Bill Knott's "An Instructor's Dream"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem shows us a teacher wrestling with the notion of “graduation.” Happy reading.

Bill Knott was born on February 17, 1940, in Carson City, Michigan. When he was seven years old, his mother died in childbirth, and his father passed away three years later. He grew up in an orphanage in Mooseheart, Illinois, and on an uncle’s farm. In the late 1950s, he joined the U.S. Army and, after serving his full enlistment, was honorably discharged in 1960.

In the early 1960s, Knott moved to Chicago, where he worked as a hospital orderly. There, he became involved in the poetry scene and worked with John Logan, Paul Carroll, Charles Simic, and other poets. He published his first book, The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans (Big Table, 1968), under the pseudonym Saint Geraurd in 1968. He also published Nights of Naomi (Barn Dream Press, 1971) and Auto-necrophilia (Big Table, 1971) under the same name.

Knott went on to publish several poetry collections under his own name, including I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems, 1960–2014 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), edited by Thomas Lux; Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999 (BOA Editions, 2000); Becos (Random House, 1983); and Love Poems to Myself (Barn Dream Press, 1974). He also self-published many books and posted all of his poems online, where they could be read for free.

Of his work, Lux writes, “As dense as some of his poems can be, they rarely defeat comprehensibility. Some are so lucid and straightforward, they are like a punch in the gut, or one’s first great kiss…. His intense focus on every syllable, and the sound of every syllable in relation to nearby sounds, is so skilled that the poems often seem casual: Art hides art.”

Knott taught at Emerson College for over twenty-five years. He received the Iowa Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors and awards. He died on March 12, 2014, in Bay City, Michigan.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, May 19th, 2025. Today's poem is by Bill Knott, and it's called An Instructor's Dream. It's graduation season to the end of another academic year. And while many of the
0:23.7	poems that are trotted out at this time of the year for such occasions as academic graduations
0:29.0	tend to focus on the experience of the graduate and the widening vistas, reflection upon what they
0:36.2	have learned, today's poem is a meditation from the
0:39.7	teacher's point of view. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.
0:45.6	An Instructor's Dream. Many decades after graduation, the students sneak back onto the school
0:53.7	grounds at night and within the pain-lit windows, catch students sneak back onto the school grounds at night and within
0:55.4	the pane-lit windows, catch me their teacher at the desk or blackboard cradling a chalk.
1:01.7	Someone has erased their youth, and as they crouch closer to see more, it grows darker and
1:07.8	quieter than they have known in their lives. The lesson never learned surrounds
1:13.2	them. Why have they come? Is there any more to memorize now at the end than there was then?
1:21.2	What is it they peer at through shades of time to hear X times X repeated? My vain efforts to corner a room, Snickers, do they mock me?
1:32.0	Forever? Out there my past has risen in the eyes of all my former pupils, but I wonder if behind them,
1:40.6	others, younger and younger, stretch away to a day whose dawn will never ring its end,
1:47.5	its commencement bell. I think this poem does a great job of giving some words and images to
1:55.5	one of the great difficulties of being a teacher, which is the difficult realization that you cannot teach your students all
2:03.9	that you'd like, or all that they need to learn, or that in some way, they cannot finish learning
2:13.4	your lesson in your presence or under your care. There is this truth about life that only comes
2:21.5	with experience and the teacher tries to offer some sort of conceptual introduction to this lesson
2:28.5	or maybe even an exemplary one through a life well lived in the presence, in the eyes of their students.
2:36.5	But the lesson must be completed. It must be fully learned out in the midst of life.
2:44.1	Teachers who don't grasp this or take a while to grasp this, usually younger teachers,
	...

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