Bill Knott

Bill Knott offers at his blog to email pdfs of his past 45 years of work.
One of my favorite that bounced around my head for days giving me chuckles:

INTERRUPTUS
Wait. What are you.
I’m a poet. I write filler for suicide-notes. Like:
I love you.
Alright. Continue.

I knew that M. talking about Nicholas Moore’s 31 versions of Baudelaire’s Je suis comme le roi… was bouncing off something I read recently and it’s in there, BASH (ten versions of furuike ya) .

If I were a pond
and some frog jumped into me
I wouldn’t respond.
I am a pond but
when a frog gets intimate
I keep my mouth shut.
I may look like scum
but some frogs can poke this pond
to orgasm come.
This pond is old as
me. That’s how bad-off it is.
Frog-visits, I doze.

And so on. He plays a lot. It seems an extension of how he loves the pivot and reframe, the refraining from one box for anything. In Volume 3: Quatorzains he introduces it saying

Why “quatorzains” rather than “sonnets”? I feel super-
stitious about using the latter term. I feel defensive and
or resentful: only real poets write sonnets, and I’m not
a real poet, am I. No, I’m a—a poet-biscuit.

A lot of people do whimsical and offbeat and throw in footnotes or asides but rarely with such quirky flair that seems at least as much for the reader’s amusement as for the writer.
I love that he does footnotes such as

Anybody who reads poetry can see the ubiquitous self-doubts poets evince
regarding the validity/value of their art. Compare that to the smug self-satisfied
attitudes exhibited by the advocates and practitioners of music. They take it for
granted that music is the highest art, the universal art, the only art that transcends
all borders and biases. […]
But if music is what its hucksters continually sell it as, ‘The Universal Language’,
what that means is that before the Babel Discontinuity there was no music.
Music did not exist before Babel, and will cease to exist when a true universal language
(and a true universal peace) returns in the form of digitaldata/pictovids exchanged
instantaneously by androids cyborgs robots. Music will soon be as obsolete defunct
extinct as humans are.

There’s surreal turn or few in the poems of Volume 3 as well, such as on p. 6,

LAPSE POETICA
Smashing the elixir of life while
shouting “From now on this is my life!”
may not be the best manner
to ensure progress, I know. One
never dips apes into human navels
in order to baptize angels,

What a rush of concepts mashed together yet by the end a sense.
Another excerpt from page 16

What avantgarde nonsense a photograph is.
Miscarriage of abstraction
Whose shadow has a breakdown
At the airport:

Whimsical is sweet but the surreal is imaginative that is interesting. Especially in Volume 3, there is a love to let ideas reel out there, and see what catches. It’s far looser than the epigrams earlier yet more depressed in a romantic Dickinson sort of way. Can you see what I mean?

GRAFTING BOARD
The way the grass weaves my walk into its
intricate bouquet, the sway of my hips knees
branches snatch and carry aloft all moves
that imitate apples cherries: orchard
(it lingers by the ways prior to it)
I could accomplish you who cry.
The days have their noise and I none else.
If the sleep I poach from is posted with
echoes, does tapping these trespass keys—
does each step staple a sapling to a tree?
Because nothing is changed by beauty because
beauty is a part of the way things were
changing anyway because it’s never
a catalyst but a process (I guess).

There’s phenomenal, almost pheromonal sort of draw to all the assonance running through the meadow. The first stanza makes me salivate.
There’s a grand sigh of mope and hopelessness yet at the same time a mind within mind picking apart itself and the poem beginning to untie the knitting it has done with that parting, (I guess), demonstrating the very process it is describing. As if he says Here’s a theory, no, retracted. Sounds good, but is it true or just can’t be left standing with one pov? It’s a sort of refusal to enter and linger in any moment.
He has a sort of comically ruefulness, but pulls back. All seems to underscore, nothing is purely anything. The darkness isn’t tragedy and the glory isn’t glowing. I think its the self-deprecation and irreverence that gets me smiling most. The way the mind undercuts itself from getting too precious is refreshious. Under the grand graveyard memorial, he comments, “Look, look, a graveyard has fancy dirt.”
Reasonably enough given the time, there’s a lot of poems. Some is quippy and quirky and clever and fun with tongue firmly in cheek hitting enamel truths. Like this gem from Q’s Volume One,

THE ENEMY
Like everyone I demand to be
Defended unto the death of
All who defend me, all the
World’s people I command to
Roundabout me shield me on
Guard, tall, arm in arms to
Fight off the enemy. My
Theory is if they all stand
Banded together and wall me
Safe, there’s no one left to
Be the enemy. Unless I of
Course start attack, snap-
Ping and shattering my fists
On your invincible backs.

I like he he takes things out to their further illogically logical end.
I love the name of one collection: A BUTTERFLY WITH A SANDWICH. The selected short poems, from the April 2006 edition, volume TWO includes this shortie:

DEAR ADVICE COLUMNIST
I recently killed my father
And will soon marry my mother;
My question is:
Should his side of the family be invited to the wedding?

I like the dark humor and absurdity, although lord knows it’s not much of a stretch from messes people get themselves into. And wouldn’t it just be human to have that quandary of I’ve murdered but real concern is in the proper etiquette for other rules of play for the resulting luncheon.
He resists the easy, the expected, the constant in writing his poems.
In Quatorzains, Volume 4, I love that he puts side by side quotes on himself that glow and glower,
“Over the years, Knott has maintained a prickly, poignant voice that
deserves to be heard more prominently in contemporary poetry’s
cacophony.”
—Ken Tucker, New York Times Book Review (April 15, 2001)
“[Knott’s] poems are so naive that the question of their poetic quality
hardly arises. . . . Mr. Knott practices a dead language.”
—Denis Donoghue, New York Review of Books
“. . . Knott’s originality as a poet: he is absurd and classical and surrealist all at once. A marvelously impossible animal.”
—Paul Zweig, Contemporary Poetry in America (1974)
“[Bill Knott is] incompetent . . .”
—Alicia Ostriker, Partisan Review
How many people would quote their critics as content?