Bill Knott is the author of some of the America's finest, most original poetry. It is impossible to discuss post-modern American poetry without focusing on the singular vision of Bill Knott. A true maverick, a master revered by the finest poets of our time, Knott has been virtually ignored by both the American poetry establishment and the "avante garde." Among his volumes of poetry are: The Quicken Tree, Outremer (Iowa Poetry Prize), Poems 1963-1988, Selected and Collected Poems, Rome in Rome, Love Poems to Myself, Nights of Naomi, Autonecrophilia, Aurealism, and The Naomi Poems. The selection below is from Knott's recently completed manuscript, Plaza de Loco.

AFTER THE PERSIAN GULF WAR (March-June 1991)

1. Blitzbiz

I was born to dive into a straw, swim through
a straw, emerge from a straw—
Sudden, glistening, the mediabreak
made me drink ice tea in a sandstorm.

Now even the core of a sleepmask digs
in me for the place I love least to go. Ink-length
away, its sky the color of manacles will
hold my toes locked to another's fingers:

count up, with them, the death on them. Memorize
these faces propped against the hearth of an
earthquake daily, pure propitiates. Sweet

cathedral built to pyromania's standards,
Icarus parachutes into the midst
of a cockfight and look! wins his feathers back.

2. The Outremerican Religion

Emerson said I must know it all firsthand.
I can't simply take another's word for it—
no: I must go there, experience it myself.
But in order to go there I need a car,

need gas, need oil. Like Jack Kerouac
I must cross the country incessantly using
whatever-it-takes: like Elizabeth
Bishop I must never stop traveling to see

the world close-up, anti-vicariously, re
my Outremerican masters drawn one by one
down that road, out past that sea, unkenning

the cost, not reckoning the loss of fossil
fuels my ego entails in fulfilling this
me-feel-or-fail, I-go-to-be philosophy.

(Don't stop—
                        indulge
                                      my need
                                                      for unmediated
experiential
                     direct
                                 nonsurrogate
—fuck periphrase!—to

whom the immediacy of
personal hands-on
on-the-spot

on-the-scene
is vis â vis. Is Ism/ Real—
Artless. Autobiographical. Allyouall.)

3. Roadshow (Via Crucis)

Now the Saved the Lost
together must cross

Outremerica . . .
and down that downsome

road, god we’re gonesome!
Gas station stasis—?

or 'Moral Crisis'?
Hear our war, our prayer:

Oh Christian Fathers—
Reagan, Bush—give us

a nation fit to
drive children through.

In herds,
with guns at their heads.

4. Garden of the Aediles

It remains beneath the lids to be
seen says memory. Vestige is mostly
an orchestra led by a dowser,
veiled, a water traced in testament,

thirst for it heaps each drop with desert.
False tooth fed into a rifle,
that distance mows us down. Our
lens weighs what, our faith? Outtakes

droughttakes where pillars of smoke
guide more children digging boundaries
whose tourists long to obey

any songbird's prey. High from its wells
they soar, branches scorched in charcoal,
limbs perched upon a pencilsill.

Note:
I can't resist appending just one quote from Our
Redeemer Ralph Waldo: "Everything good is on the
highway." (But don't forget to bring your Gulf creditcard!)

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