Selected and Collected Poems

by Bill Knott

Book by Knott, Bill

Genres: Poetry

121 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1977

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

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

These poems occasionally reach for some higher idea, some purpose, something to say, but most of them read more as if Knott threw a bunch of tongue-loving words and bodily fluids and swears at a wall and jotted them down in whichever ways they stuck. Which quite apart from not really being to my taste, is...tiresome.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Only a maze could remember your hair of buttered blowguns"
This is a line from one of Knotts poems that will always stay with me.

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of Knott's short poems are stunningly brilliant, among the most memorable I've encountered. Other poems, usually longer, are filled with surrealistic word play and convoluted syntax that I no longer find enjoyable.

[Mills College Library]

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