I loved Kent's ability to use the poetic art form to criticize not poetry itself, but the popular trends that muddy and obscure poetry by forcing all of us to dig through the garbage to find actual substance.

“From One Hundred Poems from the Chinese” doesn’t aspire to the brevity and concision of classical Chinese poetry. They’re relatively long, jumping between themes and styles, and always very funny.

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!

The ostensible cause was Kent’s Emily Post-Avant piece critiquing Amanda Gorman’s poem for the Biden inauguration, which an editor at The Typescript said was “antithetical to our values.” I’ve sometimes disagreed with Kent, both in private exchanges and on the pages of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, but I see nothing particularly offensive about the Gorman column, with the possible exception of calling Lady Gaga a “narcissistic bitch.”

Johnson’s work is distinguishable for its international breadth and for its pugilism.

He listens to the life inside life for the life outside life.

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.

“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!”

Echoes from so many sources, augmenting frequencies, ostensibly bitching about insufficient personal rewards — but more fundamentally, questioning the Peter Principle that underlies curatorial commodification.

Satirists live in a kind of poetic permanent revolution: “to mock,” a Greek proverb goes, “is to thumb through Archilochus” (Guy Davenport, 7 Greeks).

“I do want to be aware of those tensions (between academy and creativity, between ‘translation’ and ‘adaptation’), and find a way to play off them without being tortured or paralyzed by them or pulled too far in one direction or the other.”