Poem of the Day: "Sonnet" by Bill Knott

"Sonnet" by Bill Knott is the Songs of Eretz Poem of the Day for March 31, 2014.  It is also Poets.org's offering from Poem-A-Day for the same date.  A link to the poem may be found here:  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23931.

Bill Knott (pictured) was born in 1940 and died March 12, 2014.  He was a teacher at Emerson College in Boston and a recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Although he had over ten books of poetry published by various houses, he self-published most of his work on his blog.  He said, "If I had to rely on real publishers to present my work, I might very well have stopped writing altogether."  Reference to this and additional biographical information may be found here:  http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/2555.

"Sonnet" is written in fairly liberal free verse, but has the requisite fourteen-line length, and its subjects--truth and beauty and love--are frequent topics of the traditional sonnet forms.  Lines eleven and twelve reveal the sonnet as a love poem--a nice surprise, given the rather dry treatment of truth and beauty in the preceding ten lines.  The poem comes full circle and ends as it began, with lines one and fourteen and two and thirteen being identical.