Word: knotts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
LAST CHRITMAS I was in the Coop, looking desperately for a present for an old friend, and I picked up Bill Knott's Naonti Poems. I don't know what I was looking for-I suppose I was expecting another dose of tense, burdened lyricism, or brief, staccato bits of free verse machinery-but what I found was the clearest, purest, most unpretentious voice I'd come upon among younger poets. Knott's images were whole and satisfying: for once words were the things they said they were. I bought the book and never gave it away...
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...
Then I read Bill Knott's Naomi Poems, the freshest lyrics, the most unabashedly real attempts at poems I'd come across in a long time. Some of them were bad, some were awkward, but the voice was true, untutored but true. This man has been going after poetry in his own fashion; he hadn't been following anyone's advice. As a result, his poems said what he meant, unconstrained by mentors and models and cliques...