I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960-2014

by Bill Knott, Thomas Lux (Editor)

For half a century, Bill Knott’s brilliant, vaudevillian verse electrified the poetic form. Over his long career, he studiously avoided joining any one school of poetry, preferring instead to freewheel from French surrealism to the avant-garde and back again—experimenting relentlessly and refusing to embrace straightforward dialectics. Whether drawing from musings on romantic love or propaganda from the Vietnam War, Knott’s quintessential poems are alive with sensory activity, abiding by the pulse and impulse of a pure, restless emotion. This provocative, playful sensibility has ensured that his poems have a rare and unmistakable immediacy, effortlessly crystalizing thought in all its moods and tenses.

An essential contribution to American letters, I am Flying into Myself gathers a selection of Knott’s previous volumes of poetry, published between 1960 and 2004, as well as verse circulated online from 2005 until a few days before his death in 2014. His work—ranging from surrealistic wordplay to the anti-poem, sonnets, sestinas, and haikus—all convenes in this inventive and brilliant book, arranged by his friend the poet Thomas Lux, to showcase our American Rimbaud, one of the true poetic innovators of the last century.

I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960-2014 celebrates one of poetry’s most determined outsiders, a vitally important American poet richly deserving of a wider audience.

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Hardcover

Published February 14, 2017

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

[Jerrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished this one up and, while there were many poems I enjoyed, I’m lukewarm on the collection as a whole. Many of the poems seemed to have a sort of angry arrogance. I appreciate reading challenging work, though, and wouldn’t recommend anyone shy away from reading this collection.

[tortoise dreams · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first, and perhaps the last, collection of Bill Knott's poems published since his death in 2014.

Poetry Review: I Am Flying Into Myself is a selection of work by a little-known poet in a culture of little-known poets. Not only little-known, but thorny, uncooperative, curmudgeonly, and a writer who went through immense changes in his writing, from the almost epigrammatic poetry of his early books, through surrealism (or Aurealism as he called it), to the complex, thorny, intellectual, syllabic, more formal poetry of his later years, but always with his own odd and individual sense of humor. As the editor Thomas Lux notes, Bill Knott was "a school of one, among the American poets." Lux notes that he edited this collection of 152 poems from Knott's own collection of 964 poems, and states that he generally adhered to Knott's order, which was "meant to be random, neither chronological nor thematic." This books lists Knott's 12 books, which through haunting thrift stores I've managed to collect seven and read eight.The existence of I Am Flying Into Myself is a wonderful thing in and of itself, it makes me happy just to know I can hold it in my hands. It's interesting to note which poems Lux chose from so many choices: many sonnets, many formal works, so much of his wordplay, puns, games, neologisms, and the magic Knott found in words. At his best Knott works in elements of Joyce, Shakespeare, perhaps even some Dylan Thomas. I believe these are the poems Knott himself would have wanted preserved. As grateful as I am to Lux for shepherding this project, these poems are not always the ones I would have chosen. For me there are too few from the early books on which Knott, to his later regret, made his reputation. He never quite lived down his image as the angry, young, anti-war poet. Though I treasure all his work, for me the work in this collection is not as immediate, emotional, political, powerful as those early efforts. My only other wish is that there were even more poems in the collection (there's room). Here is one from the book, called "Goodbye": "If you are still alive when you read this,/close your eyes. I am/under their lids, growing black." And if Bill Knott was still with us and could see this collection, I think he would say something dismissive, about "sure, after I'm dead, what good does this do me?" But I also think he would be secretly pleased, quite pleased, and would eagerly and approvingly look through the pages, and would be just as happy (though he wouldn't admit it) that it's from a prestigious publisher like Farrar Straus Giroux. I Am Flying Into Myself is a good thing; look for it in your local bookstore or library. [4½★]

[elise anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

stunning, strange, crisp poems.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 4 out of 5]

ADVICE FROM THE EXPERTS

I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter’s curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don’t, don’t jump.

FIRST SIGHT

Summer is entered through screendoors,
and therefore seems unclear
at first sight, when it is in fact
a mesh of fine wires
suspended panewise
whose haze has confused the eyes …
What if we never entered then—
what if the days remained like this,
a hesitation at the threshold of itself,
expectant, tense, tensile
as lines that crisscross each other
in a space forever latent
where we wait, pressed up against
something trying to retain its vagueness.

PAINTING VS. POETRY

Painting is a person placed
between the light and a
canvas so that their shadow
is cast on the canvas and
then the person signs their
name on it whereas poetry
is the shadow writing its
name upon the person.

