“Holy still is Speech, but there is no sacred tongue, the truth may be told in all.” (Auden)
“Its lucky we don’t need “the vulgate”—for now all languages are holy.” (Kuusisto in a rambling lecture)
I spent my 18th summer playing Billie Holiday records and reading the poet Bill Knott.
I was largely friendless, recovering from a hospitalization for anorexia—I mean, really, I was returning to the world with scars and many tremblings—I’d flip the Holiday record and read, with the aid of a prodigious magnifying glass.
Bill Knott:
Poem
What language will be safe
When we lie awake all night
Saying palm words, no fingertip words
This wound searching us for a voice
Will become a fountain with rooms to let
Or a language composed of kisses and leaves
When you’ve lived long with the stripped, coded privacies of injury, you feel the transmission of these lines—the electric, recombinative flesh and syllables of lingo. Imagery depends on nouns but think of Knott’s verbs: be, lie, saying, searching… Bill Knott was orphaned young; I lived my blind-kid solitudes—God Almighty, I used to play Victrola records alone in the attic. What I loved was Knott’s “fountain” with rooms to let. Inner joy… New and promising words.
I still wonder, every day, what language will be safe?
Bill Knott:
Poetry,
you are an electric,
a magic, field—like the space
between a sleep walker’s out held arms….
There is no court rhyme or shepherds pipe for safety. And none for faith.
“If that isn’t love, it will have to do, until the real thing comes along…”
Bill Knott’s poetry collections include The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans(1968), Becos (1983),Outremer, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (1988),Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999 (2000),The Unsubscriber (2004), and Stigmata Errata Etcetera (2007), a collaboration with collages by the artist Star Black. He passed away yesterday.
Planet of the Blind 