote these in the late 60s it was definitely OK to write political poetry. But one things that separates this from a lot of the poetry is that it doesn’t provide a clear place to stand, in fact it implicates art in violence (Another post: why Bly can write some awesome poems about atrocities but then turn around and write some awful nature poems.).

Art is atrocious in Knott’s poems, and in part (like Genet’s Our Lady of Flowers) this comes from its incredibly commitment to literariness, to artistry, to the baroque.

6.
But now I’m making it seem like I like Bill Knott for his transgressiveness or something like that. That’s not exactly true. It’s more like I love the way – as in Genet – the shitty, kitschy stuff intermingles with just stunning sentences and images. As I’ve said before, both the shittiness and the baroque or maximal have long been the most troublesome aesthetics to American poetry – literary devices used out of control is a kind of kitsch. His poetry goes all the way, it’s too much, too beautiful, too literary, at the same time as it gives us shit and corpses.

7.
For example in the “Were-Age,” he asks the reader to become intimitely involved inside Art that reproduces the kind of grotesque baroque of American atrocities: The constellation of sperm on our bodies is both vast/outer space and physical and sticky on our bellies; both historical and metaphorical and physical.

And in all of this: an utter awareness of media and its speed – “death’s monogram,” 10,000 men.” Or as Velvet Underground put it around the same time: “The dead bodies pile up in mounds.” In that song (“Heroin”) media enters the body through a heroin needle (or at least a “spike”); in Knott’s poem media enters like blood going into “wounds.”

And with media we’re back to self-published booklets. Bill Knott as the poet who entered the plague ground with every baroque gesture, and has come out – not as a famous poet of standing and taste – but one of the greatest jesters of the corpse heaps this shitty world has produced.

8.
Knott’s body is a very post-freudian body. These are bodies that are part of history, intertwined with history, but there is no “interiority,” no soul or essence there. Unlike Billy Collins – whom Knott supposedly loves – poetry is not an escape into a truer sphere (compared to swimming often or some other natural space). The bodies pile up like porn or horror movies. And it’s perhaps this that makes his poetry most tasteless of all: not only is there no place to stand, but we are not granted our own beloved interiority, our agency; instead we are piled up and intertwined with the unsavory violence of our world (and the crassly literary).

9.
Also wanted to mention a recent book that I find very much in line with this – Daniel Borzutzky’s “The Book of Interfering Bodies.”

In her (favorable) review of the book on Htmlgiant, Lily Hoang wrote about Borzutzky’s questionable taste: “For instance, I think pulling skin from flesh is something pretty cliché. The first poem in this collection, “Resuscitation,” closes with skin being pulled from the body. I started to read. I rolled my eye.”

There is something unquestionably tasteless about involving torture and art. And yet the two seem inextricably intertwined (see Abu Ghraib):

The soldier had taken my pants and all I had left was skin

I wanted to peel off my skin and dissolve into the tiniest voice

I started to peel the skin off my arms and worked my way up to my shoulder across my neck to the other shoulder along the arms down to the hand

Or:

Its impossible to read the Book of Glass without spilling blood. The reader pulls it out of the tower with special tongs.

Like Knott, history becomes involved with art and kitsch (in Borzutzky’s case a steadily accumulating heap of “books”). And the thing I hadn’t thought about until I compared Borzutzky and Knott was how they speak in a kind of bureaucratic grotesque. Bureaucracy is generally considered indeed kitsch and “banal evil” etc, but in both Knott and Borzutzky bureaucracy becomes very evil, grotesque and beautiful, seductive and repulsive at the same time.

10.
About this bureaucracy, Borzutzky has the greatest epigraph I’ve seen in some time:

“It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of the imagination.” (The 9/11 Commission)

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