EVERY RIFT WITH ORE

How fiercely foilsome the facial knife shivs
its two blades up to where the forehead ends
as wound-deep-wedged widow’s-peaks: how weakly
the old hero hair-line fights back and fends,
each pass of day fewer gray strands save me—
how deadly dull’s the duel our sword lives.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Innovative, inventive, and wholly unique poems from a genuinely original surrealist. Bill Knott shoots for the very marrow of response from his readers. This is a collection well worth reading and savoring.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's a link to the published version of the review: http://artsfuse.org/161619/poetry-rev...


In a 1964 letter recommending interesting young poets to his friend Kenneth Rexroth, James Wright suggested that Rexroth look into “an unmistakably beautiful, deeply fertile, unaffected, marvelous poet…a young man of about 25 years of age who has the wonderfully unpoetick (sic) name of Bill Knott.” Wright clearly had an eye for talent. As the new collection of selected poems I Am Flying Into Myself shows, Bill Knott’s wry, playful, but haunting poetry has been overlooked far too long.

This woeful oversight might be due to the fact that over his long career (he died in 2014) Knott didn’t exactly seek attention, even within the sequestered world of poetry. Unpretentious to the core, Knott was given to bouts of extreme depression and self-doubt; self-promotion wasn’t his style. Knott strongly avoided being pigeonholed into any school or movement; he was a party of one.

A radical ethos complicated his approach to publishing. For many years, Knott self-published his books (rejecting covers he considered too showy) and made his poems available online for free, or selling them for the price of printing and mailing. Whoever was hip enough to know about and order a copy of his droll, accessible, humble, often brilliant, and winningly unique poems got more than their money’s worth.

Knott’s voice doesn’t strain to impress the reader with its perceptiveness and wit, but instead gracefully steps back to let its plainspoken magic do the work. A good introduction to Knott’s style might be his “Sonnet (To-)”:

The way the world is not
Astonished at you
It doesn’t blink a leaf
When we step from the house
Leads me to think
That beauty is natural, unremarkable
And not to be spoken of
Except in the course of things
The course of singing and worksharing
The course of squeezes and neighbors
The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out
And the course of course of me
Astonished at you
The way the world is not

This poem showcases many (but not all) of the qualities that make Knott’s poetry so remarkable. There’s the open, conversational tone, the informal but confident use of a classic poetic form, the unique turns of phrase (“blink a leaf” and “raving hair”), the pithy statement delivered with clarity and humility, the subtle nods to the political (the “neighbors” and “worksharing”) and the bittersweet juxtaposition of the poet’s tenderness and the indifference of the world around it.

In his warm introduction the poet Thomas Lux draws on decades of friendship, affectionately describing Knott’s enthusiasm and erudition, acknowledging the somber sides of Knott’s personality as well as his generosity, dedication to craftsmanship, and essential decency. Knott had a connection to Boston, teaching at Emerson College for twenty-five years and living in a series of dilapidated apartments in Somerville.

Knott knew well the world’s indifference, beginning with an evidently horrific Michigan childhood punctuated by abuse and neglect. “All my life I had nothing, / but worse than that, /I wouldn’t share it.” Knott was orphaned and institutionalized at a young age, as described in the moving poem “Christmas at the Orphanage.” His rigorous moral conscience couldn’t have been easy to bear; his disgust at the Vietnam War and America’s casual exploitation was absolute. One poem entitled “History” starkly lays it out: “Hope…goosestep.”

Beginning his long, eccentric career as, in Lux’s words, a “hard-core, blunt-force surrealist” with the publication of The Naomi Poems, Knott made an instant name for himself. The poems claimed to have been written by a poet named after a Catholic saint who supposedly died in his early twenties a virgin suicide. Unfortunately those intriguing poems are not included here. Hopefully, this edition will spark some publisher’s interest in releasing it so we can see Knott’s American vision of surrealism.

Investigating the cracks of meaning that open up through his inventive wordplay, Knott’s poetry reads easily but with a deep layer of complexity some poets strain to reach. He occasionally switches nouns and verbs, invents new compound words, and uses puns that incorporate writer’s names (such as “Rilkemilky” and “immallarmean”). The bold experimentation impressed his evidently not-insignificant readership; Knott’s reputation with other poets is very strong, with Robert Pinsky paying tribute to his “thorny” genius and Yusef Komunyakaa praising him, saying, “there’s no other poet like Bill Knott.”

Knott kept his wry, world weary eye trained to throw darts at the everyday absurd by writing many pithy, koan-like deadpan aphorisms, often titled simply “Poem,” such as: “Your nakedness: the sound when I break an apple in half.”
Here are a few more:

“Poem”: “Even when the streets are empty, / even at night, the stopsign/ tells the truth.”

“Bad Habit”: “At least once a day, / every day, / to ensure that my facial/ compatibility with God’s is nil, / I smile.”

“My Life By Me”: “Every autobiography/ longs to reach out/of its pages/ and rip the pseudonym/ off its cover.”

“Minor Poem”: “The only response/ to a child’s grave is/ to lie down before it and play dead.”

