Though I was often confused about the heated arguments
Though I was often confused about the heated arguments and references on Kent Johnson and Michael Boughn’s Dispatches, since I didn’t keep up with these things, I was always energized by its existence. Though Kent Johnson is kind of argumentative, or because he is, I just put him in touch with brilliant Bill Marx, who wrote negative or mixed reviews of nearly every play or book he reviewed and now edits a must-read and often controversial online magazine, The Arts Fuse. They are going to have fun being partners in crime, or in rime.
I think Kent Johnson has a similar sensibility, a moral urge to tell us what’s actually going on behind the scenes and what he thinks is worth our time and attention.
I remember that, for endless years, traditional poets got NEA grants. Then, somehow, some more innovative poets became judges, and the next thing you know, the more innovative poets from Robert Creeley on down, a whole slew of them, got grants.
Kent Johnson wants to convince us that boards, manipulators, superficial poets and MFA programs have turned the world of poetry into the opposite of poetry, which we look to because it goes below the radar of — what? — capitalism, advertising, false cheer.
Several years ago I sent a poem overflowing with emotion, not something the poets I generally hang with or read or admire, do, and to my surprise he and Mike Boughn took the poem for Dispatches, saying it was honest. Who says that these days? .
1799 cartoon depicting William Cobbett. Granger.
And they published other things, like a strange letter I wrote but never sent to John Ashbery, again because I was feeling wistful about the world of poetry and the poets we had lost.
They published the important Resist anthology when Trump was elected, and recently an anthology of poems called Poetics of the More-than-Human World — which is what we don’t think or feel enough about yet what is most essential to write about and to act on now.
It was an unusual combination — Dispatches was — of cool and warm.
I love the Language poets, especially Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein, as well as others loosely associated with them, like Tina Darragh and P. Inman — they free me from the endless repetition of similar thoughts. Kent has made fun of and criticized them, and it’s true that the excesses of the post-post-Language poets can be flat and dull rather than revving us up (though others are energizing, for sure). I suppose Kent gives some of them a hard time because of those excesses.
But Kent’s truly original book is giving me the details. I laughed out loud, and admired the variousness of the poems, in structure and theme, so I looked forward to each section as something fresh and different.
He has a cause and he has devoted himself to it. I can’t say God bless him but I can say
Poets bless him. Read this book to chuckle at or sigh because of our little world and to rethink poetics. And maybe, as happened to me right away since I couldn’t always tell when he was serious, I had to admit to myself that I’m implicated in the poetry wars, too. Which means he went deep.
For What? by Frederick Varley, 1919. Wikimedia.
