Auto-necrophilia; the----poems, book 2

by Bill Knott

Softcover book

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

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

[Jeff Jackson]

TO MY ENEMIES
I will ruin you
By leaving my fingerprints
On all your crimes

POLITICS
Am I Left or Right?
-I can be located exactly arm's-length
from either of my hands

POEM
One of the old guys said
a good test of poetry was
that if you thought of a true
poem while shaving you'd cut yourself
well
lots of times I'll be reading a poem
and stop right in the middle
cause I remembered
the great shaves I get
from my Wilkinson Sword-Edge blades

POEM
Page 34,
Cry of the Peacocks,
by Naomi Lazard
(Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967)

POEM
The wind blew a piece of paper to my feet.
I picked it up.
It was not a petition for my death.

POEM
Your nakedness: The sound when I break an apple in half.

[tortoise dreams]

The third book by American poet Bill Knott (1940-2014).

Poetry Review: Auto-Necrophilia is more than a bizarre title. Artists as diverse as Mary Karr, Charles Simic, and Richard Hell have cited Bill Knott as an influence. In Auto-Necrophilia, Knott very much continues the feel of The Naomi Poems (published in 1968), warranting its sub-title: "The ____ Poems. Book 2." The chapbook, Aurealism: A Study (1970), was published between these two books. In that one and this, Bill Knott assumed his own name (no longer using the pseudonym Saint Geraud, as he did with The Naomi Poems), although he still appends the fictional life dates "(1940-1966)" to his name. One of the poems in Auto Necrophilia addresses the pseudonym issue:

I don't use a pen-name anymore
I don't use a pen anymore
I don't write anymore
I just sit looking at the wastebasket
With this alert intelligent look on my face

Vietnam is less an obvious theme here than the previous book (tho the war is still a subtext to many of the pieces):

if you understand something
explain it to me
but real slow
and use one-syllable corpses

There aren't quite as many of the short, incisive poems in Auto-Necrophilia, but they still have an effect:

I am the only one who can say
"I have never been in anyone's dreams"
Your nakedness: the sound when I break an apple in half

- - - - -

The wind blew a piece of paper to my feet.
I picked it up.
It was not a petition for my death.

Generally the poems are longer, and there's a noticeable increase in the surrealism (or is it Aurealism?) in the pieces:

The spinal-fusion taps at the window of blank pennies.

- - - - -

Lyricism is the elaboration of a moment's cowardice
For example the rows of shoes surrounding an empty lighthouse

Usually I'm not a fan of surrealism when it's just to appear weird and randomly juxtapose incongruous images, but Bill Knott's surrealism works on two levels. First, there's a method to his madness, there is a meaningful underlying message, it's not aimless even if I don't always get it. Second, the power of his images, even when opaque, are so good that I can just read his lines for the pleasure of the ride:

You slash your throat with a butterfly

- - - - -

Even your shoulders are petty crimes

Knott's anger and antagonistic nature are well on display, the kind of person who's only happy when he's unhappy, rarely allowing the status quo to linger, overturning the apple cart whenever things seem to be going too well. As more evidence of Knott's contrary nature, the Table of Contents does not include the actual poem titles, most of which are simply "Poem," but are the titles of B-movie horror films. The poems are also full of his usual puns and wordplay and an insistence on provocative tastelessness (such as the book's title).

I'm admittedly a Bill Knott fan, if you can find his books, you might be too. [5 Stars]

[Vicky]

A display of unexpected images. Some of these poems make no sense, some of them make total sense. Even though I was thinking of e.e.cummings, the voice here is very separate, with its own sarcasm and self-deprecating humor at times. Unpretentious, uninhibited, non-chalant: Bill Knott is too cool. I found him a while ago and read the same ten poems over and over, and finally today I checked out all his books from the library. A couple of them I couldn't take out because they are so out-dated and not entered into "the system"--laugh out loud--but I'm glad to have come upon them now. Gems.

Here's one of the poems:

POEM

Page 34,
Cry of the Peacocks,
By Naomi Lazard
(Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967).


Here's another one:

PROSEPOEM

First, make a 100 minute movie. Then take the 1 million 440 thousand frames, or stills; take each frame, blow it up, maybe silkscreen it, then take all 1 million 440 thousand pictures, hang them in a gallery, consecutively in a line so the first frame of the movie is the first picture and the last, last. Then have the people who come in run past the 1 million 440 thousand pictures, so that in this way they become both spectator and projector. Oh yes, the movie: have it be about the smell of outer inertia.

[Eveline Chao]

These poems are SO weird and SO great. One of the best lines is, "I'm a poet. I write filler for suicide-notes."

Here are a couple of the poems:

POEM

The wind blew a piece of paper to my feet.
I picked it up.
It was not a petition for my death.

NO-ACT PLAY

I'm sitting alone in my rented room.

A door knocks at the door.

I don't answer.

It goes away.

Later I leave the room, and go to my crummy job.

The door returns, and knocks again.

It is admitted.

TO MY ENEMIES

I will ruin you
By leaving my fingerprints
On all of your crimes

POEM

Once I had to leave you, so
I arranged for earth-tremors at night
So in your sleep you'd think I was stroking you
American Tobacco Company

POEM

One of the old guys said
a good test of poetry was
that if you thought of a true
poem while shaving you'd cut yourself
well
lots of times I'll be reading a poem
and stop right in the middle
cause I just remembered
the great shaves I get
from my Wilkinson Sword-Edge blades

[dirty derk]

disturbing, clever and fucking funny.