KENT JOHNSON DOSSIER

There is an enduring fascination in many portions of the contemporary poetry world for the cantankerous antics of Jack Spicer, part of the triumvirate of mid-century “Berkeley Renaissance” poets (with friends and sometime rivals Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser). The alcoholic and problematic Spicer rarely encountered another major poet or poetic institution he wasn’t prepared to spit in the eye or step on the toes of. Thus, for example, he famously set out to deliberately write poems that would be rejected by Poetry; tried to prevent his publications from circulating outside his home turf of the Bay Area (and refused copyright on most of them); and reproduced Duncan’s entire “acknowledgments” page from The Opening of the Field in his book Lament for the Makers as a spiteful prank. 

Like students swapping stories about a notorious kid who once haunted the halls of their school, poets love stuff like this. But they would hate a figure like Spicer if he appeared among them now. All one has to do is recall the way in which the more recently deceased Ed Dorn, whose sneering wit and hard-boiled misanthropy offended poets far and wide, is currently disregarded and seldom taught. And it helps explain the outsider-ish position of Kent Johnson in today’s poetry scene. This was brought home to me many years ago, when, as a student in an MFA program, I asked a guest speaker what she thought of Johnson’s possible authorship of Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, the 1997 book through which Johnson announced himself to the poetry world (though it’s more accurate to say that his reputation emerged from the scandal that ensued). The anger with which the speaker responded — to the effect that “the Yasusada poems” were a fine project, but Johnson had “gone too far” by continuing with the ruse that he was not the actual author of the book — taught me an important lesson about the vicissitudes of the literary world.

The guest speaker was well-known critic and Stanford professor Marjorie Perloff, whose pre-scandal praise for the project is quoted on the opening page of Doubled Flowering.

In the years since, Johnson has distinguished himself by picking fights with poets and leveling critiques at the poetry community with almost ceaseless gusto. But he has also produced a great number of unique, interesting, and maddeningly uncategorizable books. It is worth remembering, in reference to Dorn, that he was perhaps the funniest and sharpest satirist to come along in the English language in many years — in some ways, his masterpiece Gunslinger is a throwback to the comic satire of Byron and Pope, et al.

As I wrote some years ago, as a satirist Johnson seems to toggle between large-scale, high-concept satirical works and lighter, Horatian projects. His new book Because of Poetry, I Have a Really Big House brings these modes together in an aesthetically pleasing way that, to my mind, is unparalleled in Johnson’s career to date. Aside from concluding that Johnson has simply mastered the form that his poetics have been aiming for and building towards for a long time, it is tempting to guess that the object of his satire has come into focus like never before. In previous projects Johnson often seemed to be in a grudge match with specific figures (for example, the Conceptual writers and their apologists), and bent on exposing and lampooning inconsistencies in their approach to issues of authorship and authenticity. This was, undoubtedly, the central theme of the above-mentioned Doubled Flowering, as well as the controversial A Question Mark Above the Sun, published in 2010 by Punch Press, which nearly resulted in lawsuits from the Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara literary estates.

The hard feelings, accusations of fraud, and virtual fisticuffs that these and other works occasioned, while viscerally satisfying to Johnson’s friends and fans, were arguably counterproductive to an objective appreciation of the actual poetry. In Because of Poetry…, Johnson takes aim at anyone and everything associated with the contemporary poetry world, and the laughter’s often at his own expense. It’s this laughter-with-an-edge-to-it vibe that makes a piece like the four-part “It’s Hard Being a Famous Poet” swing. Each begins with a whiney lament, as in no. 2, “The Shower”:

It sucks being a famous poet.
All your time gets taken up on
the phone or in answering emails
from people looking for a blurb,
and stuff. It’s totally tiresome!

