On Because of Poetry…
Responses to Kent Johnson often lend themselves to hyperbole. If I can, I want to resist that.
Some of the greatest efforts at building and supporting community have been undertaken by Johnson, and I have a hard time thinking about him without thinking about his brilliance in the poetry community itself, that is to say, his insistence on the failings at even its semblance.
I used the word community above, and I should revise that. Collectivity may come closer, I think, to the aim, but we are far from that.
As a poet, he has taken risks that are hard to fathom. For poets who haven’t had the pleasure of reading him as closely as I have — and I am thinking back to poets in Boston, dear friends arguing over a kitchen table — I would recommend an assessment. I won’t pretend to any serious knowledge. If I may, I’d like to forgo all polemic and simply talk about his new book, which, if nothing else, demands why it may be impossible for Johnson ever to have printed a Collected.
It does seem impossible to me, and that itself is no small thing for a poet of Johnson’s caliber. There are a few other poets I might include in that, those inconceivable in one category or another, and those whose scattered work is beyond category. Johnson’s work is distinguishable for its international breadth and for its pugilism.
A close up of a cover of Marx.
It is not pugilism that stands out in Because of Poetry… Anyone who ever doubted Johnson’s skill at lyricism will be surprised by the book. This may be a more covert form of pugilism or a way of demonstrating that in his poetry pugilism was always misunderstood, which I believe it has been. Here are some lines I’d cite as evidence of that; Johnson’s grasp of pop culture is probably worse than mine, but I would want to defend the book through this.
Though Comrade Fawkes would stay with the barrels until the fateful moment.
Blowing himself to the heavens for the saketh of poetry’s sovereignty.
From the insidious creeping of Capital, the State, and the general economy of.
The culture industry, which hath come to invade almost fucking everything.
The explosion was tremendous, shaking the whole Field to its cowardly core.
I’ll stay with these lines for a bit.
Do we come after? One main point of Because of Poetry…, which has a lovely cover by Michael Basinski, is that poets may make the house bigger, because they recognize existence.
Are we here now? I fear Johnson likely will not be read fully for a few more decades, if not longer. It shouldn’t take that long, though.
His recent book will deny all this.
Excerpt of a poem by Ed Dorn.