What's not Knott is Knott

Bill Knott was an accomplished, self-deprecating poet who slung many influential lines.

I'm a poet. I write filler for suicide-notes.

Many of his poems had the unassuming title POEM.

I am left with the impression that he was a person who used the crutch of self-deprecation to attract the adoration he so sorely wanted but feebly worked to deflect so as not to appear needy. I lean on that same crutch.

I love poetry, but I only abide a handful of contemporary poets. I appreciate and strive to write poems that have, at least, these two ingredients:

1. Something for the reader to imagine; and
2. Some semblance of existential inquiry.

Bill Knott rarely fell short by these criteria. His most personally influential poem is:

POEM

The wind blew a piece of paper to my feet.
I picked it up.
It was not a petition for my death.

This poem is Bill Knott for me.

The title of this post comes from Bill Knott's email handle notknott@gmail.com. Having read his work and having watched him read at the Walker Art Center (circa 1980), I have come to realize:

What's not Knott is Knott.

I'm wistful knowing his work will cease. I knew him through the channel of his published poems. His quirky point of view and brilliant word-smithing influenced what I deem essential in writing.



Following is likely the last poem he wrote. It was published on his blog five days before his death. It reads like a work-in-progress perhaps in need of substantial editing. But fittingly it is another final poem entitled POEM, reproduced in it's entirety:

Friday, March 7, 2014 worksheet , , unfinished draft POEM That the acrobat would remain instead In the burning hoop rather than complete Their turn through it is a suspect thought. Why Halt there in that residual nought wrought, Assault that seary vortex, flarehenge shroud, Round and red as Plath's ovenhead. Ghastly Silhouettes of gaslight pervade our past; Kindled images drenched in daguerre, ancient To the point of banishment when evenings Vanish in a similar coup, v-neck-deep in Loinclothed caverns it's best to hide. Abide May elapse and they, framed by flames, fall from That looped height finale, that halo-hold On all our eye normally denies. Still, The signal desire to stay locked in such Arsonous arcs is one the circus rocks Against each night in its maze of dreams, Replaying the deaths that dared defy this ploy. Is this highjinks all our mountebanks allow: With thrall a ring of fire they marry the day To their devious acts and thus are at last Delivered, severed from its whole, that portrait Momentarily clicked past every portal Scorching their soles as they halt there bathed In that eye whose lashes fry their hair and toes Posing perhaps for the one photo its parade Maims our streets with, vicious charade whose Promised feats are purely made, not performed. One might imagine it were in the nature to occur. You could conclude this event was more yours Than nature's tiger tricks extinct already for Their blessedness, a mock phrase the lecturer Faces lions with, his tamed stallion stoned as They lean over the podium to watch us wince At each pick ax throe. That cam contaminates What it captures, bright cages bulge with fetish Divulgences—it freezes trapezes, these bareback Riders, nude knees. They cannot move beyond This figure, they must die there daily just for fun. Charioted into that charred station, this Stagey stasis verges on the absurd, what a coal Crude farce, though objections to imperfection Are part of the drama enacted by critics: Obsolete the sole acrobat's illusive tiptoe Teeter that flammable cameo concerns us; How the spotlight is mottled in the star, blotched By their performance marring each watched face. Such sight must perpetuate what it sought Or go astray: but is this status, this Jumpcaught bit what our linear needs To thwart its deliberately taut onslaught, Swan somersault halted strid-air, though no Continuation of the comedian In that conflagration could be the true Disruption, the correct avoidance of Transcendence: it can't taunt that denouement FX-splendiddy enough, unlike the way one's Living beyond their years in splatter or Pattern brings fit end to each leapt theft, Though certainly one stalls its engulfment with Curious realms of appalled affrights viz. An astral body coined in light, the vaunt Tumbler pauses there in their circ de solar Auto da fe, feral fireball our drone Missiles visit hourly to satisfy the spacious Prey of the ticket window's demands: Why do I care if they burn there in mid air Abandoned by the gruesome need to reach The applause line, to round the stadium track Racing for the tape across their chests hurrah While victor olympian marathonic greeds gild Post-event. Better calamity for them, they Should perish publically in clusters of cloud Clash fare, the bomb heard posthumously by The body it shatters. They should explode there; Let them droop like an upside down U from That white hot hoop. When Hart Crane sailed through The goalposts to win the game for Sodom High in Their annual grudgematch against Gomorroh Prep, he shone for a moment as bright as this, Each stadium cheering his radium. Fireworks To our face must fly the phantom bound pyreward Drenched daily from raucous Pompeii . . . But ask The acrobat: demand from her/him whether Hovering in that hell is preferable to The headlong hurl of time: does it protect The climax from commencement's rash intent, From end and then the only end of end, hails Larkin— You will have seen the sun as a figure standing Inside a similar wheel etched enfold, Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Sustained by his Refusal pall to ever leave this modest pose, That threshold of gold spits scarring us for The sacrifice that surely the crowd expects. Inca-high that knife gleams. History buffs Confirm his death and worship none but him Perhaps. Lingering, third-degree, ideal, Some hung circumference of furnace Festival. Like celebrant Empedocles We prefer an oval entry to eternity, Who saw how perfect circ his volcan rim Rose in its apotheosis of form, pure Aureate anti-goal, broken so un-coned And conjured in its ofference of O. Say it is this incompleteness excites us. If it were closed, if the acrobat aced Her symbiotic roundgame, if the goal Were capable of twinning its beginning gone, Would DadaVinci/VineVanGogh have cheated? Shall we salute, requite, honor, any Height which resists summit, disdaining each Ultimate point that might map our madness, Spurning the pursuit of angels who seek Peaks only, dullards pining for the crest's Honed sharpness of spite, groundsake shed where We doctrinaire humans find sync thread in Some secular oriel. Regardless of descent An actor takes their bow from this window Lit by licking jets as if its footfire Spanned the entire stage, or, thinned to a line, Led tightrope misstep regrets. Circling Whom is the audience, applauding for Coherence they griddle the enclosure With incendiary candles whose torch would Barbecue them if they dared abandon That pose their tragic-guarded aspirations Demand every artist must adopt: don't Bail and save yourself, Rimbaud, show-and- Flambeau, rainbow-scald us till we laugh. We love to see your turn-as-burnout blazed Across our bluetube skies, your moon Rockets die Titanic-wise. Hush-lit Orchesta pits await but why would she Not complete her set, traverse that fiery Core and trudge back safely in center ring; What need too urgent to gratify our slavish engine Moults us in that molten omega motif, Bold bad figure trying to transbolt itself into Pain's pantheon of prancing grindshows film Ilumed, from whom these testy trips descend; When cymbals cling their triumph there, why Does artifact elect the Paphos illusion, Scales wept in random arbors, desiccate Flowers whose vase unearthed the breach Of our first kin. Appalled sleep of the sentinal Culminating in twelve o'clock amendments and Celebrations—fixated by laminations of Dexterity: to remain there in that Shadrach Shade, that Abednego abyss where tapering Grapes render the host bodied as mould mouth, Incomplete transubstantation of the ashes Promised by such. Exposed to this apotheosis Of the will obeying its stubborn occupation Of the suicide it opposes, how can we Respond when there is no red in the blood to Accent the mime's whiteness that designates And underlines this cry for gore: nonlineage The liontamer opens each cage hoping to Channel the crossing over of the dice, odds Gods wrestle as stainedglass, angel porthole Jacob juggles with and must jettison the privacy Of, because the act must occur in the show: The acrobat could stand there on her gymroom Treadmill encircled by flames in solitude, who'd Care? Publication's scandal is vital, to air One's immolation's the de rigeur we pay for— Thrown wager against that hazard entrance, he, The exegete costumed in cameo, the clone Of our circular locket solar island marmoreal, Posited motionless and visual, this principal Model fixation focus of interest and poised Inaction, this cessationpoint where one's Lapidary leap suffers its defiant disgrounding Death around which cancellations flash And norms occur: in the tethered fire of its Incompatibility may we see this evanescent Foreign frontier erasure all ways the farer flies— A cat would not sit in that hot that long. Maybe only Bartleby can understand This arch refusal to honor the task and Go through the hole that enters the stale turnstile Of success, to land standing amid acclaims Less receptive than those flames that clapped us Rife for the briefest of blinks, captivated Spellbound, gaining that acme game whose contest Our feebleness would bear the better of, Wear its caesura more purely. What suspension In the poet's portrayal of silence, rude Interruption of the spectacle by this perched Ecstasy of decline, musing the stoopstance Of routine, elevating its spasm comically —The tragic transport is empty (Holderlin)— Barren, contradictory, purgatorial, Pause unconnected, discontiguous coup, Bridge-span the bride's threshold bloodied with Liminal costumes of grief. Who repudiates In spite of himself the gulf between this loss Of trajectory in a space wagered by weight, A grace of phases borne now by the citizen Brow, laurel yearning from emerging light to Observe their whole depleted origin, scald-version Displacing this usurpation of a course Reserved for lustral berth. Acro is a stand-in Syncly for the hearth whose gate waits to Consume this fence-sitter, unwilling arbiter Loathe to choose which of their substituted Phoenix-eyeflicks can span this whirlicue If only to escape the eternal bracing it takes That cut-out coin to fix cold within space A corpus collage, practicing whose personae— Unanimously deformed, incessantly lazy, Beyond seen clearly, veils cleaved, as when Your nape dawns for the headsman's axe and He spits to make its split-edge shine sharper For every arctic-pitted spectator— Investing the forsaken sky with this Decisive dearth is not enough to placate Alleviate our loneliness as probe-missiles Out-limbing him with love for his ice-cream Hat and hacked-off head, the holo-guillotine Honing itself against any lack of descent From that arcade's space capsule, or Anne Sexton painting the shade carbon monoxide Tints skin with in your car's career, cherry sword, Aureoled revolt upon the shocktuft tree: That she, the acrobat, should fear that sphere Of fire would seem synonymous with our own Hesitance, but can that figure sustain its ground Up there in transient facticity, that Matchstick myth mourned by all, mute-hymned To the core. In Summer harvest the hung Fruits manifest spirit, flesh hangs from an ideal Wheel flung and clinging to air's a-leaf womb Atmosphere toppling at hand. How near It roams its round of annihilated creation Emanating from the central outcast spun; Can the burning child awaken the father In time to be rescued or will he too grow old Against vigilance. Or must he watch over This oval cremation where the wind's kinks Wither infancy's summation, trender toward Spurious apparitions, godmaze stalled in some Corrupt word preferred to those I might throw; Any furtive shadow my launchpad had.

REFERENCES

• Bill Knott, Wikipedia.
• Bill Knott's blog.
• Remembering Bill Knott, Robert P. Baird, New Yorker, 17 March 2014.