Weekly Feature: Poetry at The Arts Fuse
Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.
PROSEPOEM
Each evening the sea casts starfish up on the beach, scattering, stranding them. They die at dawn, leaving black hungers in the sun. We slept there that summer, we fucked in their radiant evolutions up to our body. Ringed by starfish gasping for their element, we joined to create ours. All night they inhaled the sweat from our thrusting limbs, and lived. Often she cried out: Your hand! —It was a starfish, caressing her with my low fire.
Bill Knott was born in Carson City, Michigan, in 1940 and died in Bay City, Michigan, in 2014. In the years between, Knott traveled the country—eventually settling in Boston—where he taught for many years at Emerson College and published eleven full-length books of poems. He was awarded both the Iowa Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship.
His first book, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans (1968), first published under a pseudonym, received great acclaim, resonating with fellow artists and writers, such as James Tate, Jim Jarmusch, Thurston Moore, Mary Karr, and Denis Johnson—who based his novel Already Dead on one of Knott’s poems. Its reputation has continued to grow. After over 50 years, Black Ocean Press is proud to announce it is back in print, featuring a new introduction by longtime proponent Richard Hell. It is available wherever books are sold and on their site.
Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.
— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx
Bill Knott was/is a legend whose name spread wide. A friend once sent me a copy of a letter to Knott from Jim Harrison. It was in an inscribed copy of Harrison’s 1973 book “Letters to Yesenin” — a tender poetic “correspondence” with the Russian poet who hanged himself in 1925. Apparently, Bill was paring down his library, handing on things that he thought others might need. My friend picked it up at Avenue Victor Hugo bookshop (then on Newbury Street, now in Lee, NH). Inside was the letter to Bill (which read, in part: “I drank up the three bucks within an hour or so of getting your note. I have nothing to show for them, literally pissed away in this dark heartland. So here they are, and another hopefully flawless copy.”
Harrison’s inscription reads: “To Bill, with admiration. Some day our names will ring from Grayling to Carson City, from Carson City to Grayling, ding, ding, ding.”
I think he was right.
Very glad to see this, and all the love for Bill Knott. I love his work, and I wrote him up for the Fuse a while back: https://artsfuse.org/161619/poetry-review-bill-knotts-american-surrealism-a-magic-carpet-ride/