{"id":8435,"date":"2017-09-25T16:25:48","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T15:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435"},"modified":"2017-09-25T16:26:03","modified_gmt":"2017-09-25T15:26:03","slug":"bill-knott-i-am-flying-into-myself-selected-poems-1960-2014-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435","title":{"rendered":"Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014<\/em>, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"
Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014<\/em>, edited with an introduction by Thomas Lux (Farar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00).<\/h5>\n

In his introduction to Bill Knott\u2019s Selected<\/em>, Thomas Lux comments that Knott\u2019s first book, Nights of Naomi<\/em> was \u2018straight from the surrealist manifestos, but entirely his own. The poems are violent, dark and guttural.\u2019 The poems in this beautifully produced book, are many things, some of them \u2018violent, dark and guttural\u2019, but this book weighs in as one of the more interesting books I\u2019ve read, in a long time.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s first book, Nights of Naomi<\/em>, by letterpress on fine watermarked paper, they took it to Knott\u2019s apartment: \u2018We 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

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, \u2018Operation Crosszero\u2019, the second verse runs as follows: Shall heaven\u2019s 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.\u2019 Metaphysicals on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis, perhaps. There\u2019s 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\u2019t present here.<\/p>\n

The other influence that pervades this book is, surely, that of e.e.cummings. In part, that influence is shown in Knott\u2019s use of jokey play in the writing. In part, it is cummings\u2019 particular sense of address<\/em>; his bouncing of \u2018you\u2019 and \u2018I\u2019 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 \u2018pulling the rug\u2019 is also a way of, ironically, emphasizing just how serious the love, itself, is. The last two verses of \u2018The Spell\u2019 go as follows, \u2018But 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.\u2019 Perhaps this is Marvell worked through the lens of Cummings, but Knott\u2019s technical achievement is to make that perspective his own. Where the influence of cummings is strongest, however, Knott\u2019s poems can sometimes seem fey and slight; Adrian Henri on a bad hair day.<\/p>\n

Towards the end of this substantial book, the influence of a \u2018metaphysical attitude\u2019, as much as the metaphysicals themselves, appears more strongly. It is here, perhaps, that Knott comes into his own. In \u2018The Retrieval\u2019, Knott meditates on the difficulty of recalling the face of particular beloved. In tight, short-lined quatrains, Knott dissects in considerable, metaphysical detail how \u2018one 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:\u2019 Knott\u2019s 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, \u2018as 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.\u2019 Knott\u2019s syntactic disruptions mimicking the way the mind plays in the attempt to reach images from the past. <\/p>\n

Ian Pople<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s Selected, Thomas Lux comments that Knott\u2019s first book, Nights of Naomi was \u2018straight from the surrealist manifestos, but entirely his own. The poems are violent, dark and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nBill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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\u2019s Selected, Thomas Lux comments that Knott\u2019s first book, Nights of Naomi was \u2018straight from the surrealist manifestos, but entirely his own. The poems are violent, dark and […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-09-25T15:25:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-09-25T15:26:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/i65.tinypic.com\/n4abd1.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ian Pople\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Ian Pople\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435\",\"name\":\"Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2017-09-25T15:25:48+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-09-25T15:26:03+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/1e4c20066db3d71097155619e6d443a9\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, reviewed by Ian Pople\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"description\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/1e4c20066db3d71097155619e6d443a9\",\"name\":\"Ian Pople\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"caption\":\"Ian Pople\"},\"description\":\"Ian Pople's Spillway is published by Anstruther Press.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?author=21\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review","og_description":"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\u2019s Selected, Thomas Lux comments that Knott\u2019s first book, Nights of Naomi was \u2018straight from the surrealist manifestos, but entirely his own. The poems are violent, dark and […]","og_url":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435","og_site_name":"The Manchester Review","article_published_time":"2017-09-25T15:25:48+00:00","article_modified_time":"2017-09-25T15:26:03+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/i65.tinypic.com\/n4abd1.jpg"}],"author":"Ian Pople","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Ian Pople","Est. reading time":"3 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435","url":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435","name":"Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review","isPartOf":{"@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website"},"datePublished":"2017-09-25T15:25:48+00:00","dateModified":"2017-09-25T15:26:03+00:00","author":{"@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/1e4c20066db3d71097155619e6d443a9"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8435#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Bill Knott, I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014, reviewed by Ian Pople"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website","url":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/","name":"The Manchester Review","description":"The Manchester Review","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/1e4c20066db3d71097155619e6d443a9","name":"Ian Pople","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif","caption":"Ian Pople"},"description":"Ian Pople's Spillway is published by Anstruther Press.","url":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?author=21"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2PuXo-2c3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8435"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8441,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8435\/revisions\/8441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}