Write More Poems 

with Help from Bill Knott 

I’ve been reading I Am Flying Into Myself, Selected Poems 1960-2014 by the “perpetually insolvent” poet Bill Knott. In his introduction, Thomas Lux describes Knott as a “quintessential, almost primal lyric poet, primal in the sense that his poems seem to emerge from his bone marrow as well as his heart and mind.” Knott was fond of creating neologisms, such as “shroudmeal,” “Rilkemilky,” and “gangplanking.” He was also, according to Lux, “thorny, original, accessible, electrical, occasionally impolite, and heartbreaking.”

Reading Knott’s poems made me want to stop reading them and start writing. I decided to try to decipher what they were doing to my brain, and how I could funnel the experience into some practical writing advice.

Write Small. The brevity of these poems is part of the magic. For the most part, Knott’s poems are short, sometimes just one line long, as in “Poem:” 

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

Challenge yourself to write a poem that is one sentence long, but manages to convey an entire relationship, history, or some wisdom you’ve gleaned. Make an ordinary moment spectacular, or whittle something momentous down to size.

Create Killer Metaphors. Knott creates metaphors that shock and delight. “To Jose Lezama Lima” opens with the line, “The poem is a letter opener that slices.” “Night Thought” compares pajamas to “floppy statues of ourselves” as well as “slack seams / of death.” 

Make a list of ordinary objects in your house. Then come up with weird ways to describe them. (This should be fun.) When you find a metaphor that works, make that the first line of a new poem.

Get formal. The sonnet is Knott’s form of choice, and he renders it in multiple ways: in two four-lined stanzas followed by two three-line stanzas, or an eight-line stanza after a six-line stanza, or seven couplets. Some are rhymed and some aren’t. Regardless, Knott mastered the form, and therefore earned the right to play with it.

Choose a form—sonnet, pantoum, villanelle, etc. Make it your own, then stretch it, play with it, break it and build it back up.

Write outside your little tiny box. Just as I’d gotten comfortable with Knott’s short, pithy poems and his creatively reimagined sonnets, I came across “Letter to a Landscape,” a bulky chunk of verse written in five-line stanzas that covers three pages. The poem is full of Knott-isms, such as “perched / purloin to yield your past vast-hold,” but it feels fresh and weird at the same time, a quality Knott manages to sustain over the poem’s length.

Throughout the collection, a few poems like “Letter to a Landscape” appear.  They shake things up, keep things lively, wake the reader out of a short-poem stupor. In your own writing, strive for the occasional out-of-character poem. Unbalance yourself and see where you fall.

Play with language. Within Knott’s poems, half-rhymes lurk in the middle of lines. The poems are sonic and rhythmical, alive and always surprising. In “Letter to a Landscape,” he makes up words with abandon: “yearyawns,” “interhearted,” “thermometerstraw,” for example. 

Make up phrases and words. Jam nouns and verbs together. See what sticks.

Reading Bill Knott gave me a much-needed jolt. Using words from the poems in I Am Flying Into Myself, I found his poems sharp, vacant, opaque, mournful, handpainted, and tattooed. And reading them got me writing.