(Sergey) (Yesenin) Speaking (Isadora) (Duncan)
I love Russia; and Isadora and her dance.When I put my arms around her, she’s likeWheat that sways in the very midst of a bloody battle,—Un-hearkened-to, but piling up peace for the earth(Though my self-war juggles no nimbus). Earthquake; shouldersA-lit with birthdays of doves; piety of the unwashableCreases in my mother’s gaze and hands. Isadora “becalmed”Isadora the ray sky one tastes on the skin of justborn babies(Remember, IsadoraWhen you took me to AmericaI went, as one visits a grave, toThe place where Bill Knott would be born 20 years in the futureI embraced the pastures, the abandoned quarry, where he would playWith children of your aura and my sapling eyeWhere bees brought honey to dying flowers I sprinkledChildhood upon the horizons, the cowsWho licked my heart like a block of salt) Isadora I write this poemOn my shroud, when my home-village walks out to harvest.Bread weeps as you break it gently into years.
Feature Date
- February 24, 2020
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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“(Sergey) (Yesenin) Speaking (Isadora) (Duncan)”
from I AM FLYING INTO MYSELF: SELECTED POEMS, 1960-2014 by Bill Knott, edited by Thomas Lux.
Copyright © 2017 by The Estate of Bill Knott.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Bill Knott was born in Carson City, Michigan, in 1940 and died in Bay City, Michigan, in 2014. His first book, The Naomi Poems, was written under the pen name St. Geraud (1940–1966) and published to great acclaim in 1968. Between 1968 and 2004, he published eleven full-length books of poems. He taught at Emerson College in Boston for twenty-five years.
“He wrote some of the most brilliant, strange, and subversive poetry America has ever seen. This posthumous selection is an attempt by Knott's longtime friend, the poet Thomas Lux, to organize his legacy and make it presentable. Perhaps something essential is lost in curtailing the chaos that Knott himself created, but we are also profoundly lucky not to have this extraordinary body of work cast into oblivion.”
—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR Books
"Every poet should be lucky enough to have his work edited with such care and discussed with such admiration as Thomas Lux”
—The Harvard Review
“His insurgent D.I.Y. purity is on full display in I Am Flying Into Myself . . . Knott’s poems claim a peculiar kind of privacy, as though he confiscated his lines from public view in order to mete them out on his own stubborn terms. The result is a tangle of sweetness, irritability, hospitality, and paranoia . . .”
—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
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