Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, edited with an introduction by Thomas Lux (Farar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00).

In his introduction to Bill Knott’s Selected, Thomas Lux comments that Knott’s first book, Nights of Naomi was ‘straight from the surrealist manifestos, but entirely his own. The poems are violent, dark and guttural.’ The poems in this beautifully produced book, are many things, some of them ‘violent, dark and guttural’, but this book weighs in as one of the more interesting books I’ve read, in a long time.

Knott, himself, appears to have been a mass of contradictions; semi-permanently broke, he published many of his later poems online, when that became a possibility. When Lux and a college mate produced Knott’s first book, Nights of Naomi, by letterpress on fine watermarked paper, they took it to Knott’s apartment: ‘We handed him a copy. He flipped through the pages for a few seconds and then tossed the book over his shoulder into a pile of trash surrounding an overflowing wastebasket! He made an excuse about needing to work, and we were back out on the street.’

Knott claimed a number of influences over the course of a long and very prolific writing life. In the early poems, it is not so much surrealism as the metaphysicals which seem to guide him. In the poem, ‘Operation Crosszero’, the second verse runs as follows: Shall heaven’s cycles of beginnings/ And ends hover concealed from the eye: What blitzkrieg visits have its big bangs/ Planned; whose planet-kills queue that blue sky.’ Metaphysicals on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis, perhaps. There’s a slightly tortuous moving through the images, here. And, in the weaker poems in the book, this movement occasionally adds up to a rather woozy moving towards and away from agit-prop. Like his great contemporaries, C.K. Williams, and W.S. Merwin, Knott was very against the Vietnam war; though many of those particular poems aren’t present here.

The other influence that pervades this book is, surely, that of e.e.cummings. In part, that influence is shown in Knott’s use of jokey play in the writing. In part, it is cummings’ particular sense of address; his bouncing of ‘you’ and ‘I’ across a poem. That poem might be a love poem but both Knott and cummings are intent upon pulling the rug from under the seriousness of the love lyric as a type. And that ‘pulling the rug’ is also a way of, ironically, emphasizing just how serious the love, itself, is. The last two verses of ‘The Spell’ go as follows, ‘But say these charms reversed/ at times, would I worry who surpasses me as versus you -// at times I could barely tell./ Better is good but not as well.’ Perhaps this is Marvell worked through the lens of Cummings, but Knott’s technical achievement is to make that perspective his own. Where the influence of cummings is strongest, however, Knott’s poems can sometimes seem fey and slight; Adrian Henri on a bad hair day.

Towards the end of this substantial book, the influence of a ‘metaphysical attitude’, as much as the metaphysicals themselves, appears more strongly. It is here, perhaps, that Knott comes into his own. In ‘The Retrieval’, Knott meditates on the difficulty of recalling the face of particular beloved. In tight, short-lined quatrains, Knott dissects in considerable, metaphysical detail how ‘one must gaze/ first into nothingness -// in which the semblance/ encountered should/ be blank, so it can flit/ across the screen of// expectation, and whither/ all the images there:’ Knott’s technical ability is to make the line breaks work across the long sentences, he works through the poem. And when, next, the syntax splinters and slips, that disruption seems earned in the context of the poem, ‘as we scan the past, for/ someone any the same// we could seem cipher/ enough to erase each/ old recognition held/ so long in our mind.’ Knott’s syntactic disruptions mimicking the way the mind plays in the attempt to reach images from the past.

Ian Pople

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