Other sections likewise expertly skewer the sort of humble-bragging and jostling for power and prizes that anyone who follows poets on social media will be familiar with. Not leaving previous objects of satire completely behind, the end of no. 3, “Everything Is So Beautiful,” takes oblique aim at Kenneth Goldsmith’s much-reviled “Michael Brown’s Body,” substituting Chinese dissident-poet Liu Xiaobo, “the Nobel Peace Prize guy,” for Brown in its terse description of the project. Such nods to real-po-world controversies add a bit of heft and edge to this satire of largely low-stakes concerns.

A “list poem” of sorts, “To Make an Omelet of Poetry, You Have to Break Some Eggs,” is perhaps best understood as an echo or companion of “79 Poetry Bumper Stickers” (published in 5 Works by the Rejection Group, habenicht press, 2011), showcasing Johnson’s knack for biting, bite-sized satirical aphorisms. The latter included such gems as “WHICH DICKMAN ARE YOU?” and “I BREAK LINES FOR NO APPARENT REASON.” In “To Make an Omelet…,” we get a long list of poetic grievances, such as: “12. Did unkindly delete all my comments on his blog”; “15. Did done blocketh me on Twitter”; “58. Did suggest I was the Jeffrey Dahmer of poetry, even after I promoted his poetry to the skies.” The self-deprecating whininess of these laments is at once overwhelming and endearing; even as one might be tempted to guess at possible identities behind some of them, it’s impossible not to perceive one’s own hurt feelings in others.

In his review of Because of Poetry…, Barry Schwabsky writes that Johnson has a gift for “press[ing] an annoying affectation so far that you end up finding it funnier than you could ever have imagined at first, and then even somehow beguiling,” noting both the above-mentioned “To Make an Omelet…” and what he calls the “tin-eared non-poet’s poetry” that makes up From: One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. The latter, indeed, expertly channels the airy but awkward “translationese” that so often finds its way into modern English versions of Asian verse. Johnson has had a marvelous ear for the cloying rhythms of this poetic mode going back to Doubled Flowering; I would only add to Schwabsky’s comment the observation that the conventions adhering to such verse signify a sort of ethereal importance and authenticity, without which the Yasusada “translations” would never have been so credited and garnered such accolades. As always, it is such qualities that Johnson is so deft at exploiting and satirizing. 

In some ways, the satire of Johnson’s “Chinese” poems resembles Timothy Yu’s 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press, 2016), which takes merciless aim at the lazy Orientalism of Billy Collins, first and foremost, but also the Orientalist tendencies of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder among revered white male American poets. But where Timothy Yu pokes holes in the problematic exoticism such poets invent and conjure — often by turning the strained “Chinese” imagery inside-out and focusing it on white America — Johnson mines the political undercurrent that runs through the ancient Chinese poets. Thus, in a poem that begins with an air of breezy, wistful remembrance of a friend, the speaker of “On Deer Park Slope, I Recall My Old Friend, Wang Chen,” suddenly spews vitriol at the Poetry Foundation:

The grand Coalition of careerist
cliques was much boosted by the institution’s
lawyered birth in wake of the $100+ million
opioid Lilly gift, now worth around $200 million,
or so they say.

What Johnson brings to this sequence of poems, then, is not only his lampooning of literary translation style, as noted above, but also the insight that its quasi-pastoral form is the perfect vehicle for bitter political asides. And by channeling his bitterness at po-world problems into the form, Johnson highlights his own outsider status, clearly identifying with the lonely exiles who narrate the poems. He also underscores (again) just how pathetic most of these problems are in the big scheme of things.

But there is a poignancy to the poems as well — who or what is actually being satirized, and to what end? Perhaps, in a way, what’s being prodded most of all is the reader’s own complacency. We should care, Johnson reminds us, not only about the degraded state of poetry on the American cultural scene, but the specific ways in which it’s been degraded and compromised and rendered pathetic — ways that we can pay attention to and do something about. It was Jack Spicer’s vehemence that nothing mattered more than poets and poetry — and the vitriolic rhetoric and stunts that ensued — that sparks admiration now, even as it alienated so many of his contemporaries. One wonders what Spicer would be doing if he were around today, and how Johnson’s work will be regarded in the fullness of time.