Bill
Knott's The Unsubscriber
The Unsubscriber
Bill Knott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Knott is as fond of
sonnets as Borges is, hence his attention to one by the Argentinean, “To
a Minor Poet of 1899”, as two considerations of the fugitive substance of
art in frail hands, “Compact Dusk” and an after-poem on the
original.
Godard decreed
“in the future, television will show only reproductions of films.”
Trakl and Goethe
are treated in loci classici, “4 Transversions of Goethe’s Wanderers Nachtlied II” and “Transversion
of Trakl’s Ein Winterabend”,
the latter with again a prelude (“Poem for Georg Trakl”).
“A meditation
upon Bashō’s most famous haiku”
(“Mizu No Oto”),
an “Old Joke from the Ted & Syl
Show”,
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You’re wrong, you
bodkin, you big moose, You handsome sod: God is
in the profile— Got one, and you’re
God; you’re Ted Hughes;— Don’t got one, you’re Philip Larkin! |
Robert Frost
(“Winter Regrets”). Walter Pater, René Magritte, Graham Greene, Georges
Braque, all of these are the comfortable calling cards of a very friendly poet.
Mondrian collected drawing certificates, Eliot was a banker, Stevens an
insurance man (like Ives, and thus an amateur, the BBC must conclude), Knott is
a tenured professor.
His book comes with
a warning or two for specialists,
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I wish to be
misunderstood; that is, to be understood from your
perspective. |
That is,
“Wrong”. Knott’s perspective is given at once. The Flat Earth
Society of children, that “vain solipsistic sect” pondered by
Nemerov in his “To Lu Chi”, the simple expectation of word and
thing as cognates, Butley’s Reg and his “no bloody
metaphors”, this is the group from which the title is extricated.
Knott is a master
of deadpan, the tacit irony that spills over the observer. It is pleasant for
him to recall the vroom of Kerouac amid the penitential cells of his
heirs, and greatly amusing to add a long footnote on the damnable masculine
sex, concluding, “All future poets can be replicants coined from the DNA
of Adrienne Rich.” Incidentally, Emerson principally and Whitman are
cited as mock-devils in this vein. A great comedian, Knott, with a refinement
in his delivery that was simply lost on the Contemporary Poetry Review.
The general form is
divided by “An Interlude of Short Poems”, with a final section of
“Poems After”. Birth and death, beginning and end are roughly the
framework of each section. So, the entire book ends with “Alfonsina Storni”, who
drowned in the sea to forestall a death by cancer,
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Sea that swallowed your
poet throat Does not for the having of it sing less And besides only that cancer tried to float |
another sonnet, and one that suggests another meaning in the title,
“getting out from under”.
There is a long and
beautiful meditation on Isadora and Esenin (from
Russell’s film, in a way). Part Four opens with fourteen lines on Pascal
and small rooms. There is a poem “To Ripley (Alien 1-4)”,
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Always your face like a
space (Destination: beautiful)
ship Empties its mote of closeup trace Down screens that blink
blank blip |
also a memory of
“Mrs. Frye and the Pencilsharpener”,
groundling works in a certain sense, “with the net up”,
entertainments in the profoundest sense (the one known by Shakespeare and
Hollywood). The short poems have this capacity, such as
“Contrivance”,
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The perfect artist is the one who manages to die at the hands of the
critics. |
He proceeds from
“The Unsubscriber” to “Paradise” with Auden, when
“the writer / Runs howling to his art” in the sonnet, “Neckognition”,
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that whatever disappears can also go as verse whose shape’s
nape-known now. |
a dual art
(“By the River Baab”), its reward à la
Cummings,
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disappearing in salutations. |
(and
this is the place to mention Part Four’s “Gimme
Shelter”, a poem that seems designed to emulate Mallarmé’s “Cantique de Saint Jean”). The great
Kafka jape of “Circus: Aerialists” has us trapping them up there
till hungry or weary they fall,
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And sprawled in dust of
center ring May take back our lack of
sympathy When once like shadows
shown or less You lowered yourselves
among us. |
And with a characteristic
symmetry, thoughtfully applied, Knott elevates the thought once again in a Kafka
structure (“The Word”),
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I am the windowkeeper of the Tower of Babel. Whoever built this place put one window at its top and one door at its base. if there is a doorkeeper; if I’m not alone in here. * * * mightn’t some stir
occur in the vacuum of this hollow highrise, provoking its ghost to whisper at least one pure, one pre-word word— Maintaining my post would otherwise be a waste... |
At last, himself in contrast
to these burlesques, in the arms of the Muse, “Suite (to Hoku)”,
The
poet is an exclamation mark, head below to bare the
receptacle (“As Usual”), his portrait is in “Group Photograph
(The Early Years)”,
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Most biographies of the
Moderns share A common pose: ranks of raw
youth appear Often capped and gowned,
uniformly there— It looks alike in all such
Lives we read. * * * How of this many is there
but one self— Whose underneath name
obtains its caption— In book beside book, on
shelf after shelf? |
He mocks
a sterile fashion (“No Italics”), a venerable custom dating back at
least a quarter-century to a New Yorker poem tremulously answering all
questions with a Sibylline bird-cry, “Drink your tea!” He
continues in “Dream Amid Bed-Woods”,
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To somehow remain alow, to resist All berth above: you must
push off this soft Palleted grove, this tall, forest mattress. |
Kafka
and Poe (a great poet, great writer) combine somehow in “Actors: The
Denouement”,
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After each performance
comes catharsis as one more audience
member is sewn into the hem of the
theater curtain; some day it will sway too
heavy to raise. |
The
Prisoner is on (“Sub/Unsub”), the suicidal bubble, Mallarmé’s bave, wonders if its prey’s position
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is fixed then momentarily on the charts of our quantum ocean? The spirit drifts,
uncaught. |
We
come into this world with nothing, or nearly (“The Answer”),
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Only in departure whole. Arrival is always partial. |
The
clone as Poe’s or Wilde’s doppelgänger, “without
passport”,
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where does the line leave off and, leaving, does it end? |
In
“Labmarks”, an unnamed Friday’s footprints “at the
center of the maze” are desperately zoomed-in on by “spysats”.
