Poetry

The Quicken Tree

NOTE: Title is out of print.

Drawing from a potent mix of his American roots and the French Symbolists in a crucible of a surreal imagination, Knott stands apart from current conventions. Fascinated by the verbal texture of language, he fuses together ideas and images that challenge and bedazzle. The Quicken Tree is replete with poems that stretch the traditional boundaries of love: consummated, unrequited, and failed. Other poems, given to fictional characters, settings and circumstances, evade traditional genre definitions.

"The most original poet of my generation . . . also the greatest outsider" — Stephen Dobyns, AWP Chronicle.

Stress Therapy

Time, time, time, time, the clock
vaccinates us,
and then even that lacks
prophylaxis.
Ticktock-pockmarked, stricken
by such strokes, we
get sick of prescriptions
which work solely
on the body.
Systole diastole--
It is by its very
intermittency
that the heart knows
itself to be an I.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 1996

Available editions: Title Unavailable
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Cloth ISBN: 1-880238-24-1
Publishing Date: January 1995

Paperback ISBN: 1-880238-25-x
Publishing Date: January 1995

FormatPaperback , Hardcover

Publication DateJanuary 1, 1995

ISBN1-880238-24-1

From $12.50

Out of Stock

About the Author

About the Author

William Kilborn Knott was an American poet and visual artist whose poems were sometimes surreal with startling juxtaposed images. His collections included The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans (1968), Becos (1983), Outremer, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (1988), The Unsubscriber (2004), and two collections published by BOA Editions: The Quicken Tree (1995) and Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999 (2000—out of print). Knott taught for more than 25 years at Emerson College in Boston. He died in 2014.