Sandra Simonds at Poetry Magazine:
While Knott may have alienated his peers in what Charles Bernstein dubbed “official verse culture,” by the 1970s and ’80s his irreverent style, trickster persona, and anti-establishment ethos were precisely why he found fans in the emerging punk rock scene. In their novel Inferno (2016), Eileen Myles calls Knott a “genius” who lived in a “hovel” and looked “generally greasy.” They also remark, “people claim that Bill Knott was the inspiration for punk.” Perhaps Knott’s connection to punk rock explains why the foreword of the reissued Naomi Poems is written by Richard Hell, a pioneer in the punk movement known for his bands Television and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Upon encountering the collection at age 18 or 19, within a year of its release, Hell says the book felt “like an infection or injection.” He was captivated by its “all-pervading condition of longing, adoration, fear, and fury, lurching from near-worship of ‘Naomi’ into anger and despair at, among much else, the bloodthirsty American military and their corporate cohort.”
Star Black, Knott’s former partner, mentioned to me in a phone conversation that Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth exchanged poems and music with Knott. When I reached out to Moore via email, he recalled that he asked Knott to open for Sonic Youth in the early 2000s but the poet “demurred.”
more here.
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David Keith was a graduate student in 1991 when a volcano erupted in the Philippines, sending a cloud of ash toward the edge of space. Seventeen million tons of sulfur dioxide released from Mount Pinatubo spread across the stratosphere, reflecting some of the sun’s energy away from Earth. The result was a drop in average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by roughly one degree Fahrenheit in the year that followed. Today, Dr. Keith cites that event as validation of an idea that has become his life’s work: He believes that by intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, it would be possible to lower temperatures worldwide, blunting global warming.
Baldwin Hills juts up 500 feet from the flat expanse of the Los Angeles Basin, the result of millennia of seismic activity along the Newport-Inglewood Fault, a dextral strike-slip fault that runs for 47 miles from Culver City through Signal Hill to Newport Beach. The fault, formed some 30 million years ago when the Pacific plate collided with the North American plate (an intersection that now sits at the San Andreas Fault), expresses on the surface as a series of low, irregular hills. Below the surface, seismic activity created a series of oil and gas reservoirs, including the Inglewood Oil Field.
I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without. What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked—at first avid, then groaning—on their sexual careers. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.
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