Poet of isolation …

… Bill Knott’s Anti-Career of Guerrilla Poetry - The New Yorker. (Hat tip, G. E. Reutter.)

Something about Knott froze in childhood, leaving a body of work marked by the child’s tendency to literalize imaginative schemes. Knott was a poet of zany precision, the zaniness usually coming right away, often in the first line, followed by quite meticulous workings out of his oddball premises. He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour.