A selection of Bill Knott's life work--testimony of his enduring,
"thorny genius" (Robert Pinsky)
*
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.
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.
