The Unsubscriber by Bill Knott (2004)

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

Poetry Review:  The Unsubscriber is Bill Knott's mature work, having grown and learned much since his first, 1968's The Naomi Poems. Sure there are hints and ghosts of his old work here, but this book was written by a grown man, older, wiser, better read, and more thoughtful than that youthful self. Not quite as angry, not as direct, less obscenity and thrilling to dirty words, a harder book than those from his early days, no longer a voice from the hippie '60s. No one was more aggressively self-deprecating than Bill Knott, both railing against a world that refused to reward or recognize him or poets in general, and proclaiming his utter failure and the abysmal flaws of his work. But this book came from a prestigious publishing house (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and I think Knott recognized the opportunity he had and threw every ounce of himself into this volume. There are long poems, a section of his beloved short poems, sonnets, haiku, poems of 9 or 11 lines, everything he could do. The Unsubscriber is difficult, but full of rhyme, puns, surrealism, wordplay, half-rhyme, portmanteau words. The Tower of Babel, Noah, Ripley (from Alien), Wallace Stevens (obliquely), Plath & Hughes, Damocles, Isadora Duncan, Sappho and Pope Gregory VII, Kerouac, Borges, Trakl, Basho, Adrienne Rich ("All future poets can be coined ... from the DNA of ..."), the Rolling Stones, and others form the cast of these poems. The poems are serious, deep, dense (Knott acknowledges the existence of "too many recondite allusions"). He adds footnotes to shine a spotlight on his methods: no secrets here! In a way, these are poems for poets, who could write three poems from each of these. The influence of James Joyce, maybe Dylan Thomas too, probably others I'm not even qualified to discern, is felt.

Bill Knott is the unsubscriber, the compleat iconoclast who never followed any hierarchy, who precisely walked his own road. And dense as some of the poems may be, there are wonderful lines that speak clearly:

   A poem is a room that contains
   the house it's in

   As usual a metaphor
   Meant to make up for
   My lack of coherence

   Always jumping from one pan
   of the scale to the other, always
   trying to measure
   your absence.

   ... to remove
   all consonants from our star-maps.
   The infinite consists of vowels alone.

Sometimes the poems are more difficult, but always rewarding, with an underlying anger that builds slowly as The Unsubscriber goes on. Two issues enrage the author here: the current and coming environmental disaster that Knott terms ecocide ("Join Jack and his pals/in the endless adventure/of spilling fossil fuels/into the atmosphere"), and the crime of maleness, the sins committed by men ("Males must become an extinct species."):

   So I blame him and him and him and him,
   All of them from Adam onwards are men,
   Meaning me, meaning the worst thing I know.

For Bill Knott, self-hatred is never too far from the surface. All I've mentioned above just scratches the surface. I found The Unsubscriber difficult, defiant, provocative, slowly enriching. And surprisingly I found it at my local library (the benefit of being on FSG). If you're a poet, in self or soul, this could be the challenge you need. [4 Stars].