The worm turns in
“A Lesson from the Orphanage”. Lovers go a journey (“Extended”).
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... Everything goes bright
then dark. Either emerges on a
further line. |
The
diurnal impossibility of any existence worthy to be named, as a sequence of
childlike propositions à la Rimbaud,
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His eyes devoid him of the
end. * * * Carrots and peas and
please go away. A child who never lived
where always did. My fingers through the woeface feel your face. I sank my youth to the
half in the cry that loved me. You wage the world in your
flesh daily, daily watching lovers
forge duplicate keys. |
Birthdays are
“a candle in a skull”.
“The poem
that hurtles from heights unknown” (Nabokov) is, in “Elementary
Lesson”,
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cloud loud as a chalk Rattling back in place on
the blackboard’s sill |
One of
Kafka’s or Rimbaud’s Bible pensums,
“Romance (Hendecasyllabics)”, has the Ark
paired with
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that surface image none of us desires to
engage in divorce— * * * ... to reach at last their offspring shore. |
A
fine pair of love sonnets (“Two Poems to S.”) have desire and solitude and love as a sequence of
fragments from the foregoing.
And here is John
the Baptist,
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caught in that unreeling
portrait called Arrival, |
bearing witness to
the completed self (“Succession”).
Prince and pauper
are interchangeable (“True Story”), experimentally proven with
changelings, anyway
|
the pure narrative we write in
order to write. |
Boulez was asked at
UCLA (by a strange character in nineteenth-century dress like an English
bump-feeler) if Mallarmé’s verse were not essentially masturbatory, he
replied, “Your Mallarmé,” and cheerfully asked the evening’s
moderator (Elliott Carter was across the table) how to say “l’absent de tous
bouquets” in English. So, very much so, Knott’s
“Monodrama”,
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Sky from your vantage of
death, try to see. Flesh drawn back for the
first wound, it’s me. |
Narcissus has his
response (“Echo Near the End”), Geryon
descends,
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Banking slowly the monster
completes its turn— |
a wedding, dreams
are the only surcease of murder,
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Suicides stuck to the roof of the
mouth, stupid tripod of spit. |
Erudite, a certain
amount of erudition is required. Yeats’ Complete Poems come with
notes on Greek mythology and the Flood and “Normandy, a region in
France,” but leave Irish pronunciation unaddressed. “I have to
quote that brute Ovid,” says Knott (“De-Evolution of the Poet in
Rumor’s House”), and
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Each time it tries to say
more than this The tip of the tongue must
wrestle a leech. |
Yeats’ editor
is spoken for (his rationale is worldwide distribution and the decline of
general knowledge) in “The Flaw”, Nabokov’s oculus, a blind
sun, a manifold teardrop,
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Must I also go aggregate
go greet A global bitter mime that
bears its white Situate amidst their
company sought Opposite I wake lost at
night without |
The transitoriness
of ephemeral culture in age (recalling a song of Carter’s) never comes
around,
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Mocked by how little of
its kitsch remains, We crave our carton, not
what it contains. |
Part I concludes
with twenty-three quatrains in a Nemerovian style tending toward Frost and full
of literary allusions or associations (“Relics with Old Blue
Medicine-Type Bottle: To X”), among them Pinter’s flowers, Arthur
Miller’s old pair, Mallarmé’s Baudelaire and Madame Bovary,
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What antidote waits,
withering, within Against that great
granulate upheaval of Fields whose depths have
grown archeological— Filled by fucked relics
and by that above-all Most subterranean of
discoveries, love? |
An intermission is
required, Knott provides one. After all (“Shower”), language is
mutable and shifting, things have a connotation, don’t they?
