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The Unsubscriber: Poems
Eavesdroppers fear
the hermit's soliloquy.
Wake up, wound, the knife said.
--from "To Live By"
Bill Knott's poetic manner--surreal yet vernacular, outrageous and tender--is unlike anything in contemporary American verse. In The Unsubscriber , he investigates cloning laboratories and spaceships, cemeteries and battlefields, talks to Damocles and pokes fun at Hamlet, witnesses the moments before a seduction, and charts maps in the stars and in forests. Knott tells fables, poses questions, shadows spies, and breathes new life into poetry's oldest love and war. The Unsubscriber is the first new book in a decade by a fiercely iconoclastic American poet deserving of a wide audience.
the hermit's soliloquy.
Wake up, wound, the knife said.
--from "To Live By"
Bill Knott's poetic manner--surreal yet vernacular, outrageous and tender--is unlike anything in contemporary American verse. In The Unsubscriber , he investigates cloning laboratories and spaceships, cemeteries and battlefields, talks to Damocles and pokes fun at Hamlet, witnesses the moments before a seduction, and charts maps in the stars and in forests. Knott tells fables, poses questions, shadows spies, and breathes new life into poetry's oldest love and war. The Unsubscriber is the first new book in a decade by a fiercely iconoclastic American poet deserving of a wide audience.
- GenresPoetry
136 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
89 people want to read
About the author
Bill Knott
142 books36 followersBill 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 6, 2016
The eleventh book by American poet Bill Knott (1940-2014).
Poetry Review: The Unsubscriber is Bill Knott's mature work, having grown and learned much since his first, 1968's The Naomi Poems. Sure there are hints and ghosts of his old work here, but this book was written by a grown man, older, wiser, better read, and more thoughtful than that youthful self. Not quite as angry, not as direct, less obscenity and thrilling to dirty words, a harder book than those from his early days, no longer a voice from the hippie '60s. No one was more aggressively self-deprecating than Bill Knott, both railing against a world that refused to reward or recognize him or poets in general, and proclaiming his utter failure and the abysmal flaws of his work. But this book came from a prestigious publishing house (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and I think Knott recognized the opportunity he had and threw every ounce of himself into this volume. There are long poems, a section of his beloved short poems, sonnets, haiku, poems of 9 or 11 lines, everything he could do. The Unsubscriber is difficult, but full of rhyme, puns, surrealism, wordplay, half-rhyme, portmanteau words. The Tower of Babel, Noah, Ripley (from Alien), Wallace Stevens (obliquely), Plath & Hughes, Damocles, Isadora Duncan, Sappho and Pope Gregory VII, Kerouac, Borges, Trakl, Basho, Adrienne Rich ("All future poets can be coined ... from the DNA of ..."), the Rolling Stones, and others form the cast of these poems. The poems are serious, deep, dense (Knott acknowledges the existence of "too many recondite allusions"). He adds footnotes to shine a spotlight on his methods: no secrets here! In a way, these are poems for poets, who could write three poems from each of these. The influence of James Joyce, maybe Dylan Thomas too, probably others I'm not even qualified to discern, is felt.
Bill Knott is the unsubscriber, the compleat iconoclast who never followed any hierarchy, who precisely walked his own road. And dense as some of the poems may be, there are wonderful lines that speak clearly:
A poem is a room that contains
the house it's in
As usual a metaphor
Meant to make up for
My lack of coherence
Always jumping from one pan
of the scale to the other, always
trying to measure
your absence.
... to remove
all consonants from our star-maps.
The infinite consists of vowels alone.
Sometimes the poems are more difficult, but always rewarding, with an underlying anger that builds slowly as The Unsubscriber goes on. Two issues enrage the author here: the current and coming environmental disaster that Knott terms ecocide ("Join Jack and his pals/in the endless adventure/of spilling fossil fuels/into the atmosphere"), and the crime of maleness, the sins committed by men ("Males must become an extinct species."):
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.
For Bill Knott, self-hatred is never too far from the surface. All I've mentioned above just scratches the surface. I found The Unsubscriber difficult, defiant, provocative, slowly enriching. And surprisingly I found it at my local library (the benefit of being on FSG). If you're a poet, in self or soul, this could be the challenge you need. [4 Stars].
Poetry Review: The Unsubscriber is Bill Knott's mature work, having grown and learned much since his first, 1968's The Naomi Poems. Sure there are hints and ghosts of his old work here, but this book was written by a grown man, older, wiser, better read, and more thoughtful than that youthful self. Not quite as angry, not as direct, less obscenity and thrilling to dirty words, a harder book than those from his early days, no longer a voice from the hippie '60s. No one was more aggressively self-deprecating than Bill Knott, both railing against a world that refused to reward or recognize him or poets in general, and proclaiming his utter failure and the abysmal flaws of his work. But this book came from a prestigious publishing house (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and I think Knott recognized the opportunity he had and threw every ounce of himself into this volume. There are long poems, a section of his beloved short poems, sonnets, haiku, poems of 9 or 11 lines, everything he could do. The Unsubscriber is difficult, but full of rhyme, puns, surrealism, wordplay, half-rhyme, portmanteau words. The Tower of Babel, Noah, Ripley (from Alien), Wallace Stevens (obliquely), Plath & Hughes, Damocles, Isadora Duncan, Sappho and Pope Gregory VII, Kerouac, Borges, Trakl, Basho, Adrienne Rich ("All future poets can be coined ... from the DNA of ..."), the Rolling Stones, and others form the cast of these poems. The poems are serious, deep, dense (Knott acknowledges the existence of "too many recondite allusions"). He adds footnotes to shine a spotlight on his methods: no secrets here! In a way, these are poems for poets, who could write three poems from each of these. The influence of James Joyce, maybe Dylan Thomas too, probably others I'm not even qualified to discern, is felt.
