Bill Knott was
born in Carson City, Michigan in 1940. His mother died
when he was
six and his father when he was eleven. He grew up in an
orphanage,
which he left at the age of fifteen when he suffered a
nervous
breakdown and was sent to an insane asylum. Released after a
year, he went
to live with an uncle who was a sharecropper on a farm
in Michigan,
and after finishing high school he was drafted into the
army. I met
him in Chicago in 1965 through a friend, who told me about
this
extraordinary young poet who worked on the night shift in a
hospital
emptying piss pots. One Sunday afternoon, he took me to see
Bill in a
rooming house where he lived. We knocked a long time before
he opened the
door and let us into a room full of books, empty Pepsi
bottles, and
one huge poster of Monica Vitti, the Italian movie star,
hanging over
his bed. He offered us each a Pepsi and we stayed for
hours talking
about poetry.
I don't
remember when Bill and I started showing each other poems, but
we kept in
touch by mail after I returned to New York. Then one day I
heard that a
mimeographed letter supposedly written by a friend of
Bill's was
making rounds. It apparently announced that Bill had killed
himself
because he was an orphan and a virgin and because he couldn't
endure any
longer not being loved by somebody. I didn't know what to
think, since I
had had one of my letters to him returned earlier that
week with the
word "deceased" written on the envelope in Bill's
unmistakable
handwriting, and figured he probably just wanted to be
left in peace
for a while. Not long after, his first book, The Naomi
Poems: Book
One: Corpse and Beans, was published bearing the name
Saint Geraud
(1940-1966) with the introduction explaining that the
name was a
pseudonym for a young poet who in fact was very much alive
and writing.
Of course, when my copy arrived in the mail, it was
signed:
"Knott (1940-1966)" and had that bit about the author being
still alive
crossed out in the introduction.
I find it
still to be an incredibly fine book of poems. Knott was
unlike any
American poet of his time, because he was influenced far
more by
European and South American poetry than by our own, with the
exceptions of
James Wright and W.S. Merwin. I recall him talking to me
about Rimbaud,
Trakl, Char, Vallejo, Desnos, and Lorca, and there are
traces of them
all in The Naomi Poems. As in his future books, there
are love
poems, angry political poems, poems about unhappy children,
comic poems,
and many poems about death, like this famous one:
Goodbye
If you are
still alive when you read this,
close your
eyes. I am
under their
lids, growing black.
Addio
Se sei ancora vivo quando leggi qui,
chiudi gli occhi. Sono lì
sotto le palpebre che divento nero.
Other books
followed: Auto-Necrophilia, (1971), Love Poems to Myself
(1974), Rome
in Rome (1976), Selected and Collected Poems (1977),
Becos (1983),
Outremer (1989), and many more. What makes Knott unique
among our
poets is that he made it extremely difficult even for his
admirers to
keep up with his work and have a clear idea of what he had
actually
accomplished as a poet, since he invariably quarreled with
his publishers
as soon as his books came out, allowing many of them
thus to go out
of print. To remedy that, he kept bringing out new
volumes of
poems in bound typescript editions, handing them out to
people he knew
or sneaking them into bookstores and leaving them on
poetry
shelves. Once the Internet came along, he posted new poems and
old poems that
he had tinkered with on his blog, gaining in the
process many
new readers and losing as many older ones. I imagine
it'll take
years to sort all this out and have a book that represents
his best work
in all its amazing variety, from the early surrealist
experiments to
his sonnets and other poems in traditional forms. The
day I heard
that he had passed away, I was broken-hearted and kept
thinking of
him late into the night. At some point I got out of bed
and went
searching among my books till I found this old poem of his
and heard his
voice saying it as I sat down to read it:
Mother's List
of Names
My mother's
list of names today I take it in my hand
And I read the
places she underlined William and Ann
The others are
my brothers and sisters I know
I'm going to
see them when I'm fully grown
Yes they're
waiting for me to join em and I will
Just over the
top of that great big hill
Lies a green
valley where their shouts of joy are fellowing
Save all but
one can be seen there next a kin
And a link is
missing from their ringarosey dance
Think of the
names she wrote down not just by chance
When she
learned that a baby inside her was growing small
She placed
that list inside the family Bible
Then I was
born and she died soon after
And I grew up
sinful of questions I could not ask her
I did not know
that she had left me the answer
Pressed
between the holy pages with the happy laughter
Of John,
Rudolph, Frank, Arthur, Paul
Pauline,
Martha, Ann, Doris, Susan, you all,
I did not even
know you were alive
Till I read
the Bible today for the first time in my life
And I found
this list of names that might have been my own
You other me's
on the bright side of my moon
Mother and
Daddy too have joined you in play
And I am
coming to complete the circle of your day
I was a lonely
child I never understood that you
Were waiting
for me to find the truth and know
And I'll make
this one promise you want me to
I'm goin to
continue my Bible study
Till I'm back
inside the Body
With you
