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.

        In the museum hall, near the shocking air
        around Kiki Smith's Virgin
        (bold labia cast in metho-cellulose, shining
        glass pupils pushed into a paper head
        with no mouth),

                    The young scholar
                    in crisp uniform
                    drops his books

                    pages flap like
                    white doves.

                We lumbered beneath
                the slow grind of his boot,
                like common logs,
                surrendering ourselves
                to the odor of winter;

                The landscape hung its laundry
                across the sky
                in a sagging line of colors,
                baking in the afternoon heat.

                White birds
                caromed off undergarments,

        Death is a bachelor, but I expected
        His place to be clean. Instead, the bed's unmade,
        The long-past-polished floor's piled high
        With clothesheaps; takeout bones; the ruined
        Wreck of some machine it seems he couldn't fix
        To save his life; a dirty fingered
        Windowpane, beneath which, mounted on the sill

In this one Maxwell Perkins dips his shadow into white ink
while the dust of evening settles
soft as birdsong winces
when you bleed me with a compass needle ­ there I am
chopping trees into horses, puttin' my treasure X
in that there river, paring my fingernails
in famous grave ­

                throwing off this blanket

                of ignorance
                I pen

                on a train

                spilling lies and greed.
                around me

    My brief love for you held these things:
    transparent hope of women, restless
    copper-tasting kisses.
    I wonder if you'd ever had these things,
    held a fragile teacup in your palm,
    breathed gently into steam
    felt a wave of sex-driven grace wash over you;

    l Full House
    ll Greetings
    lll At Anchor Bank
    lV Damn Dreams
    V Things Looking Up
    Vl Bronx Oracle