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I tie my handkerchief to a kite to try and dry the cries of the clouds up there. Pour, pour: oh, if only I hadn’t loaned my umbrella to that submarine! |
And so forth, in a
sequence or perhaps rather a succession of poems too brief to excerpt,
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Always jumping from one
pan of the scale to the other,
always trying to measure your absence. |
(“Weighed”),
every means is tried, even Houdini’s medium, out of this emerges
Beckett’s Rilke’s “Ichgott”
to its peers, and “Lovelade”,
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The sea is the cargo of
empty ships Moon bears the sun when
it’s gone My face with the trace of
your lips Will fare from now on and
on |
and a very quick,
telling “Poem” (which might be Rauschenberg & De Kooning),
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Dear boys and girls, please don’t forget
to underline my words after you erase them. |
before
Knott’s Matisse “transversions” of Goethe, a rest and a
warning to heed Dylan Thomas.
The
omphalos,
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Last link with the
Mother’s body, and therefore with the
self, I accumulate around you.
My belly oceans your lame island. * * * In some homelands they dry and twine the
umbilical-cord into a knout and then use it to spank the placenta,
crying “Bad! Bad! You made
me bad!” |
The
note of Velazquez (and Joyce and Greece) opens the freer Part III, which
continues like Rilke on mirrors,
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And no expert needs to authenticate these masterworks. We are the forgeries. We are the fakes. |
The
new Pharaoh of “Poem that Wants to be Ash” is bidden to
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Imagine a color so true every
prism it passes through
melts— |
“Excerpts
from the Diary of Damocles”, a great poem, is also merely the prelude to
its footnote already cited, Twain’s delivery and setup arranged
off-balance, deliberately.
The earlier
“Vows” (in Part II) serves as the linchpin (quietly, unobtrusively)
of “Wedding Party”, which coincides with the value indicated, a
trick Nabokov would enjoy. And now another literary satire, “Salon Poem
in Leafgravure”,
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Cemetery statuary should be deciduous * * * let crosses blossom, the tall crosses regain their nailed arms. Now all
the chisel foliage should follow
until the whole museum from within is
risen. |
The instrument is
toward us, double-edged (“To Live By”), commanding.
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Wake up, wound, the knife
said. |
A joke said by John
Cassavetes in Marvin & Tige, whose source is Mallarmé’s faun (“moins tristes vapeurs”), informs “Forthfable”,
Eve rained on by a teary Adam, imaginatively.
The dauber
howsoever out-of-doors, the taker of views, is summoned to his duty away,
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Meanwhile the hydra of my
soul needs just one more mirror
to see itself whole, so hold your
eyes still. |
(“The Sightstop”), whited sepulchers have a fashion cycle
of “Heilstyles”,
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Body by Buchenwald, shade
by Chanel. Nazi nurses infiltrate CIA
hospice— At Safehouse
Haven the dying agents Are coaxed by swastika
sisters to confess A. Hitler was their
greatest influence. |
Another style, the
random assemblage of words, stones randomly selected on a beach to create the
same effect. Eliot is alluded to in this context, and Breton’s hand
(“Rock Picked Up from the Beach”).
Goddard’s
tree is left behind (“Space”),
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at which point we merged
to remove all consonants from our
star-maps. The infinite consists of
vowels alone. |
Dead words in a
vain “Cemetery”, fingernail-text,
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one needs a hand bared of all uses, of all
trades: as ours is not. |
A Beckettian
construction, a sort of roundelay, “Later/Literal”. The problem of
language in a speaker read by a lip-moving lip-reader “From a
Distance”,
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less translation than
transference? |
The difference of
writing and written, pebbles in a paper boat (“Parable from
Childhood”),
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ripples horizoned by sky remain the only real cargo
aboard |
“In the
prison of his days,” cracks in the walls intensify suffering
(“Stretch”),
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...through which can be
seen fair glimpses of all the
others penned around us, the ones who deserve this sentence. |
Browning’s
trick (according to Borges), to burn the weary wooden horses
(“Merry-No-Round”),
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as once the artisan when out of the tree they were nagged to this neigh. |
“Fix
vertigos” or Eliot’s butterfly,
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and have my symbol also, a snail scotchtaped to a stopsign. |
(“Step On
It”). Some of the reviews, such as they are, suggest Knott as a kind of jester,
Hop-Frog at least. His own view for dull interviewers is called “(Poem)
(Posthumous) (Poem)”,
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I am that serene derided echo known as form, that
scalded snowstorm, I too trying to tiptoe up to its
conductor’s deathbed. |
So far so good,
critics.
