Stigmata Errata Etcetera

by Bill Knott

Mark Doty introduces this stunning new collection, the third in Saturnalia Books new Artist/Poet Collaboration series. Bill Knott has to be the only poet who can claim to have been for nearly forty years now at the head of both the avant-garde and the rear-garde of American poetry. Meticulous and formal, yet wildly inventive, Knott is among the very finest poets living today. Paired perfectly with his poems is the surreal and oddly beautiful world of Star Black s collages. Stigmata Errata Etcetera is a book that brings absurdity and wit into clear focus, reverberating with Knott s unique blend of heartrending humor and Black s playful and passionate imagery. As Doty writes, These two not-so-different sorts of creation together point back to the mystery of the new arises, out of its polyglot beginnings, one unlikely thing rubbing up against another. Found things, assembled with the strange freshness of the ordering eye or ear, bring new and distinct presences into the world.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2007

About the author

Bill Knott spent most of his youth in Chicago. He also taught poetry at Columbia College in Chicago in the early 1970s.

His first book was The Naomi Poems, published in 1968, under the pseudonym Saint Giraud. His many books of poetry include Auto-necrophilia, Love Poems To Myself, Rome in Rome, The Quicken Tree, Selected and Collected Poems, and Laugh At the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. He is currently an associate professor of English at Emerson College in Boston.

In recent years, he has several times made all of his collected poems available for free online.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure every poem here was a winner, but enough of them were to make me really glad I read this.

Knott runs up against the risk here of not saying anything but just stacking interesting words up against one another. But often enough, something jumps between the words, a volt or maybe even a just a flea, but it makes you jump a little, too.

Worth reading, to be sure.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems have a developed elegiac tone rather than the dominant atonal music of his earlier poems . "Sometimes a dream will show me the words I need…" "The shallows is where I sight myself" . A wonderful poet who's writings are for me superior to the derivative Cornelian collages of Star Black which fail to add anything to Knott's words.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful sound- and word-play. Love him. A bit from one of my faves, "Poem": "dissolve in draft/little whistlestuff/pathetic kisspuff/flimsiest flak/" and then... this ending kills me..."aloonaloft/aloftalloon/lost".

[Amira · Rating 4 out of 5]

"is it a fallacy on my part to assume
that the products of love are always
more acidic, more corrosive
than the products of loathing?"

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knott can move from tender to perplexing in a line: with musical assertiveness and imagistic grotesqueries or imagistic beauties. Surreal and sentimental both, these poems along with Star Black's collages, make for an unforgettable read.