Bill Knott: "The Crown Prince of Bad Judgement"

Black Ocean recently published a new edition of Bill Knott’s classic The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans (first published in 1968), complete with a new cover (the woman now turns her back to the reader) and an actually good introduction by Richard Hell.

It’s a book/author I’ve thought a lot about over the years, and someone I got to know a little over the Internet toward the end of his life. The reason he reached out to me was because of my translations (he was a fan of Lars Norén like myself, having read WS Merwin’s translation in the late 70s) - and I think this is something that really defines him as a poet, someone who was, until the end, devoted to reading non-US poetry.

In his introduction, Hell elaborates on Knott’s connection to translation, noting that Knott had taken to heart Kenneth Rexroth’s argument about the importance of reading foreign poets: “The point of his essay was, as I understood it then and now, the since young poets inevitably have to imitate their predecessors, they would be better off imitating foreign poets.” The reason for this, according to Knott, was that reading poetry in translation introduced an element of noise, transmission, deformation that made it impossible to master the predecessor.

I’m of course starting to use my own language. In Transgressive Circulation (Noemi Press), I talk about the fear that “young poets” should be vulnerable to “foreign influence” that can infect the US lineage. Of course this is exactly what happened in the 1960s, when folks like Robert Bly published a heap of foreign poets who were more exciting than the New Critical establishment. Knott was part of that context, but, while Bly relaxed his xenophillic stance (at the same time as he stopped being so overtly political, stopped being so influenced by Garcia Lorca), Knott remained devoted to foreign influence. He pretty much announces it with the second title of the book, which is a homophonic translation of Robert Desnos’s Corpse et Biens.

In a sense he remained a “young poet,” susceptible to foreign influence. The very model of a “young poet” as being particularly vulnerable to foreign influence betrays a hierarchical anxiety in US poetry: there is something about youth, about those who have not properly mastered the status quo, that makes them corruptible. As I mentioned in my “Defense of Mimicry,” mastery is a way of quarantining the foreign:

… Steiner warns that the translation process is highly volatile: there is always a “risk of being transformed.” To master the foreign text, the translator must fully understand the foreign meaning and fully assimilate it into the target culture in the “appropriative transfer.” If the translator fails, the process of translation may lead to “infection” and “contagion.” They may lose their own voice, their individuality: “the inhaled voice of the foreign text had come to choke their own.” The body is a site of corruption; it’s where selfhood is lost.

Because the “young” are seen as not having mastered what poetry is, they are susceptible. We might say that Knott remained susceptible his whole life. Remained young.

It seems relevant that Knott claimed that Naomi was the work of a dead poet St Geraud, who had supposedly committed suicide (and was a virgin, a double “failure” in the eyes of our culture, but also gives him a kind of purity that Knott always undermines in his work). There’s a streak of failure that runs through Knott’s work. For me there’s a connection between the suicide poet who dies before their book is even published and later years when Knott was obsessed with the idea that he could not publish his books, and thus had to self-publish.

I’m sure he could have gotten his books published, but he seemed to feel most himself as a kind of failure. I remember reading an interview with him 20 years ago - maybe in Rain Taxi? - where he kept saying that Rich and Bly were “good poets,” not like him. I think people took it as self-deprecation, but it is more than that.

In her essay on him on the Poetry website, Sandra Simonds discusses how Knott’s “embracing rejection became an all-encompassing identity.” But also how this was connected to a love of filth and tastelessness: there constant presence of sex and genitals runs through his work, as if to debase poetry. Simonds refers to Ron Silliman writing about Knott that he was “the crown prince of bad judgment.” It’s worth noting that he's the “crown prince” even though at the time he was definitely past the age of being considered a “prince.” That is, there was an unfinished, youthfulness to his bad taste. St Geraud may have been a virgin, but poetry turned him into a corpse.

OK, I haven’t really even gotten to the poems yet, so I might have to write a sequel to this post, but for now I’ll leave you with one of his - possibly tasteless - poems from the book:

My sperm is lyre in your blood your

Smell wanders over me like a mouth

You die a moment in my eyes then pass through into my heart

Where you live as a drunk

Where yo live as that body burntNaked by the throes of your whitest name

River carving a death mask for these words

I paint the features of a face on the head of mu cock

But I don’t call it Orpheus

Bridge between love and paper between dream and quicksand I

You salt tongued to the idea abyss’ gaze

Our sunglasses broken like ciao

All of time battles your instant

You lie under cool enormous leaves once the sun’s eyelids

Your instant - into which dies mine and eternity’s and our’s

Sweat-bead upon your belly

It’s interesting to type these words out because it feels so much like some of the poems in my book The Sugar Book, which shares a love of the tasteless.

Just now I searched my email inbox and I found comments Knott left on the blog Montevidayo back in 2011, including this:

Of course Surrealism exists. There was a manifesto proclaiming its existence. And then other ones. And expulsions. And then a lot of stuff happened to complicate things. Including Stalinism. And other stuff. But it's *historical*, in that sense, Surrealism. Does Futurism not exist? Suprematism? Constructivism? Abstract Expressionism? It is what "it is" and you go from there.

Perhaps for my next post I’ll write about Surrealism and Knott.