Knott’s sense of humor is generally dark and bends towards the absurd. He isn’t a misanthrope per se, but his incisive intelligence expertly cuts through all linear thinking: “The poem is a letter opener that slices/ a to discover b in which c waits/ and so on until z reiterates/ my metaphor’s acute dullness, its crisis// of belief.” Modern poets aren’t as self-assured about the exalted role of poetry as they used to be- modernity caused a pervasive self-consciousness about one’s language having a life of its own.

Knott’s poetic sense acknowledges that anxiety, but is determined to make something beautiful and accessible out of it. “The Sculpture” uses a striking image: “We stood there nude embracing while the sculptor/ Poked and packed some sort of glop between us/ Molding fast all the voids the gaps that lay/ Where we’d tried most to hold each other close…Then we were told to kiss hug hug harder/And then our heat would help to harden it.”

The love poems are exquisite, deeply felt and modestly passionate, but the sense of mortality waits in the wings. Knott’s meditations in “To A Dead Friend” are haunting in their irony: “mourning clothes worn/ inside out/ would be white/ if things were right/ if opposites ruled.” Though the specifics of his personal life are somewhat vague (will there eventually be a biography?) Knott’s sense of life was never far removed from tragedy. There are the long, rippling lines in the poem “Water” conveying the varying forms of the poignant phrase “I am the mourner.” “Poem In The Cardiac Unit” heroically fights to keep itself free of cliché in dire circumstances, and may have been the last thing he ever wrote.

It’s the book I’ve re-read the most times this year, and each time I come back to it I notice something new. The antic vision is always fresh. A great line like “I walk/ on human stilts” or “even your shoulders are petty crimes” is followed by an amusing poem imagining the galaxy as a deadbeat tenant, evicted by the universe for not suitably expanding fast enough. Perhaps what makes Bill Knott’s poetry so addictive is his uncanny ability to verbally twist reality, flouting and then changing a reader’s expectations again and again.

He’s the only poet I know who prefers his magic carpet “floating always/ right in front of me/ perpendicular, like a door.” There very few poets who could make the image that supplies the title of the collection pivot from fatalistic tragedy to imaginative triumph so neatly: “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.” Hopefully now, with this collection, there will be enough readers who are ready to follow.

[Max Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haven’t read much like this and really loved. Inventive and unapologetic— gonna read more of this dude

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.

So good

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my hundredth listedly read book of poetry, the best collection by an American poet, I'd suppose, unless otherwise convinced, which I'd consider most unlikely (because, good G–d almighty, hah!)

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bill Knott was a deeply odd man who made a total commitment to his art. For that commitment he was willing to sacrifice a lot, although Emerson College did a good job finding a way to support him for many years. After he retired he moved to Mt. Pleasant, Mi., where the poet Robert Fanning and others helped him get along. I met him once up there at a reading I was part of. I was nervous with him in the audience, although it was clear he would have no idea why other poets would feel that way around him. I remember his pants were held up with a piece of rope.

Tom Lux collected these poems from published and unpublished material and wrote a brilliant introduction (this might have been one of the last things Lux did before he, too, died).

I have to admit that I enjoy the shorter poems and the earlier poems most. Some of the longer poems filled with word play and using formal restrictions move me less, even though many of them are admirably accomplished. The elegy for his mother, who died when he was six or seven, "The Closet," is told from the point of view of the poet at Six. It might be a perfect poem; it is certainly deeply moving. The poems from the sequence of "Naomi Poems" still startle me with their invention and their passion.

Knott gets stuck as a surrealist; that is very important for Lux's interpretation of him, too. And apparently he would set himself automatic writing exercises like the classical surrealists did. But I find the bizarre associations in Knott's poems more witty, more chosen, less Freudian than the French surrealist work. I do NOT mean this as a criticism. Knott in many ways feels more human.

This book deserves a wide readership. I think younger poets will find something in Bill Knott that they do not find anywhere else. Perhaps his lack of "career" ambition and his almost religious devotion to his art might put off some people, but it shouldn't.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn’t too familiar with Knott’s work prior to picking this up, which I did, based upon the stellar reviews heaped upon it.

I don’t have MUCH to commend this book to lovers of poetry; there is just too much dearness out there. The poems selected here are truly hit or miss.

Some of the ultra short poems, which read more like quips, are interesting, as here, in “History”: “Hope...goosestep.” But many others leave me blank and hardly seem to be poems at all—not just because of formal issues or length, I couldn’t care less about such things—but because of their lack of imagination. Their banality.

But then Knott will write a poem like the absolutely sublime “Sunset And Noon: Marjory P.” and knock my head off. Listen:

“Each face strikes a different hour in the heart/...I touch/the face foretold as yours/(it’s like a boney honey in the sunset, pale laughter of leeches/...Then to rise by noon when the horizon’s tug-of-war is raging/To sink by noon in the white studio embracing/—The sky directionless as children who keep getting/kissed on top of their heads.”

