KENT JOHNSON DOSSIER

Back in November, I received an invitation from The Typescript to submit a piece to a dossier of work regarding Kent Johnson’s Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House. I’ve been a fan of Kent’s writing for 25 years, so I was happy to send a review. Yesterday, when I received a terse email from an editor saying they would not be publishing any more pieces on Because of Poetry, my first thought was, “I wonder what Kent did.” 

The short answer is, “what anyone vaguely familiar with Kent’s work would have known he would do.”

The ostensible cause was Kent’s Emily Post-Avant piece critiquing Amanda Gorman’s poem for the Biden inauguration, which an editor at The Typescript said was “antithetical to our values.” I’ve sometimes disagreed with Kent, both in private exchanges and on the pages of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, but I see nothing particularly offensive about the Gorman column, with the possible exception of calling Lady Gaga a “narcissistic bitch.” 

More to the point, The Typescript is shocked — SHOCKED — that Kent Johnson, a man who has satirized, disparaged, and mocked a substantial majority of the most prominent Anglophone poets, would critique the woman who, in a matter of minutes, became the most famous living poet in America. And here’s the thing: from my perspective, his Emily Post-Avant piece is both fair and accurate. As a political performance, “The Hill We Climb” was excellent, a pitch-perfect assemblage of sentiments appropriate and even necessary for a Democratic president after four years of Trump. That’s not a critique, since it’s exactly what almost any poet would attempt to do in her position, and I should add that I think it was a much better poem than either Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright” or Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning,” the latter of which was memorably rewritten using the N+7 method by Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin as “On the Pumice of Morons.” Having said all that, would anyone at The Typescript say it’s actually a good poem? Would they have published it if it arrived before the inauguration? I doubt it, so it seems to be their decision was political in the most pinched and banal version of that term.

As Kent notes, each of Gorman’s three books will be released in editions of a million copies, which brings up yet another irony: because of poetry, Gorman almost certainly will have a really big house.