Poet's Choice
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Back in high school, I fell in love with Bill Knott's visionary poems, some only a few lines long. As American bombs in Vietnam were accidentally killing children, he penned this tiny gem: "The only response/to a child's grave is/to lie down before it and play dead."
His poem "Death" almost celebrates dying as parcel of the poet's dreamy hermeticism, that need to turn inward: "Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest./They will place my hands like this./It will look as though I am flying into myself."
Knott, who still produces some of the finest American experimental verse, became a cult figure partly through a suicide hoax in 1966. After collecting rejection slips for years, he sent a mimeographed note to several poetry editors saying something like "Bill Knott died an orphan and a virgin." His subsequent work was published under the pen-name Saint Geraud, a character in a 19th-century porn novel who runs an orphanage and sodomizes his charges. The fact that Knott landed in an orphanage after his father's suicide makes both the hoax and the nom de plume mirror-images of what we deduce might have been his private tortures.
Knott came out from behind his mask with his second book, Auto-Necrophilia. He's an iconoclast who pokes fun at the whole culture, as in "Some of My Problems": "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?"
Knott embodies what poet and critic Octavio Paz describes as modern poetry's "heroic-burlesque remedy," for in trying to marry the sublime to the ridiculous, he's attempting, perhaps futilely, to unite humor and love, life and art. In "A Lesson From the Orphanage," he uses the brutal social structure of foundlings to refute war:
If you beat up someone smaller than you
they won't (and histories prove this) tell:
look at those people on the opposite side
of the planet: they want to beat us up but
they're smaller so that's okay. Not okay is
that most of us will die in the war between
us and them, because small equals (and mice
