Kent Johnson’s Really Big House on Walden Pond
A Review of Because of Poetry, I Have a Really Big House, by Kent Johnson, Shearsman Books, 2020.
I once met Kent Johnson at a dive I stopped at in Buffalo when I was passing through on my way north. After plying me with a few boilermakers (not even top shelf), he invited me back to see his big house that he said he got because of poetry. “Yeah, right,” I thought. That’ll be the day. I was going to decline his invitation, but he’s a very persuasive guy. “Come on,” he said. “It’s really cool.”
I tagged along mostly to humour him, but when we got there, you know what? He wasn’t lying. It’s a really big house. Sprawling, even, would be more accurate, except he couldn’t very well call his book Because of Poetry I Have a Sprawling House. It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, and Kent Johnson is nothing if not a ringer. I mean, he’s a ringer in the sense that he’s a dead ringer for Roberto Bolaño, or so I hear in certain chat rooms on the Dark Web. But he’s also been known to go to poetry readings by creative writing types and pretend he doesn’t know how to write poetry, till he gets up at the open mic, and then bam, lets loose with a blast of the real thing, and they all go, oh my god who let the ringer in?
When we got there, the first thing I noticed about his really sprawling house that he got because of poetry was that it’s not really a house at all — it’s more like a book, but a book that you could live in, if you know what I mean. Some books are like houses that way — different rooms you can move to and from. Places to sit down and kick back. Places to get nourished. Places to sleep. I have it on good authority that some books even have trout streams in them from the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, which I happen to know Kent Johnson is very interested in — having a sprawling house with speckled brown trout lurking in deep cold pools in the corners of the living room so he doesn’t have to risk his life traversing slippery rocks and falling on his ass into the river and breaking his neck (which has been known to happen, all except for the last part) and he can actually fish for trout while sitting on the chesterfield watching Fargo and having a few drinks. And posting something somewhere on the internet about poetry.
Kent reading at Resist launch, photograph by the author.
It’s a good life, almost Thoreauvian in its elegant simplicity and adherence to basic principles. Of course Thoreau probably wouldn’t have approved of Kent Johnson’s really sprawling house, given his predilection for tiny shacks. But I suspect he would have approved of Kent Johnson’s badass attitude in spite of his sprawling domicile since Henry was pretty badass himself. He didn’t have much time for phonies. Or commuters. Not that I am down on commuters. But, cosmologically speaking, it is kind of a horror that the current Management would have you believe it is just fine and dandy to spend a quarter of your life stuck in traffic while the stars stare down in disbelief. One thing is for sure — Kent would be in the clink with Henry demanding that Waldo explain what the hell he was doing out there.
What I’d like to know is, how did he do it? Kent Johnson, not Thoreau. We know how Thoreau did it. He got his buddy Waldo to loan him some land. He walked in the woods a lot, often with Louisa May Alcott. Canoe trips. Kent Johnson is a whole other kettle of fish. Although I can guarantee you he definitely would be out on the pond with Henry in the middle of the night, hanging over the edge of the boat, staring into the inky depths where stars danced. Nothing phony there. Just the real thing. Which is what I think Henry and Kent have in common. We used to call it Truth, but that got us into some pretty serious trouble, and now we are content to settle for truth. Speckled brown trout in cold pools.
Kent at lake, photograph by author.
Come to think of it, the other thing Henry and Kent have in common is writing oners. Henry’s books, every one, is a oner. His Journals take that even further. And nobody that I know of today comes close to the prolific imagination that Kent Johnson brings to writing poetry. In what could reasonably be called a well-populated field, Johnson is unique. He is a formal Coyote, shapeshifting from poem to poem, from book to book. He is Trickster roaming through the Poetry World holding up a mirror to its vanity and hypocrisy. And he knows a hell of a lot about poetry. Don’t let the “Ah shucks I’m just a community college teacher from Wisconsin” routine fool you. He knows his shit. This fact often gets overlooked because the sense of his wealth of knowledge is lost in your own laughter as he invents some new form in a burst of poetic exuberance. The laughter is intricately woven into a deeper truth, a real knowledge. Robin Blaser called it the truth of laughter. Maybe that’s why Kent Johnson’s house seems so big. Laughter does that.