Anyone know much about a fella called Bill Knott? I
don't, but he has some beautiful little poems in the
Penguin Book of Surrealist Verse. Never seen his stuff
anywhere else.
(2 poems by Knott)
SLEEP
We brush the other, invisible moon.
Its caves come out and carry us inside.
DEATH
If you are still alive, close your eyes.
I am under the lids, growing black.
X-Apparently-To: [log in to unmask] via
web803.mail.yahoo.com
X-Track: 1: 40
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 21:04:46 -0400
X-Sender: "Frederick Pollack" <[log in to unmask]>
(Unverified)
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 [en]C-gatewaynet (Win98; I)
Subject: Obscure and Neglected Poets
From: Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
To: "[log in to unmask]"
<[log in to unmask]>
X-Unsub: To leave, send text 'leave poetryetc' to
[log in to unmask]
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
Sender: [log in to unmask]
Being rather obscure and out-of-the-way myself, I've
always had a taste
for obscure but good art of every sort - composers
like Schreker and
Pfitzner and Magnard; in painting, late Derain. My
favorite biblical
verse is from Isaish - The stone that the builders
rejected has become
the chief corner-stone ... it expresses a personal
hope. I have a LOT
of poetry of this sort. The point, of course, is not
obscurity but
unfairly neglected quality and uncomfortable
originality. In passing
let me recommend the poems of Marsden Hartley; the
noted early-modern
painter, who died in '43, was also a good modernist
poet - Black Sparrow
Press collected his poems. And John Wheelwright - mad
Bostonian, scion
of wealth, Communist, harangued the workers while
wearing his expensive
camel-hair coat, run down by a car (WAS it an
accident?) in '41,
practitioner of a verse whose baroque hermeticism in
the service of left
politics bears interesting comparison with Prynne's.
(New Directions
press, some years back.) And Matthew Mead, a Brit
whose work I have not
seen, or seen mentioned, in many years. But now I want
to talk about
Hubbell. - Many years ago a friend, knowing my tastes,
gave me what
remains the best obscure, or obscurest good, book in
my library, Long
Island Triptych, Swallow Press, 1947, by a poet named
Lindley Williams
Hubbell. I could find out nothing about him. When
Kees' letters were
published I was gratified to find Kees, during the
war, calling H. the
ONLY poet doing anything worthwhile in New York. From
the capsule
biographies I learned that H was born in Connecticut
in 1901, was a Yale
Younger Poet in the 20s (later saw the book;
God-awful). In 1953 he
became a professor of English in Kyoto and in 1960 a
Japanese citizen
with the name Hayashi Shuseki. In 1971 Long Island
Triptych was
reprinted with an "Atlantic Triptych," begun in
Hartford in 1950,
finished in Kyoto in '64, and published by the English
-language Ikuta
Press, Kobe. By one of those strange chances that
befall only someone
who spends his life in used bookstores, I found this
volume - in Burbank
- in the late '80s. I have never seen any of
Hubbell's other nine
books; nor do I know when he died nor anything else
about him. Anyone
out there with a taste for incunabulae is welcome to
share my obsession.
Perhaps in some dusty second-hand shop in Perth or
Glasgow ... Again,
the point is not that the work is obscure but that
it's good - and
Hubbell means a lot to me.
>From Long Island Triptych:
III. Glendale
V
In the Devonian, Long Island was under water.
Fish were its most advanced inhabitants,
Appearing first, intent on love and slaughter,
During this age. Under the narrow sea
Crawled the crustacean, limited of sense,
And molluscs, contented not to crawl but be.
Majestically, where Glendale was to be,
The paddled antiarchi cleft the water.
The jawless placodermi, with less sense,
Were put upon by the inhabitants
Of this prolific and ferocious sea,
Having barely time to breed before their slaughter.
The acanthodians, as adept at slaughter
As sharks are now, had little else to be
Except eating or eaten, while the sea
Deepened and widened, and benath the water
Limestone was laid down. The inhabitants
Continued to grow in action and in sense.
=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get Yahoo! Mail – Free email you can access from anywhere!
http://mail.yahoo.com/
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|