1. I keep listening. Where are the words? I wander between stations. The damnation of the beloved Keeps me in fascination. Who shall be made real? 2. Will you arrive With your soft dresses Rolled away in your suitcase? Will you speak elegantly of clouds, Of forgotten shapes? Will you tell me with your subtlety…
The following interview took place on two occasions in July of this year at my apartment in Cambridge. Bill Knott drank instant iced tea, as is his custom, and talked easily once we had started. Knott is the author of nine books of poems, most of them published by small presses, beginning with the Naomi…
They were naked and the earth Was covered with light snow. They squatted and said nothing. The children appeared asleep. It got dark and they were still there: On a vast plain without landmarks, Under a sky the color of slate and lead, On an evening in late December. I’m told, but do not believe,…
Once words stunned the field, like sudden rain, as if Rain were the name of a woman, whose eyes drenched yours alive in the full torrent of saying exactly what she wanted to say. Then husbandry took over: the dry stare of a dry bush, piling one odd rock on top of another odd rock…
* I first read some poems of Bill Knott's in magazines nearly 10 years ago, in the Fall of 1967. I was a sophomore in college. I remember being stunned by the passion and mystery of the poems. At that time I'd only been reading contemporary poetry with any direction for a year or so…
Not a line, not a glimpse, not a second. Every eye no more inhabited than a fish. The fat on the old woman’s arm hangs like a white sloth from the limb of a tree as she airs her dentures in a tenement yawn. Eyeless, we raise our hands in greeting and touch against the…
We have learned a Mandarin language, an ingrown puzzle binding us to talk to one another— the many ones and others—to disengage with unfixing clarity our actual selves as figures from their grounds, the sheets of glass or broad leaves that hold rain like beads of sweat on a high arched, double arched, romanesque brow…
Our eyes unlash slowly one by one at last bald lids rise What for Mimicry re the poet’s eye looking inwards sees without the lashes’ soft-pleaded intercedence too pupilly cool cruel as muttered justice I call my goodbyes home in the dusk
Coffee keeps me dancing. My father drinks coffee all day, so do I— two of us troubling our hearts with a hundred miles between us. He’s a clerk in a hardware store: paint and machinery all day, TV and historical novels all night as suburban stars fall. May brings reruns, a cold, new appetites. My…
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