Whew.

So there are maybe 4 or 5 poems like that. The rest, for me, are variants of B and C material.

[Norb Aikin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing collection! I was unfamiliar with Knott's work until I saw this on my library's "new arrivals" table a few months back...it kept crossing my line of vision until I finally grabbed it, and it does not disappoint. The Thomas Lux intro adds sufficient biographical information and sums up appropriately what you're about to get yourself into...a surreal twist on the everyday, and in-depth pluming of the thoughts many of us find ourselves letting pass because we're just not interested enough in knowing our own whys. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in creating word art that separates itself from the masses.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love the rhythm, rhyme, and wordplay. What a mind. What a talent. Partially biased by back story.

[Seth Steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The things we tame are what
entangle and turn us wild”

Some good stuff, some wasn’t for me.

[BooksRgood · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved these poems - most with a wonderfully warped perspective

[Tomi Olugbemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.
– Bill Knott

I came upon Bill Knott while writing and researching a thing about death. Knott is a master of short punchy but poignant poems. It's remarkable how something so short can invoke deep feelings. But it's not just short poems, Knott is as versatile as they come.

A masterful collection of humorous, clever and dark poetry. It's a lengthy collection of poems and naturally, they aren't all hits. I skipped many poems out of boredom. But when a book begins with a poem like Goodbye –"If you are still alive when you read this/close your eyes./I am under their lids, growing black,"– it holds promise.

[Ethan Ksiazek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knott’s solipsistic memories bleed in and out of all that surrounds him, inanimate, impersonal, all united. Read this while listening to Alaskan Tapes’ “Who Tends a Garden” and the whole experience made the tumultuous blood in my brain humbly submit into a placid pond. Knott is a rare mix of sweet-deprecation, hapless noticing, and effacement of an old ego, so what’s left of him isn’t so starkly different from dreams, memories, dust illuminated in the air. The word-play is also surreal and gellid as Hell, like painting your brain with colors you’ve yet to see. Excited to come back and grow with this collection.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered Bill Knott's poems in the heady year of 1968 when his first book was published under the penname of St. Geraud. His short, bizarre, surrealistic poems still knock my socks off after all these years. There were some in this collection that I did not know and I was entranced by them. Sometimes his surrealism is so far out, so dependent on allusions and sound games that I get lost, but there is lots more gold than dross in his works.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knott's poems are briliant--funny, heartbreaking, sometimes head-scratching--in their use of language. Knott knewthe elasticity and plasticity of English and of the long traditions of poetry. The best of these poems, as represented here by Thomas Lux, are often awesome in the truest sense of te word.

[Skylar Miklus · Rating 3 out of 5]

These weird, surrealist free verse poems are full of metaphor, metatextuality, and imagery. Knott seems preoccupied with modernity, politics, his own childhood as an orphan, and the state of contemporary poetics. The poems about his mother's death at a young age were particularly raw and moving. Others that don't work so well for me are one-line quips which read as pre-Tiktok Tiktok poetry.

[Seth Arnopole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the poems made me walk away from the book temporarily, some of them had me scratching my head (or my arms), some of them were irritants in the best way, some of them astounded me with their images, connections, wordplay, etc. These poems are often puzzling, enigmatic, knotty (or should I say Knotty?).

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If you are still alive when you read this,/ close your eyes. I am/ under their lids, growing black." This opening welcomes us into a collection that is surreal, playful, probing, and widely varied, from haiku to ten-page epic poems in size and from humor to melancholy in mood.

[Richard Subber · Rating 1 out of 5]

It looks like William Kilborn Knott thought that any rush gush shush of kin-dread words could be a poem thing.
I don’t think so, know so,
no suh.

Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com

[Michael Cole · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought I liked poetry, but I guess Knott. It took me months to finish this book. 10% of these poems are jaw dropping, but the other 90% I found quite dull and a chore to read. The shorter the poem, the better the poem is.

[Jillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most poems didn’t quite land with me, but a few of my favorites:

The day after my fathers death
My moms list of names
To myself
My theory
Another false execution
Questions
The consolations of sociobiology
Alternate fates

[Ksenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked some poems here a lot, a few were quite insufferable. What this book solidified for me was my general dislike for collected works, anthologies, and compendiums when it comes to poetry. However good the curation, I still much prefer reading them one collection at a time.

[Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

no pretensions present in this collection. flow and words and some tight immediate observations of this strange enigmatic thing called life.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Selected and compiled by Thomas Lux
An interesting selection that spans more than 5o years of Knott’s work.

[Jason Mashak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite.

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Ramsey Mathews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes complex and challenging. Sometimes simple. Like life.