Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems, 1969-1999

Book by Knott, Bill

In 160 poems ranging from one-liners--"History" consists of two words: "Hope... goosestep"--to extended satires, Knott moves fluidly through a career's worth of poetic forms, employing everything from tanka to hendecasyllabics. Regardless of the form, however, this collection never swerves from the deliciously mordant sense of absurdity that first brought Knott attention in the '60s and '70s. While his work is often referential and straightforward ("The wind blows a piece of paper to my feet.// I pick it up.// It is not a petition for my death."), Knott intensifies his lines, at times, by torquing syntax and fusing words: "Knee-plenty take me. The topsheet teethes on us;/ the cunning foreskin heaps up nakedness." Following his forms, Knott's subject matter spans from put-downs of the work of Eugenio Montale and Galway Kinnell to a satire on a singles cruise and scathing send-ups of consumerism. But while full of brilliant vitriol, Knott's absurdity sometimes bleeds into inanity, and his over-the-top style can be wearying: "Fallen wart, comrade, hacked off by haste or/ the CIA, hey wart, whoa wart. Here you go,/ wartypoo, into this test-tube with you." Nonetheless, this book stands as much-needed retrospective of one the more distinctive and talented poets to cast himself out of the counter-cultural ferment. (June)

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Bill Knott has always taken the position of a non-joiner, an outsider, a comedian and a crank, a deflator, a sufferer. "I wish to be misunderstood," he says wryly in his tiny poem "Wrong" -- "that is,/ to be understood from your perspective." Knott is a sort of Bartleby the Scrivener of lyric poetry, a prolific writer who puns often on his name (knot, not) and has gone his own idiosyncratic way for 35 years and 11 volumes, which include Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969-1999. He is, to borrow the title of his new book, the quintessential "Unsubscriber."

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
Gave you implicit a sophistic faith --
(Fallacious fellowship!) --
Youth's adherents
Ignore the fact that most factions reject
Their lyric league (which only fools have stayed
Striplings of) and none condone its nonsense:
No one loves that vain solipsistic sect
You'd never join, whose dues you've always paid.

Knott has cultivated a surreal wit and an offbeat vernacular style that has moments of high lyricism and deep despair. I was 18 when I read his first book, The Naomi Poems: Book One: Corpse and Beans (Big Table, 1968) published under the pseudonym St. Geraud (1940-1966). The author's note stunned me ("Bill Knott (1940-1966) is a virgin and a suicide"), and so did some of the radically short poems, such as this brief elegy --

Death
Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

and this dark farewell --
Goodbye
If you are still alive when you read this,
close your eyes. I am
under their lids, growing black.

Knott has always had a weird, self-deprecating sense of humor and a tortured sensibility. At times he seems like a lesser Robert Desnos, the French surrealist who combined a gift for associative thinking with a deep humanity. Like Desnos, Knott has a flair for strange images and a sneaky formal sense. He likes to play with the sonnet form (see his responses to Borges, Trakl and Basho in his new book) and thinks of a poem as "a room that contains/ the house it's in." He likes to play with sound and count syllables -- a typical title is "Romance (Hendecasyllabics)"; to coin words ("Neckcognition," "Transhendeculous") and compound them ("Forthfable," "Heilstyles").

Above all, Knott is willing to take in -- to take on -- the subject of suffering, which he approaches from his own offbeat and genuine angle ("in the Orphanage, hell, even if they do tell/ on you there's no one for them to tell it to"). Here is a four-line poem, for example, that seems to me to hover somewhere near Flannery O'Connor's zone:

Crux
Do they let you still keep your crutches when
they crucify you, as if you could even manage
the goshdarn things with your hands out like that.
Heck, they'd have to nail them up to your armpits.

By Edward Hirsch
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.