Santa Fe was fertile literary ground in those days. Many notable poets - including Christopher Merrill, Miriam Sagan, Robert Winson, and Leo Romero - were living there. Major poets like Czeslaw Milosz, Michael McClure, N. Scott Momaday, and John Trudell made appearances. Everywhere there were readings - at churches, coffee houses, and bookstores. This was when performance poetry was in ascension, and poets would often read to music, declaim in dramatic voices, or act out theatrical bits, like slicing up irises with a pair of scissors or filling reading spaces with black balloons.

And while Knoll joined in on the performance scene, and did it very well, he didn't need to. Amidst all the high-powered literary talent living in or passing through Santa Fe, his work ranked with the best. Knoll's poetry was a revelation, and across the years my admiration for his work continually increases.

As with Knoll's four previous volumes, Elevator Music for the Dead opens our inner vision, taking us through the gates of the unconscious to discover what Gary Snyder calls "the new connections" revealed by poetry. From "Rock of Ages," we read, "the moon sees you/Cat trance walk into vanish/Step darkly over a pattern of stars/Through a one way window/On both sides simultaneous." The poem "Owl Light" begins, "Talking to yourself in the kitchen/As the sun blows out/Is an everyday occurrence/In some circles." Welcome, Knoll is saying, to my circle, a world where the sun can extinguish like a candle and you can vanish into a dream of star patterns, a "one way window" that is the same on both sides because this new universe is actually the largely unrealized one we already inhabit.
As with all effective surrealists, Knoll takes us to a landscape both familiar and strange - the world of dreams half remembered, of universal myths distorted by deep time. His work reminds me of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, wherein intense, sometimes perilous truths lurk beneath the image of an owl crossing the vast space of an abandoned factory or a glass mysteriously sliding off a table's edge. Knoll's poetry also reveals the world's unexpected textures through images formed from startling juxtapositions: "My life is ordinary/as a rose petal on a dead man's shadow"; "A red ray enters Blue Strip Pit/Christ is reborn/Has the wing span of a condor"; "A midget tries to sell me a tourniquet of rain/Engrained in a fragment of African sky."

At times, Knoll pays homage to the surrealists who influenced his work. In "Algebra of Color," there are lines that evoke the writings of Octovio Paz - "Always the harvest of butterflies always the cities of invisible/Architectures in crystal desert stones blood numbers in the deep sky." Another poem contains a visual reference to Rene Magritte with the line, "A series of new moons entangled in the cottonwood tree." The book begins with an epigraph by Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara - "I think of the heat that language weaves/around its core the dream they call us by."

Building on this surrealist foundation, Knoll, with the trickster's mission to guide us to a different light, reshapes the tropes of classical mythology: "Persephone drowned yesterday in a heart shaped pool/A whiskey priestess performed her last rites/Lilith, was that her name? Or was it Lily?"

But Knoll's deepest visions derive from his self-created myths - a dream woman comes to him "bewildered by the concept of modern love," a heron and a queen "converse in a dream language . . . that may save the world," a tamarisk tree has Jesus Christ as her "secret lover" and lives "in the shadow of Einstein."

Currently, only a small cadre of admirers recognizes the brilliance of Knoll's poetry, and its shamanic ability to rearrange our perceptual understanding. Perhaps someday his work will have the wide audience it deserves. Meanwhile, it comforts me to know that Knoll continues to write, and that his word gems still rise like Buddhist prayers into the dark, star-filled New Mexico night.
John Nizalowski is the author of Hooking the Sun (Farolito Press). Currently he is working on a biography of Frank Waters and teaches creative writing at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colorado.