Profane Illuminations: Bill Knott and Surrealism

Yesterday I wrote a piece about Bill Knott’ supposedly “bad taste” and its relationship to translation and its corruptive force on “young poets.”

Surrealism and its collage-y practices is a major facet of this corruptive force. It’s impossible to talk about US Poetry of the 1960s - whether WS Merwin or Bob Dylan - without talking about Surrealism. This aesthetic came (back) into the US via small journals and poets like Bly and Merwin, as well as Surrealist groups like the Chicago Surrealists (lead by the Rosemonts).

Although he seemed to have a somewhat ambivalent relationship to Surrealism (as his blog comment to Montevidayo suggests), Knott was deeply affected by Surrealism.

I’m interested in the way Surrealism is so frequently depicted as “bad taste.” I wrote a piece years ago on why Larry Levis had to be cleansed of the influence of surrealism and translation. The same can be said of Plath, whose career trajectory Helen Vendler tried - frankly, very poorly - to recast as moving away from bad taste and surrealism when clearly that is where she headed for her greatest poems. It is as if critics need to clean the taint of Surrealism off poets before they can be considered “great.”

In his introduction, Richard Hell both minimizes Surrealisms influence and devotes a big chunk to this influence. After all, as I noted in yesterday’s post, the sub-title of The Naomi Poems is a homophonic translation of a Robert Desnos book. Translation and Surrealism are inextricably bound up in the US poetry of this era (and in many other places, even in Paris it came to Breton and co as a kind of translation - of Zurich, of war, of movies, of the unconscious).

As Hell notes in the introduction, Knott’s process is based on a kind of assemblage or montage, a jamming images and phrases together: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” as Lautremont once wrote. Hell quotes Knott:

“Because I don’t write out of personal experience, I keep notebooks and I have lines and images and I keep searching for where I can put them in. So it seems I can never start a poem and know what it’s going to be about before I finish it… I’ve probably got 100 [notebooks] by now…”

The book is full of surrealist montages based on this kind of assembling/bricoleuring:

History if made of bricks you can’t go through it

And brick are made of bones and blood and

Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can to through

Except a piano with rabies

or

Soon there will be no ideas but in things,

in rubble, in skulls held under the oceans’ magnifying glass

in screams drive into one lightning-void.

or

To read the future, gaze into your crystal asshole

It’s hard not to notice that the shock - and this reminds me of when Walter Benjamin wrote that the Dadaists and their cut-up montages were not interested in an “aesthetics” but a “ballistics” - of the cut tends to be a spot where violence/ war, filth/sexuality, or the grotesque enters into the poem. It’s almost like the signified describes the shock of the cut. Williams’ “no ideas but in things” is dragged into a war of “rubble,” history is beaten against a brick wall and the piano - emblem of effete European history - gets “rabies,” becomes a sick animal.

To invoke another phrase from Benjamin, in Knott’s poems, Surrealism provides “profane illuminations.” Instead of epiphanies and transcendent experiences, Knott’s poems constantly offer profanation, the grotesque. To have an epiphany in his poems means not going up into a rarefied moment of realization, but to delve down into confusion. The cut is the place where the profane happens.

It’s also in the cut where the capital P Politics enters into the poem. Of course in US literary culture, politics has often been seen as a kind of filth, unpoetic and tasteless. Surrealist cuts then becomes a way of having the politics enter into poetry. But his own poems cannot quite bear the politics. Politics is an obscenity. This is not the kind of “redemptive” poetry that we are seeing frequently these days - political poetry that teaches us to be better, nicer people - or which was espoused by a lot of folk singers back in the 60s. But for Knott: Money doesn’t talk, it swears, as another US surrealist of the 60s era put it.

Then there are the short poems… These are the most famous poems and also tend to be like little respites from the shock of the surrealist montages:

If you are still alive when you read this,

close your eyes. I am

under their lid, growing black.

or

SLEEP

We brush the other, invisible moon.

Its caves come out and carry us inside.

or

POEM

After your death,

Naomi, your hair will escape to become

a round animal, nameless.

These poems are surreal in some sense - and after all some of the best Surrealist poems are love poems! Surrealism believed in the transgressive potential of love! - but they also provide a kind of depth, quiet, and in that quiet we are for a moment freed from the pianos with rabies.

But then even the short poems are corrupted by war:

SECRETARY

McNamara the businessman sits at his desk

And stamps “PAID” on the death lists

Even the beautiful world of the short moments is corrupted by the Vietnam War. Surrealism provides Knott with a leaky, corruptible space - freed from the “experience” of the I with its “sincere” “voice” - to allow filthy into beauty.