Lyrics Bill Knott and James Tate

Reading at Emerson 210, tonight at 8:00

LAST CHRITMAS I was in the Coop, looking desperately for a present for an old friend, and I picked up Bill Knott's Naonti Poems. I don't know what I was looking for-I suppose I was expecting another dose of tense, burdened lyricism, or brief, staccato bits of free verse machinery-but what I found was the clearest, purest, most unpretentious voice I'd come upon among younger poets. Knott's images were whole and satisfying: for once words were the things they said they were. I bought the book and never gave it away.

Bill Knott has been reading on college campuses for years, but until recently few people here had heard of him or his friend and fellow conspirator James Tate, who was the Yale Younger Poet in 1968, and whose second major collection, The Oblivion Ha-Ha, appeared last spring. If you were at Harvard and were interested in poetry, you knew about Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur. But no one seemed to realize that anything new had happened since. After all, Lowell was still writing, wasn't he?

He was. But so were plenty of others. In the meantime, there had been several generations of poets, in fact, and now people almost our own age were publishing poems which sounded very different from those we had grown to respect. Somehow, their world seemed more like ours-transcontinental, underground, and more than real. Instead of offering anxiety as the primary mode or reaction to their surroundings, these poets preferred to take the pressure of reality for granted and find other ways of expressing their dissatisfaction and boredom.

They have become, like the French decadents, our subtlest prophets of doom. Bill Knott's "colorless odorless tasteless miracles of lesslessness" are, like Baudelaire's spleen, symbols of the bloated, apathetic, decaying spirit of another botched civilization. In poems like "To American Poets," Knott aches for us to watch what we are doing. He knows there's no time left:

There's no time left to write poems. If you will write rallying cries, yes, do so, otherwise write poems then throw yourselves on the river to drift away.

Knott and Tate are not afraid to become engaged, or to withdraw, depending on how they feel. Tate's poems vary from the short, sly lyrics of The Lost Pilot to a newly wild and surrealist abandon in The Oblivion Ha-Ha, a book inhabited by immense animals and dreams within dreams. His terse, sensual allegories make deadly insinuations about our habits and fears.

Now Knott and Tate are working together, and no one knows what will happen. These poets have learned to make their own rules. They don't really care about anybody's sense of convention or propriety. Their poems are as innovative and exciting as any being written today, and we are damn lucky to have them. We're even luckier to be able to hear them.