Nearly fifty years ago, in the fall of 1966, a mimeographed letter made the rounds among poets, critics, and literary magazines, announcing that a twenty-six-year-old writer named Bill Knott had killed himself in his Chicago apartment. The letter, ostensibly written by a friend of Knott’s, said that the poet was a virgin and an orphan, and that he was tired of living without being loved. Though Knott had published poems in little magazines, he was not especially well known; still, the news, which came just a few years after Sylvia Plath’s suicide, was unsettling. In 1968, however, a poetry collection called “The Naomi Poems” was published, which told another story. While the cover suggested a posthumous, pseudonymous production—its author was advertised as “Saint Geraud (1940-1966)”—the introduction, by Paul Carroll, disclosed that the name behind the nom de plume was Bill Knott. Furthermore, Carroll wrote, Knott was not dead; he was “alive and writing today (although the poet tells me that he would rather have this not known).”
When word came again, last week, that Knott had died, no one knew quite whether to believe it. Death makes deniers of us all, but in Knott’s case we had good reason to trust our instinctive disbelief. This time, unfortunately, the facts were unrelenting: on Wednesday, Knott died of complications from heart surgery. He was seventy-four.
I knew Knott glancingly, and only on the Internet. We first crossed paths nearly a decade ago, during what now looks like a golden age of poetry blogging, on sites like Harriet, at the Poetry Foundation. Knott liked to linger and heckle in online comment sections, hawking his self-published collections and lamenting his ill treatment at the hands of an all-powerful poetry establishment. To those of us who were young and green enough not to know better, he seemed, at first, like an ordinary Internet crank, the kind who scorns rules of decorum and proper English punctuation. In time, however, it became clear that Knott had a better gift for wordplay, and a wider range of reference, than many of the bloggers on whose posts he commented. He also had an odd penchant for self-deprecation: he insisted, loudly, on his own insignificance, and when someone inevitably informed us who we were dealing with—a poet whose fans include Denis Johnson, Richard Hell, and Mary Karr—the volume of his self-denunciations would only increase. “my poetic career is nugatory,” he wrote once. “no editor will countenance my work; i’ve been forced to self-publish my poetry in vanity volumes; i am persona non grata and universally despised or ridiculed by everyone in the poetry world.”
As though in thrall to the homonymic force of his last name, Knott seemed to thrive on self-denial. Never mind that he’d published collections with major presses, or that he’d won a Guggenheim and the Iowa Poetry Prize, or that he’d held tenure at Emerson College, where he taught for more than twenty-five years. Never mind that in “The Naomi Poems,” his first book, he already knew how to put together a perfect patch of verse, like the poem “Goodbye”:
To hear Knott tell it, none of this mattered. On his various blogs, which spawned and deceased like mayflies, he posted collages of rejection slips and a running tally of anti-blurbs: positive reviews and compliments that he’d carved up with ellipses to read like pans. In an interview published a few years ago, he even managed to spin the release of “The Unsubscriber,” a collection he did with Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2004 (a poem from which appeared in The New Yorker), as a desperate last resort:
Was he serious? You always wondered with Knott, but the mask never slipped. Elisa Gabbert, a poet who studied under him at Emerson, told me that she eventually came to believe that some of Knott’s pranks, like the anti-blurbs, were part of an elaborate performance: “It was kind of a goof, but that was his whole life. It was a really grand goof.” At the same time, she said, his anxieties about fame seemed utterly genuine: “He was just so suspicious of praise and of success.” Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of FSG, who edited two of Knott’s books, including “The Unsubscriber,” recalled meeting Knott at a writers’ workshop in Vermont: “He was pretty hostile. I thought, Well, why? I think he had a kind of phobia about the establishment. Belonging was not his thing. It made him uncomfortable. I decided, in the end, that it was just better to admire him from a distance.”
Knott’s voluble self-flagellation may have been some strange play for publicity, but the facts of his biography raise the uncomfortable possibility that at least some of his stunts—even, perhaps, his faked suicide—were expressions of unbearable inner turmoil. Like his alter ego, Saint Geraud, Knott was an orphan. His mother died when he was six, his father died when he was eleven, and he lived in an orphanage in central Illinois for eight years. He did a stint in a state mental hospital—“How I survived that hell I’ll never know,” he once said—which was followed by two miserable years on his uncle’s farm, and two more in the Army.
In his later life, Knott faulted himself for not being able to turn these experiences into poetry. But, here, as in most things, he protested too much. One of his best poems, “The Closet,” takes us back, wrenchingly, to the aftermath of his mother’s death, when he was six years old:
For decades, Knott had assembled private volumes—collections of sonnets, say, or love poems—which he printed and distributed in limited runs. When print-on-demand made publishing as easy as uploading a PDF file to a Web site, he let his anthological impulse run out to its illogical extreme. On Amazon, you can find listings for his “Forthfable and Other Poems Derived from Judeo-Christian Mythology,” “May Eagles Guard Your Grave: and Other Cemetery Poems,” “Poems About Buildings,” and, my favorite, “Beta: Poems About Things That Begin with the Letter B.” None of these are beautiful artifacts; most, in fact, are barely distinguishable from bound typescripts. But the poems inside, like “Sleep,” belie the brute practicality of their material trappings:
Though he parted ways with FSG after “The Unsubscriber,” Knott never stopped sending copies of his self-published books to Galassi. The latest gift, “Collected Poetry 1960-2014 (This Edition: 2/24/14),” arrived early last week. But even this was not Knott’s last publication. “Poems 12:49 PM (EST) 03/07/14” was uploaded to Amazon on March 8th, four days before its author’s death, and is already listed, uncannily, as “Out of Print—Limited Availability.” It has a single review: five out of five stars.
Correction: This post has been revised to correct the date of Knott’s death. He died on March 12th, not March 11th.
Above: Bill Knott teaching at Emerson College, 1987. Courtesy of the Emerson College archives.