Bill Knott is the unsubscriber, the compleat iconoclast who never followed any hierarchy, who precisely walked his own road. And dense as some of the poems may be, there are wonderful lines that speak clearly:
A poem is a room that contains
the house it's in
As usual a metaphor
Meant to make up for
My lack of coherence
Always jumping from one pan
of the scale to the other, always
trying to measure
your absence.
... to remove
all consonants from our star-maps.
The infinite consists of vowels alone.
Sometimes the poems are more difficult, but always rewarding, with an underlying anger that builds slowly as The Unsubscriber goes on. Two issues enrage the author here: the current and coming environmental disaster that Knott terms ecocide ("Join Jack and his pals/in the endless adventure/of spilling fossil fuels/into the atmosphere"), and the crime of maleness, the sins committed by men ("Males must become an extinct species."):
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.
For Bill Knott, self-hatred is never too far from the surface. All I've mentioned above just scratches the surface. I found The Unsubscriber difficult, defiant, provocative, slowly enriching. And surprisingly I found it at my local library (the benefit of being on FSG). If you're a poet, in self or soul, this could be the challenge you need. [4 Stars].
September 10, 2008
I was a student in Bill Knott's poetry class, back in 2002 or 2003. I loved him as a teacher and I love him as a poet even more. His books are terrifically hard to find, but everything he's done is online. He's worth the work to find, seriously. I feel so lucky that I had him as a teacher.
October 30, 2013
I have a number of thoughts here about the 3 star review. 1. Why did Bill Knott have to use the word "ecocide"? Multiple times? Ugh. 2. This book is long. I suspect were it shorter, and the ratio of awesome poems to whatever poems remained the same, I would have thought it was way better. Something about all those poems together led the really good ones to get buried among the others. 3. He gets really into footnoting and explaining his own work about halfway through. I always enjoy notes. I find them helpful and informative. And these were that. But they were also quite man-hating and oh how they went on and on. And there's always the problem: if you really need the information in the note, put it in the text of the poem. If it doesn't warrant being in the pome--or the poem can't contain the information--then delete the note. Which is to say, footnotes are kind of half-assed. (Unless doing something formally for the poem, which these were not.) Perhaps end notes would have been better?
So, yes, 3 stars.
So, yes, 3 stars.
April 15, 2009
Some favorite lines
Poem-Suite (for Hoko)
"A poem is a room that contains
the house it's in, the way you
accommodate me when I lie
beside you..."
Poem As Usual
"Immediately I'm dead
Body laid out straight
Please don't hesitate
Just cut off my head
Lift it and lay it a foot
Or so below my feet
shift it till I look like
an exclamation mark"
Poem a lesson from the orphanage
"If you beat up someone smaller than you
they won't (and histories prove this) tell..."
True story
" We stole the rich couple's baby
and left our own infant with
a note demanding they raise our
child as if it were theirs and we
would do the same. Signed,
A Poor Couple. Decades later
our son racks summa cum laude
while theirs drapes our igloo
with beer cans."
Wrong
"I wish to be misunderstood;
that is,
to be understood from your perspective."
Poem-Suite (for Hoko)
"A poem is a room that contains
the house it's in, the way you
accommodate me when I lie
beside you..."
Poem As Usual
"Immediately I'm dead
Body laid out straight
Please don't hesitate
Just cut off my head
Lift it and lay it a foot
Or so below my feet
shift it till I look like
an exclamation mark"
Poem a lesson from the orphanage
"If you beat up someone smaller than you
they won't (and histories prove this) tell..."
True story
" We stole the rich couple's baby
and left our own infant with
a note demanding they raise our
child as if it were theirs and we
would do the same. Signed,
A Poor Couple. Decades later
our son racks summa cum laude
while theirs drapes our igloo
with beer cans."
Wrong
"I wish to be misunderstood;
that is,
to be understood from your perspective."
March 9, 2025
Sometimes Bill Knott is too clever and obscure for his own good. Many more times, I am in awe of his skill in toying with words, and stunned by the left field observations he makes about everyday occurrences and objects.
February 15, 2017
"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....."
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....."
August 12, 2008
I don't come back to this book very often, but it's quite an enjoyable read.
March 28, 2017
Bill would have had a field day with Donald Trump.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews