Word: knott
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...scene is an MGM staff meeting on an out-of-the-way bench at Knott's Berry Farm...
...Bill Knott has been reading on college campuses for years, but until recently few people here had heard of him or his friend and fellow conspirator James Tate, who was the Yale Younger Poet in 1968, and whose second major collection, The Oblivion Ha-Ha, appeared last spring. If you were at Harvard and were interested in poetry, you knew about Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur. But no one seemed to realize that anything new had happened since. After all, Lowell was still writing, wasn...
...Knott and Tate are working together, and no one knows what will happen. These poets have learned to make their own rules. They don't really care about anybody's sense of convention or propriety. Their poems are as innovative and exciting as any being written today, and we are damn lucky to have them. We're even luckier to be able to hear them...
They have become, like the French decadents, our subtlest prophets of doom. Bill Knott's "colorless odorless tasteless miracles of lesslessness" are, like Baudelaire's spleen, symbols of the bloated, apathetic, decaying spirit of another botched civilization. In poems like "To American Poets," Knott aches for us to watch what we are doing. He knows there's no time left...
...Knott and Tate are not afraid to become engaged, or to withdraw, depending on how they feel. Tate's poems vary from the short, sly lyrics of The Lost Pilot to a newly wild and surrealist abandon in The Oblivion Ha-Ha, a book inhabited by immense animals and dreams within dreams. His terse, sensual allegories make deadly insinuations about our habits and fears...