MaverickMagazine

Bill Knott

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 many 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 manuscript, Plaza de Loco.
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AN OUTREMERICAN SPEAKS

        Outfit your mirrors for departure
        though the rope-foliage looks nervous,
        hung from the harpstring hooks.

        Roll pause while the drugs pestle the place
        Sceptersweat, you are the grid, the
        grill on which I barbeque my b-b-gun.

LIFEGUARD CLINGING TO A STEEPLE

        Why are all the survivors of the needle's eye
        nude, as if their lifethread had disrobed
        rather than sewn them. Sans coat-fare,
        we proceed it seems only to precede;
        birth to burial, are not yet here.

FRAGMENTS FROM THE BEACH


        In retrospect the tragic nature
        of sea is a taste wept too daily,
        too depleted by freedom's rupture;
        the eyes have other secrets to see

NO WONDER

                There is no place in the United States
                Where you cannot arrange a murder
                For a couple of thousand dollars or
                Less, she said. This was Des Moines, Iowa,

                But I can't remember the occasion—
                I can't even remember her name, or what
                Her eyes looked like when I kissed them

AFTER THE PERSIAN GULF WAR (March-June 1991)

                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.

PLAZA DE LOCO

        It's high tide in the hero
        The floodgates fail the heart cowers
        Blood of his deeds drowns the town square
        Above it all this statue towers

DRUG OF YOUR CHOICE

        And so I write, "Love paces out its exile
        beneath an Arch of Triumph." What the meanwhile
        does that mean--pacing is going nowhere
        and the arch is built to remind a war

        to bring tourists. Overhung by that shrine
        (till infantry is the prose of pavements)
        time remains a frieze from a waxworks famine--
        vista in which we cum, sweat, become silent.

(MURAL) (MONDO) (NULFRESCO)

In Shakespeare's Last Supper the
        disciples (you, me, all of us here)
        are depicted seated alongside where
        He stands at mid-table and grins
        down like an MC at our expressions—
        are we shown, the goblets gleaming,
        gloating as they goad us on to toast
        the centrality of this spokesperson,

THE UNSUBSCRIBER

        Like all children, you were a de facto
        Member of the Flat Earth Society,
        Believing nothing but what you could see
        Or touch or whatever sense led act to

        Fruition: mudpies made summer beneath
        A tree whose measured shade endowed decrees
        Between light and dark: such hierarchies

SPACE

            From the trees the leaves came down
            until we joined hands with a wand
            and that act enabled them
            somehow then to reach the ground

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