Bill Knott: 1940-2014

I am saddened at the news of Bill Knott's passing, a poet whom I'd grown to appreciate greatly over the past several years or so. Perhaps a good deal of my own admiration for this poet lay in how little appreciated or perhaps how greatly disprized he'd been by his more fashionable contemporaries: a fact that had never sat well with him. His attacks against avant-gardists ("avanthacks" as he'd called them) everywhere were unstinting. I believe, in fact, he'd given us a useful tool--and certainly a language-- for dismantling the very bad poetries that grab attention always away from the very good. And his were very good. His critiques were never uncharitable in any sense of condemning poetic rivals for faults they'd never possessed; he'd reserved his attacks, rather, for the crassly uncharitable way his poetic rivals had dismissed non-mainstream poets, like Bill Knott, for faults they'd never possessed. He can be excused at times for a bit of surliness and invective.

As my own tribute I'd like to reprint here a post I'd written about him a few years ago. The views expressed here are quintessential Knott.
_____________________

I was recently struck by a blog post by Bill Knott entitled "can she bake a cherry pie" that initially left me shaking my head: wondering how post-avant theory & practice (or any poetics) could be so curtly dismissed, & in language that doesn't pretend to be critical at all. Just outright invective in a glaringly large font, hardly fifteen lines long, directed against the critics of Billy Collins everywhere who (as the owner of Bill Knott's prose re poetry blog contends) can't reconcile the popularity of a single poet with their own "poeticspeak", try as they might. And tried they have.

Knott's blog post seems to speak uncomfortably to people like me who really can't seem to account for anything like public taste either. If the best and brightest post-avants out there (presumably the likes of Silliman, Bernstein, Watten, Armantrout et. al.), "armed with their grad degrees in poetics, in post-posty theory", can't really tell the good from the bad, then we're really left with two options: to damn poetry theory or the reading public. And of the two I'm going to damn least the reading public. On theory & theorists he's pretty explicit & I'm inclined to agree with him for the most part:

Avant-hicks: I used to call them avanthacks, hacks, but hicks is I think more appropriate for these impoverished pockets so cut off from the rest of the world, saved in their isolation, incestuous, bristling, mad

"Incestuous, bristling, mad", indeed. Any poetry that's written to the specifications of theory can't help look lop-sided & a touch "mad": mad as anything that, as Einstein once quipped, does the same thing over & over and yet hopes for a different result. And why should cultural productions be exempt from this characterization? With Language theory you just get more Language poetry, whatever the practitioner, materials or artistic temperament, and if you expect anything interestingly different to arise, well, you must be a tad nuts. Even erudite commentators like Curtis Faville get hopelessly entangled in the insane circularity of a poetry that's slavishly tied to theory: as is seen in his recent discussion of Michael Palmer.

In fact, I might argue for a sort of poetic psychosis to account for the complete disconnect between reality & art, even going so far as to suggest (as I did in the case of Barrett Watten's Plasma ) the Language poem loses itself completely in theory, cast into the form of a literary changeling easily (& eerily) reproducible by mechanical means (such as a Google translator). And what does this mechanical reproducibility envisage if not a poetry that's been turned into a beast without a heart or a deleuzian "body without organs, or even a “natural language processing chatterbot” named ALICE to which Christian Bök recently posed a series of questions taken directly from Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris.

Does anyone expect a fashionable poetry interchangeable with translators, eviscerated literary tropes & chatterbots to be embraced by a reading public? Can ALICE really bake a cherry pie? After all, Knott had rather be asked, as he already has, to contribute to a Billy Collins poetry anthology than to one edited by more fashionable literary theorists.  Explaining the salient differences between them, he says in a Monday, April 4, 2011 post

Collins transcends the in-house standards of PoBiz, which most other anthologists are required to obey: he can include a pariah in his anthol and not suffer reprisals, whereas the other compilers fearful for their careers must exclude blacklisted writers like me or face negative consequences in their professional currency.

Billy Collins (if I read Knott aright) seems to have become the fearful Other of contemporary poetics, and with good reason. Like Frost, Sandburg & Crane before him, he commands an almost instant readership in his own lifetime & looks as if there isn't a single critical blemish to be found on him. At least that's the appearance & it's enough to make the "PoBiz" crowd a little flustered. The Language poets have only bought time for themselves by exporting their views into areas where Billy Collins will always be read with more enjoyment than Ron Silliman.