To my August 19th blog entry on places to go in Seattle, which included a trip to Open Books, Seattle’s poetry bookshop, Glenn Ingersoll posted the following comment:
I was in Seattle a couple weeks ago and visited the poetry bookstore. Pretty neat. I bought Bill Knott's self-published chapbook and a couple other things and the proprietor told me Knott is a genius. Maybe so.
By the time I’d read that, I also had acquired the same book, entitled – in GREEN CRAYON on the cover – Short Poems, but also titled on the inside The Season on Our Sleeve: Selected Short Poems. The book is simply a series of short texts – two or three to a page 5½ inches high – spread out over roughly 64 pages (thus maybe 200 poems). The copyright date is 2004, but a check of Abebooks.com shows that Knott has been producing these volumes in relatively short runs for several years, sometimes under one title, sometimes under another. How much uniformity there is in these collections is anybody’s guess, but it would seem that most include some kind of statement on the verso page rather like the one in my copy:
It should be
obvious that if
I could have
found a real
publisher
for this book, I
wouldn’t be printing
it myself.
I took this little book with me to San Antonio this past week (where I learned that one way to get a vacant row on an airplane is to pull a book out of your laptop case that has a crayon cover). Then when I got home, Realpoetik – the email poetry journal – had sent me an issue that contained the following works from The Season on Our Sleeve:
SLEEP
We brush the other, invisible moon.
Its caves come out and carry us inside.
NAOMI POEM
When our hands are alone,
they open, like faces.
There is no shore
to their opening.
ANCIENT MEASURES
As much as someone could plow in one day
They called an acre;
As much as someone could die in one instant
A lifetime—
GOODBYE
If you are still alive when you read this,
close your eyes. I am
under their lids, growing black.
These are, in fact, reasonably representative poems – neither the best nor the worst – to be found in the book. Knott has a deft grasp of a homegrown surrealism – unlike many of the poets who adopted the mode in the 1960s & ‘70s, his work doesn’t sound like a translation. In that sense, Knott’s poetry has an integrity that has enabled it to survive well beyond the context from which it first emerged.
Yet it also registers for me what actually didn’t work about this mode – the short, off-kilter social comment – and why it was abandoned by so many of its practitioners over time – as Knott notes in an intro, even Robert Bly, the leading propagator of these sorts of poems, stopped writing them.
Poems like those Knott writes focus the reader’s attention in particular kinds of ways – mostly highlighting some single element. Such a setting tends to be heroic, which is something most Americans tend to be uncomfortable with – hence the oblique angling at subjects and use of humor. When the elements are all in balance – like in the first two poems above – it can be delightful. When one element is out of balance – like the too direct angle of the final line in the third poem above – the whole thing collapses pretty much instantly. It’s an art form of precision, with very little room for error.
But as an art form, the surreal short shot has an inherent weakness, a mode of self-deception that sends more than a few of these poems (and Knott is perhaps the best at this sort of verse) out of whack. These in fact aren’t short poems. Rather, they are at the low end of medium sized poems and operate at a sort of middle distance. Thus a one-line poem with a title, e.g.
TO COMPLETE
last one in the sentence is a rotten old period
suffers not from brevity, but just the opposite – it takes forever to get to that foregone conclusion, all humor & surprise drained well before the line reaches its end. Bad haiku can prove lumbering in just the same way. What makes poems like Knott’s appear short is not their length, but rather the Eurocentric tradition from which they extend. Compared to what are they short? Haiku? Gertrude Stein’s one line poems?
If they were in fact short, they would have to focus in with far greater attentiveness than they for the most part do. So to call them short is to concede that one doesn’t actually comprehend what is going on at this level.
We are fortunate to be living in the same time as Robert Grenier, one poet who genuinely has made a career of exploring what is possible in the short poem. His works are not only shorter than those of Knott, at least on average, but they’re more complex, more focused and apt to opt for something beyond a surreal laugh at a social narrative. Short poems often require writing not at the level of the sentence, but sometimes even within the individual word. In his great project Sentences, one comes across a poem such as
silence aggressive
which manages to be far more complicated as a text while using more efficient means of getting its work done than any of the Knott pieces quoted here. This is a poem organized around the use of the hard “g” in the second word, consciously contrasted in that sea of soft sounds. It’s an entire layer of writing that is absent from Knott’s work.
The great irony over time is that Knott’s poetry has outlasted the movement from which it emerged, but does so only in this sort of mock-art-povre self-published format. Still, it’s a more interesting presence than the thoroughly academicized frames that others from that era, such as Charles Simic & James Tate, have been locked into. But if this sort of soft surrealism is where the school of quietude goes to “get wild” – like that uncle whose idea of party time is a louder bow tie – then the promise of publications like The Sixties, Kayak or Cloud Marauder really has ended not in a bang, but a whimper. No wonder a new gen version like Dean Young spends at least as much energy imitating Bob Perelman as he does Tate.
Grenier, whose recent scrawl works are no less problematic as publications than Knott’s, has emerged instead as a key figure in the evolution of poetry. If in fact The Sixties was ever truly interested in the short poem, then I’ve never understood why it didn’t focus on someone like Grenier – a Trakl translator no less – and promote his work more widely. We might still care about the fate of that journal today if it had.
