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About the Knott Poetry Prize

The Knott Prize is awarded annually to a poet whose writing eschews piety in order to explore alternative responses to the claims of religion, including skepticism; dissent; celebratory humanism; philosophically serious mystery; and celebrations of scientific thinking.

Our prize is named in honor of American poet Bill Knott, who in 2006 published a short essay calling for American poets to look beyond religion and fill what he identified as a gap in American poetry culture:

Why are there no, or almost no, anthologies of contemporary atheist poetry? Why are so few contemporary USA poets writing atheist poetry? Yeats called an old man "a coat upon a stick." Is it too much to hope that I can try to be a coat upon a stick, rather than a cloak upon a cross?

Submission guidelines

Poets are asked to submit between 1 and 6 English-language poems, totaling not more than 300 lines. Poems may be in any form. If previously published, please include a clip or URL. Only U.S. residents are eligible to receive a cash prize. The winning poems will in some way show a commitment to secularism, by making use of skeptical, scientific, or humanistic attitudes, or by addressing these topics explicitly or implicitly.

All submissions will be considered for publication in Clarion. We offer the first-place winner will receive a cash payment of not less than $100, as well as a publishing consultation with the editors of Clarion.

We will be reading submissions for the 2020 award between January 4th-October 31, 2019. If you'd like to be considered, submit your work via our submissions portal, or send it in via hard copy to Clarion, c/o Pen & Anvil Press, 139 Mt. Vernon Street, Fitchburg MA 01420. Please submit your $7 entry fee via Submittable or by check payable to Pen & Anvil.

We will be announcing the winner of the 2020 award in the first quarter of 2020.

Please note that staff members, past or present, of Clarion or Pen & Anvil are not eligible to participate in this competition.

Background

Bill Knott (17 February 1940 - 12 March 2014) was born in Carson City, Michigan. Knott was for many years an associate professor at Emerson College in Boston. Known widely in the world of American poetry as a gadfly and self-labeled outsider or "minor" poet, Knott self-published his own poetry collections, numbering in the dozens, making them available for free online or through print-on-demand vendors. He first received recognition with The Naomi Poems published in 1968 under the name Saint Geraud.

Starting in 2006 or so, Knott began circulating a call for submissions for poems of a specifically non-religious nature. He gathered and published such poems on his blogs, and even awarded cash prizes to poets whose work he judged to be especially examples of atheistic poetry. In different interviews and blog post essays, he called for...

... poetry which explores the odd angles of existence without conjuring spirits to inhabit every corner;
... poetry which performs the function of witness and questions those matters of ultimate concerns;
... poetry that steadfastly refuses to stumble into hazy spiritual literalism;
... poetry which succumbs to the revolutionary temptation without also giving itself over to the religious temptation;
... poetry which is not dishonest, or deluded, and does not depend upon confusion or delusion to obtain its effects;
... poetry which speaks to the quest that is psychological, mental, existential, ethical, and aesthetical, allotting nothing to the superfluous category of "spirituality";
... poetry which keeps faith with the aim of Gottfried Benn to write "the absolute poem, the poem without faith; the poem without hope, the poem addressed to no one, the poem made of words which you assemble in a fascinating way";
... poetry which takes its share of ownership in the literary tradition, making use of those traditional interactions and confrontations between human and deity native to religious poetry—its rich repertoire of associations and subject matter, its extravagant solidities—without participating in the epistemic claims of religion;
... poetry which somehow brings the old ciphers if not back to life, at least back to line;
... poetry unafraid to say aloud that the "spirituality" of recent U.S. writing seems suspiciously opportunistic and obsequious given the current political climate;
... poetry for the philosophical freethinker, and the political radical, and the everyman reader;
... poetry which manifests sincerity and commitment to the world around us as against the imagined worlds of spiritual longing;
... poetry which resists (protests against) the "maundering piffle" and "pietistic pap" of normative religiosity, its pretension and clichés, its speciously abstract mea culpas;
... poetry which articulates and defends the secular, skeptical, scientific experience of awe and wonder.
... a new wisdom literature which upholds mystery without being superstitious.