Craft: Bill Knott

This craft piece was suggested by Tracy Knapp. If you have an idea for a Sharpener, please let me know here:

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Bill Knott (1940-2014) was American poetry’s Andy Rooney. It’s unclear (even among people who knew him) whether his gloom and doom about poetry and his place in it was sincere or some kind of shtick. He was so alienated by the business part of poetry that he determined to publish his Collected Poems in self-published volumes that he would update as he made new work. However, after Knott’s death, Thomas Lux compiled I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960-2014 which was published by FSG.

Much of Knott’s poems are short, humorous or self-deprecating portraits, though he also made many poems that experimented with syllabics and other metrics. The overarching ethos of Knott’s work is sincerity combined with resentment. His blog was full of images of his many rejection slips.

Knott said:

That’s why I’m a failure, and why I have come to the elephants’ graveyard of failure, the Web, to publish my poems. I’m posting all my poetry to my blog because ipso facto I have failed as a print poet. Facts are facts. I can’t console myself with spurious theories that will “demonstrate” anything I want them to.