Guy Fawkes Day in The Poetry World
When Theresa Smalec noted on her Facebook page last summer that she needed to read this Kentish wag, I replied as follows. “Yes you do,” I said. And that means, order a copy forthwith from Shearsman Books in the UK, and to your utter surprise and guaranteed delight it will pop up in the mail in a very few days — at least mine did, here in Canada, where our Queen still believes in the Royal Mail! This edict still stands.
Kent’s got other books with Shearsman as well, but because I didn’t recognize how good a writer he was until I read THIS book, I foolishly didn’t order the others — shortly, I will. WHY? Because his insights into and damning critique of the state of American letters is unparalleled. Not since Ed Dorn have we had such scathing satire on the state of the arts, and not since Alexander Pope, I don’t think, have we had someone willing to take on the establishment with such vigor — and in rhymed couplets, yet! At least in the opening salvo. Please note, I did not say “with such vitriol,” for indeed Johnson’s manner is much less aggressive and far more humorous, or shall I say “light-hearted” than Pope’s, and certainly less vicious than Dorn’s when the latter attacks head-on.
The book opens with a couplet that immediately sets the tone for much of the volume, for it is a curious equation between urbanity and the bucolic. The obvious incongruity of this “coupling” at first strikes one merely as off; but upon reading a few lines, one recognizes that the whole camp of modern and postmodern poetry is being turned on its head, and that irregularities in the practice of poetry and the promotion of an entire industry of poets and their work are being satirized.
Because of poetry, I have a really big house.
Behind the house lives a kindly family of grouse.
Few would read the first line as a tautology since, for the most part, poetry pays either poorly or not at all for the serious writer. There are, of course, curious exceptions, as we have recently seen with Amanda Gorman’s instant success after her inauguration. Did I get that right? If not, perhaps I am in keeping with a Really Big House. As for the grouse, who are there for the rhyme (if not for the ready money) they have no real business at all. Oh, they sport about for a few lines, shining like shook foil as though they were pheasants. But we cannot take them seriously. And so the poem and the book open with a caveat: don’t take this seriously, folks, it’s just a rhymeful frolic. But, of course, this is a ruse, and the poem quickly enough begins its salvo against Establishment Poetics. Towards the close of the opening poem, Johnson writes two lines, both ending with the word “poetry” and concludes:
It’s funny says me, that there is no word to rhyme with Poetry…,
then promptly half-rhymes the word with “Ashbery,” who is subsequently rhymed with “Mystery.” The last two lines of the poem conclude with a “Neruda-faced mouse” and “a really big house.” So you can see, we are going in circles, and not getting very far at all. Where is the trap, and where the cheese?
Cover of Kent Johnson's Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House. Shearsman Books.
The tone and structure of the first poem in the book sets the stage for a more acerbic critique of modern poetry to come. This is laid bare in the second poem, by now clearly humorously titled, “Poetry Will Save Your Life.” Well, yeah, if it will buy me a really big house, why not? In what purports to be the autobiography of a poet on the make, Johnson makes the narrator out to be someone who, having been slow to see reality, has learned the virtue of the quid pro quo to assure one’s success in the poetry game — or wars, as it more quickly becomes. Not only has this poet acquired a really big house, but, having mistakenly drank Drano at 26 (or was it 36?) he now sports a very big hole in his throat as well — hardly an asset when it comes to giving eloquent poetry readings. But wait! There was method in his madness. He is now disfigured, handicapped in speech, but all the more certain to gain the sympathy of an audience whose hearts are ready to embrace a casualty of the Poetry Wars. He wears his badge of honor proudly and envisions seeing it as a selling point on the back cover of his upcoming volume: “I don’t think there’s ever been an Author photo with a gaping neck hole, and it would surely go nicely with the title.” Poetry will save your life. But at what cost?
If we were wondering just when our poet would switch from casual humor and subtle innuendo, we are brought to it quickly enough in “The Discs of Snow,” which opens gently enough with a quote from Jack Spicer, but instantly turns to unmitigated invective:
I like the way the flowers grow,
The way rain falls, the discs of snow.
I like the writers in my class,
The way they kiss each other’s ass.
And despite the narrator’s willingness to include himself in the sycophancy,
I wish they liked me equally,
Returning thus my fealty…,
The Poetry Foundation headquarters in Chicago. Wikipedia.
the pummelling of the Poetry Institution has begun. The contemporary poet’s struggle is not with language, truth, or the exigencies of poverty and finding one’s voice (remember that throat) but with seeking an MFA, winning contests, getting prizes and making a name for oneself — not on the battlefield of life, but “on Twitter feeds [which] / Predominate aesthetic deeds.” So much for Homer’s “Of words the speaker, and of deeds the doer.” The narrator-poet sees himself victimized for his fascistic past, and must, like Pound in his cage in Pisa,
pull down my vanity,
A centaur in a dragon world,
Where prizes fly like flags unfurled…
In despair he cries out against the manifold successes of the more institutionalized Language poets who have been welcomed by the establishment and, in particular, by the University of Pennsylvania, where a chair endowed by members of the military-industrial establishment now provides him a sinecure. As the poem concludes, Charles Bernstein is in the hot seat, while the narrator cosies up with Emily Dickinson, her pal Death, and a paltry group of avant-garde companions:
Let Bernstein have the War Crimes Chair
The Carriage holds but just ourselves,
And five or six avant-garde elves.
I like the way the flowers grow,
The way rain falls, the discs of snow.
Intended or not, the opening and concluding lines of the poem echo, however ironically, the famous poem by John McCrae, which opens,
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
which plays an eerie counterpoint to Dickinson’s poem about facing death and the true heroics of warfare.
Official US Army photo of Ezra Pound when he was a prisoner of war charged with treason against the US in Pisa, Italy, which is when he wrote The Pisan Cantos. Wikipedia.
Self-immolation in the “avant” struggle to defeat the forces of evil represented by Poetry Magazine, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and The Poetry Foundation (all here subsumed under the title “Poetry Institution”) is wonderfully parodied in the recreation of Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot to blow up the English Parliament. Here, though, the narrator stands outside the action and describes the heroic but foolish Fawkes who undertakes (hmmm) to blow up the Institution even though it will mean he too will disappear in the conflagration. The Poetry Wars have at last come to this, and in order to protect the proletarian poet against the vices of Power, he makes the ultimate sacrifice. The language of “The Gunpowder Plot” is a kind of imagined seventeenth-century doggerel worked into a prose poem filled with naive sentimentality. And unlike the actual Gunpowder Plot of English history, this event goes off as planned and brings the Poetry Establishment to its knees. All is reduced to rubble, so that an even playing field can be engaged once again:
Heinrich Ulrich, The Gunpowder Plot Conspirators. Early 17th century. National Portrait Gallery.
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.
Still, Johnson does not promise a new Opening of the Field. This is satire after all.