Kent Johnson and the Future of Poetic Satire
Don Juan can survive comparison with the poetry of Shelley and Wordsworth, not indeed on their own ground, but because it satisfies deep human needs which their poetry, great and beautiful as it is, can never satisfy. For to Wordsworth and Shelley was unhappily denied the genius of laughter, and the comic spirit has its own beneficent influence upon us; it dissolves our fanaticisms and dogmatisms, it stimulates the free play of intelligence, it preserves our sanity even where it crosses our convictions. Byron mocked at everything as only the complete skeptic can.
—Louis I. Bredvold, 1935
“Satire,” said George S. Kaufman, famously, “is what closes on Saturday night.” It certainly seems to have closed in American poetry: by and large, and despite its long history¹, examples of satire in our poetry since 1900 have been few and far between. There are reasons for that: for one thing, satire traffics in shaming, and it’s hard to defend holding anyone up to ridicule; for another, one person’s vice is another’s kink, and we’ve become, these days, notoriously shy about inhabiting any sort of moral high ground. And at the moment, there’s one more possibility for its unpopularity: namely that there are some historical periods when real life would seem to make satire totally unnecessary.
But I think critics of satire ignore one of its prime virtues, namely its humor, or, as Louis Bredvold called it in 1935, the “comic spirit.” What was it exactly that Byron had and Wordsworth and Shelley didn’t? Many poets will know these humorous lines from the first canto of Don Juan:
Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;
Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey;
Because the first is crazed beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy (I 1633-36)
But they may not be as familiar with some from the third, which takes the quarrel with Wordsworth into darker, more vituperative channels: this is the Wordsworth who was “unexcised, unhired, who then / Season’d his pedlar poems with democracy”:
We learn from Horace, “Homer sometimes sleeps;”
We feel without him, Wordsworth sometimes wakes,—
To show with what complacency he creeps,
With his dear “Waggoners,” around his lakes,
He wishes for “a boat” to sail the deeps—
Of ocean?—No, of air; and then he makes
Another outcry for “a little boat,”
And drivels seas to set it well afloat. (III, 873-880)
Ouch. We’re here confronted immediately with satire’s double edge: sure, it’s funny, or can be, but it can also be — to use one of the ex-president’s favorite words — nasty. What accounts for such scorn? Byron’s case is simple: he was operating under a completely different poetics than the Lake Poets, formed first by a close study of his eighteenth-century predecessors, and then by the comic epics of the Italian Renaissance, which gave him his form, and those amazingly versatile eight-line stanzas enabled him, he wrote in a letter to his publisher in 1820, “to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing” . . . “I have no plan – I had no plan; but I had or have materials.” For Byron, those materials included the moral and political hypocrisies of the ruling castes of all European countries. Still, the object of satire can be anything: Juvenal didn’t care much for the decadent aristocrats of his imperial society, while Swift hated the entire human race. We don’t have to subscribe to a satirist’s beliefs to appreciate the poems any more than we have to believe in God to appreciate the Commedia. It’s just that good satire is always waspish in some manner; it never adopts the party line, no matter what it is at the moment. Satirists live in a kind of poetic permanent revolution: “to mock,” a Greek proverb goes, “is to thumb through Archilochus” (Guy Davenport, 7 Greeks).
Happily, there are still some practitioners who aspire to that particular laurel, the prize for a “contest” that might have started with Archilochus yet includes Hipponax, Horace, and Juvenal among the classic poets and Dryden, Pope, and Swift in seventeenth to eighteenth-century England. Perhaps Edward Dorn was our last great satiric poet, but Kent Johnson, with his new book Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House (Shearsman Books, 2020) has officially joined the list. To explain why involves exploring the changes he’s rung on satire in this, his most impressive work, which are at once traditional and completely new.
We might start with an example close to home: in early summer of this year, the New York Times Book Review featured two poets on their front and back pages (something it will probably never do again), Claudia Rankine and Jericho Brown. The poems were fine, if not remarkable, but the reason for their display wasn’t their merit exactly, but because these Black poets were seen as authentic spokespeople to address the protests for social and racial justice that will hopefully continue on the streets of American cities. I think most poets who saw that issue were probably happy that their art had been recognized, but there was a troubling subtext: poetry, the Book Review seemed to imply, is something we turn to in extremis, when social conditions become so intolerable that “normal language” — whether political rant or Facebook post or cable pundit — isn’t qualified to address them; similar efforts like the “Shelter-in-Place” poems sponsored by the Academy of American Poets would seem to agree. In other words, poetry is rarified air, the kind of thing John Adams was talking about when he said he had to learn politics and war so his grandchildren could dabble in the humanities: it’s high rhetoric, like the recent eulogies for John Lewis or Auden’s “September 1939.”² Johnson, apparently, feels differently:
I don’t read poetry unless I have to, which
would be when a guard from Penn is pressing
a knife to my throat in a penitentiary, where I
am residing for protesting some Poetry Institution.
He orders me to squeal, again and again, that I, too,
dislike it, that I wish I were a poet, but I am not.
(“With Fred Seidel, near the Matterhorn, in 2020”)
Of course, Johnson reads a lot of poetry; his book shows familiarity with every major poetic group and community in the U.S. over the last sixty years. It’s just that satiric poets know there’s a crack in the edifice . . . any edifice. For Johnson, that edifice is the Poetry Foundation and its billion-dollar endowment that isn’t being spent to promote and protect poets. In that building, however, also live language poets, “post-avant” poets (Johnson’s column in the sadly departed journal Dispatches from the Poetry Wars was called “Emily Post-Avant”), conceptual poets, poets too indebted to theory, Gertrude Stein, and any writers who are being paid off by the “virtual Poetry Bank” of the times, including the poet himself: “True enough: I, too, am a literati-stiff” (“To Those Who May Come After”). Things used to be different, he mourns, but now “Bolinas is condo strata. Nanluoguxiang’s / a Po-bourgeois tourist-trap” (“Departing Qinzhou”), and in another poem from the masterful “From One Hundred Poems from the Chinese” section, he admits that he’s “grown old / and surly. My liver is shot. Almost all the friends / of my youth have abandoned me.” So he leaves instructions for a friend:
If you’re coming
down through the narrows of the River Kiang,
give me a ring, my cell is 815-234-8004. I’ll
come out to meet you, as far as Cho-fu-sa, by the
mist-shrouded ruins, on deserted Black Mountain. (“Near Black Mountain”)
These lines might be funny even to people who don’t know the famous Pound translation they mimic, but they’re not only funny; Johnson is serious about the corruption of the present Institutional Culture of poetry, calling it “a virtual Poetry Bank exist[ing] to buy poets off” and excoriating the “Big Tent, Third Way nature of its canny / putsch (crucially aided by Capital gifts), likely / tweaked by intelligence ops.” The Chinese section closes with a haunting verse that may or may not be an actual translation:
My dear poets, here and there,
today and long ago,
Paradise is a wandering ghost,
for ten thousand years,
before it will be born. (“Three Days After”)
Some people might wish to abstain from appreciating poems the subject matter of which is primarily other poems (and poets). But to return to Johnson’s predecessors for a minute, Dorn wasn’t above taking a few shots at the poetry world, from his comparison of poetry criticism to “grades assigned to meat” in Hello, La Jolla to the poem in his last book, Chemo Sabe, “The Dull Relief of General Pain”:
millions of people in North Korea
are succumbing to starvation . . .
Doesn’t Michael Jackson like children anymore?
Or did he never like communist children?
What’s going on? This is poetry calling!
Poetry is waiting for an answer.
Ariana Reines is a poet I’ve been paying attention to lately who’s making similar moves:
Poem being extremely careful and giving praise as peculiar as possible
Try hard little poem
Where is the reward asks the poem it will come someday
Says the poem
while on the next page she seemingly mocks herself: “Oh yeah her stuff is so fresh compared to, compared to / Her stuff is really fresh / Yeah” (“Save the World,” Mercury). And a few centuries ago, Juvenal suggested there may be other factors to poetic success besides skill:
How can grim poverty grasp
Inspiration’s enchanted wand, how find that singing grotto
if you’re forced to scrape and pinch to satisfy the body’s
demands for cash? Horace cried “Rejoice!” on a full stomach. . . .
For if Virgil had not had one slave-boy and a fairly comfortable
lodging, all those snakes would have dropped from the Fury’s hair,
her grave trumpet would have been voiceless. (“Satire VII”)
That passage could also serve as a gloss to much of Byron’s Don Juan. So one answer to the objection that these poems are too absorbed with poetry is that poets always hear other poets’ voices in their minds: why not just cop to it? But let Johnson tell it:
For we did what we could, switching our homes
More often than our shoes, all through the small
Poetry wars and the great war of the classes, despairing
At the sins in the latter, and no doubt too much
At the ones in the former. We crossed deserts, rivers,
And seas, and still we never arrived, for we were nothing.
That’s from “To Those Who May Come After,” what he calls a “translucination after Bertolt Brecht,” in which he confesses “Yeah, I know, it’s not 1939, so the language is ‘off.’”
So there are two things to keep in mind about good satire: 1) it ridicules people and ideas, and 2) it’s funny. Johnson’s Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House amply fulfills both of these criteria, but more importantly, it perpetuates a once-noble tradition that’s in serious danger today of being choked off by woke and humorless commissars who wouldn’t know satire and parody if it bit them. Sadly, that’s not only in the poetry world: the best thing about this book is that it creates a world where more of our sensibilities can be employed than in the terrible, straitened year just completed.
NOTES
The tombstone of Archilochus, the second poet of the western world after Homer, says “Hasten on, Wayfarer / lest you stir up the hornets”; he was rumored to have killed people by means of his iambs.
All these years later I still don’t understand why he took out the line “We must love one another or die” and later renounced the entire poem: that we’ll all die whether we love one another or not misses the point.