…happened. It took place over here at HTML Giant, courtesy of Kyle Minor with analyses and essays by me, Matt Salesses, Steven Breyak, Peter Jurmu, and more. Predictably, Bill Knott himself was not pleased. “It’s funny how seldom those who ostensibly undertake to write about my poetry, actually do it—instead they often fixate on absurd secondary matters like the “presentation” of my books, publication formats and irrelevancies like that—really, what’s the point of swotting around such minutiae. I appreciate all honest straightforward appraisals of my work, but if commentators focus on trivial side issues other than the merit (or lack of merit) of the poems themselves, I’m insulted,” he says. He also says that the poem “Nuremberg, U.S.A.” (which, for the record, I did write about critically) is “a poem that will never be reprinted by me….”
Matt Cozart remarked, “Bill Knott, perpetual victim,” which: maybe, maybe not. When I talked to Martin (who introduced me to Bill’s writing in the first place) about it, he said, among other things: “I think he’s uncomfortable being in the world as a person rather than as the most recent draft of his oeuvre. Too bad for him,” and “So far as Nuremburg goes, he wrote the fucking thing. He can own it.” EG recommended I “just think of it all as a mad performance,” which, also: maybe. Martin added that “Even if Bill’s behavior is totally sincere, and not a mad performance, at some point he’ll die, and it will then BECOME a mad performance. Living solely through your written output cuts both ways, Bill.”
And even though I quoted it already at the end of one of my books, and it also got quoted in the HTML Giant comments, the best way to say “Happy Bill Knott Week!” is probably to cite this poem from his book, The Unsubscriber. Kyle asked me to name my favorite Knott poem for the interview, but if he’d asked me to name the best, this might have been it:
Wrong
I wish to be misunderstood;
that is,
to be understood from your perspective.