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Around me far as the bare
can see fields shed whatever misprints my head
to toe showed forth as evidence of presence, |
Nabokov, again.
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And yet if birth that
always wealth be mine, may it gather suit to say
your name. Name? Say? Yesterday, tomorrow. Least
of all the days today. As closed as my eyes were
during their face phase. As open as they are now in
this latest guise. |
One of
Borges’ citation-poems, on the aurea mediocritas, suggests the
flight of sunlight, the bonds of earth, the poet’s rays (“The
Dawning”),
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I pray they penetrate always the dirt and find a place haven to our kind. |
“Face in the
Window”, the seigneurial poet reflects
in this sonnet on his stately person, a figure of accomplishment,
self-contained, white-haired, and in fact the speaker in Mallarmé’s
“Les Fenêtres”, and the counterimage not of “its one remaining pane”
but of a screen door and summer (“First Light”),
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a hesitation at the
threshold of itself, expectant, tense, tensile as lines that cross each
other in a space forever latent where we wait, pressed up
against something trying to retain
its vagueness. |
From Mallarmé to
Char’s horizon, so to expose the division of sense, Wilder’s and
Beckett’s dilemma (“Dearth Demise”), the
reception committee of Eastwood’s Honkytonk Man,
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the shape of your silence
when it speaks me is different than mine in
saying you, though both of them resemble
that spasm hymned as repose lifepause a happen of sorts the way the horizon’s a long
way without meaning to. |
An elegant way of
saying it, Bergman’s intermittence, qualified by the blank inconsistency
of the title, “(L)id”,
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Each time I blink Is a lapse in my life. Each blink outlives me. The one I was before The blink is never The one I am after. And the one I shall be Desires me to cease Quenched with each crease Instant of the lids. An eye juggled on The tips of its own Lashes might see Who I have been then. |
From Bergman to
Godard and the fate of finish “to die unsung in the original
tongue”,
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if words lost one of their
letters each time they were spoken, which word would
be the last intact? |
Finally, to
conclude Part III, “A Suite from Summer/Autumn 2001”, in five
sections, the irony of religious wars in “Testament”, the irony of
Futurism in “Room 5, Hotel Angleterre, Moscow,
December 28, 1925”, any nation’s flag misrepresenting it somehow
(“Memorial Garden, National Military Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia,
U.S.A.”), the great comic paradox that follows on this, “The Roadkill (For a Bestiary)”,
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(Phylum: Poeticus americanus.) |
and Nemerov again,
the final castigation of victory (“1946”),
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So I blame him and him and
him and him, All of them from Adam
onwards are men, meaning me, meaning the
worst thing I know. |
And there is an
instant segue to the meditation on Pascal that opens Part IV in quiet humor,
with old songs filtering through it (“Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”
and “You Belong to Me”). From Kerouac going nowhere fast it would
almost seem, to Greene at the birth of his consciousness,
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A dead dog at the bottom
of my pram Seems to be my earliest
memory. |
The Borges next,
the Trakl, then one of the latter’s lines as superscription to “The
End”, a view of John Ford’s The Searchers from the
standpoint of that threshold as not ours and his but the critics’, the
ignorant bloody critics’.
That rippling water
is talked around like poetic schools,
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Bashō by a pond heard
a frog make the usual
faucet-dripping-into-a-keyhole sound; it wisely ignored
his efforts to collaborate. |
Knott—Pater =
Mallarmé—Wagner in “The Singular (Nonasyllabics)”, a sonnet
on birds,
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Your songs define you
while mine unvoice my field of lieu and fail
to call up a likeness new enough from
the group auguring each face its
fate. |
The poem stands in
opposition to
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that rind that blinds us
with its consummate yield of polished
inveighed truths which betray nothing of the stuffing,
the seeds that rot innate tumors of meaning,
enemy rumors amassed across your
desk each morning. |
(“To José Lezama Lima”). A little resistance in the poem, a
little give, to achieve the result, not a pose,
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To pose nakedness is To refute it. |
Walter Pater,
“the Great Pate”, gets refuted by the jealous poet (“Transhendeculous”),
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... why shouldn’t I kneel by the podium and beg the conductor to
leave her baton propped upon my proselyte
head like a sword knighting me until I can
hardly rise from that ideal sill: one could
have no grail beyond that grace. |
The position is
Jagger (words) and Richards (music) in “Gimme
Shelter”, as aforesaid to the tune of Mallarmé’s canticle.
“The Four
Views”,
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Are you a phantom here in
your own home, or a squatter in the house
of René Magritte? |
Hérodiade before the saint with all her might is the poetaster
at “Rilke’s ‘Apollo’” in “Sureties”,
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You dance like wallpaper
thawing its father And still you lack that
proof-in-all, that aloof Olympian ennui, the
sniper’s prize. |