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 following poems are from his collection The Unsubscriber.

        Many decades after graduation
        the students sneak back onto
        the school-grounds at night
        and within the pane-lit windows
        catch me their teacher at the desk
        or blackboard cradling a chalk:
        someone has erased their youth,

            Who whispers here is forgotten.

            Saliva's emptiest fruit
            adorns the stones,
            words ripening your mouth
            to a spoilation
            of silence.

            I don't dare speak too loudly,
            some timbres could be fatal--

            that string is not too strong
            I think: and at times I have

            to breathe. Or maybe I fear
            my paraphrastic exhalations

            will spoil the oiled perfection
            of its sleekness, will mist

            over that brightness whose
            needle sharp point compasses

        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.

            Meadow of matchsticks,
            soon to be rekindled
            by Spring the incendiary.

            The exact flame of your blossoms
            will ignite the passions
            happily sapped by time--

        His task to watch an hourglass wash itself,
        A ritual cleansing that leaves him bare,
        Though no purification's new enough
        To nullify the need for such labor--

            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

        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