For decades, Knott had assembled private volumes—collections of sonnets, say, or love poems—which he printed and distributed in limited runs. When print-on-demand made publishing as easy as uploading a PDF file to a Web site, he let his anthological impulse run out to its illogical extreme. On Amazon, you can find listings for his “Forthfable and Other Poems Derived from Judeo-Christian Mythology,” “May Eagles Guard Your Grave: and Other Cemetery Poems,” “Poems About Buildings,” and, my favorite, “Beta: Poems About Things That Begin with the Letter B.” None of these are beautiful artifacts; most, in fact, are barely distinguishable from bound typescripts. But the poems inside, like “Sleep,” belie the brute practicality of their material trappings:
We brush the other, invisible moon
Its caves come out and carry us inside.
Though he parted ways with FSG after “The Unsubscriber,” Knott never stopped sending copies of his self-published books to Galassi. The latest gift, “Collected Poetry 1960-2014 (This Edition: 2/24/14),” arrived early last week. But even this was not Knott’s last publication. “Poems 12:49 PM (EST) 03/07/14” was uploaded to Amazon on March 8th, four days before its author’s death, and is already listed, uncannily, as “Out of Print—Limited Availability.” It has a single review: five out of five stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment