Outremer

by Bill Knott

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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

[Masked · Rating 4 out of 5]

bill knott is out of his mind. he gets in fights with langauge.

[Kit · Rating 1 out of 5]

I mean, I like Bill Knott but this book… ouf. Absolutely awful. Read Corpse and Beans instead. That, and this (not in Outremer):

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

[Katie Schmid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again...like? Maybe not the best book to read during a pandemic? But I liked and was bewildered by so much of it.