Those Who Come After…And Before
Because of Poetry, I Have a Really Big House by Kent Johnson. Shearsman, 90 pp., $18.
This is a review of Kent Johnson’s latest book of poetry published under his name, Because of Poetry, I Have a Really Big House. I have it on fairly good authority that neither claim in this title is true. Mr. Johnson does not have a really big house; and, if he had one, it would not be on account of poetry. But false claims are part of Kent Johnson’s view and practice of poetry. Indeed, when I say that this is the latest book “published under his name,” I refer to two intriguing books that don’t bear his name, or at least not as author: the astonishing and controversial apparent forgery of a collection of poems about Hiroshima by a brilliant but nonexistent Japanese modernist poet, Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (1996); and the equally astonishing, but so far less known and also presumably forged El Misterio Nadal: A Lost and Rescued Book by Roberto Bolaño, purportedly compiled and with an introduction in 2001 by Roberto Bolaño (2018). Johnson denies authorship of either of these works. After all, as he pointed out in an appendix to the Yasusada book, it has never been “adequately explained how a community college teacher with little poetic talent could have produced work that caused fairly unbridled admiration amongst such a range of well-placed arbiters in the world of poetry.”
Book cover art by Michael Basinski
So, Kent Johnson is a forger, like the authors of Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, The Book of Daniel (the one in the Bible, not by Doctorow), the Orphic Hymns, and The Works of Ossian, among many others. Yet, even in this company, he is a distinguished forger.
He is also a soldier–general, guerilla, cook, genius, and buffoon in our recent Poetry Wars. He is the author of satires and parodies aimed at contemporary poetic tendencies and pretenses. From 2016-2020, he co-edited with Mike Boughn the online journal Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, in which among other entertaining, edifying, and offensive acts, he brought to birth the great Emily Post-Avant (the faithful bestower of good advice on matters of poetic-political etiquette) and was a champion of OBU (One Big Union/Oligarchy Busters United — the anonymously authored Movement That Does Not Exist).
In order to properly read Kent Johnson’s poetry and evaluate his career, one must be somewhat familiar with a brief history of those Wars of Poetry to which he so often refers and which, in his view, continue to determine the compass points of contemporary American poetry. The question is pretty simple. What actually is poetry, and what is, or ought to be, its relation to its contemporary institutions and ideologies?
Which reminds me of the joke Plato tells about Socrates and the poet. Socrates runs into a poet in the agora and tells him, “I love your work, but I’m kicking you out of the Republic. You tell immoral lies about the gods and heroes. And furthermore, your whole methodology is flawed. You say that you’re — oh, what’s the phrase? — ‘representing reality.’ But all you’re representing is another representation. You’re in a cave! — metaphysically speaking — and yet you claim to be our moral guide. Well, I’m not buying it. Only philosophers can apprehend reality. Follow our lead or take a hike.”
Plato and Aristotle from Raphael’s School of Athens, 1509. Wikimedia.
And the joke is that all the while that Plato has his old teacher give the poets the boot, Plato himself is running an underground poetry lab writing his so-called “dialogues,” filled with dubious characters, unlikely fables, psychological speculations, and metaphors aplenty. But Plato’s poetics — which he calls philosophy — is authorized by truth and ethics, and he plans to install it as the official discourse of the new State. Poetry, truth, morality, and state power will be aligned.
And that continues to be the question and the conflict played out in the wars of poetry. Is poetry true (and in what sense) and ethical? And what ought to be poetry’s relation to political and ideological authority?
The social role of poetry has always been a question, but it has not always been posed explicitly as a question. Even Plato was misleading about the poetic character of his own writing. Generally, poetry has been written to praise whatever was the dominant power, whether worldly or sacred. The biblical psalms worked to this purpose. The poetic portions of the prophetic books severely criticized worldly abuses of sacred laws and renewed those demands in stronger forms. Poetry sought to align itself with power, and this seemed both right and natural, especially insofar as earthly power relied on divine sanction.
If the poet felt that worldly political power and divine power were aligned, his poems could speak to a world more or less in proper balance. The Muse would sing to him and not steer him wrong. The story of Aeneas’ journey would rightly inform the founding of Rome. If, however, the lived world and its supporting stories began to seem incompatible with ideas of divine justice; if divine justice began to appear as merely a useful fiction to support an unjust regime, then poetry would have to strain to locate its authority. Such effects of poetry would become grotesque, its characters monstrous or pathetic. The differences between Sophocles and Euripides are instructive here, as are the deep ambiguities and atrocities of the Book of Job (that heretical text somehow became canonical!).
It is only relatively recently, with the onset of Romanticism, that poetry detached itself from both divine authority and a political status quo allied with the growth of capitalism. This ideological shift in poetry’s relation to authority is well illustrated if we contrast the two most famous “Defenses of Poetry” in English, those of Phillip Sidney and Percy Shelley. Sidney, a courtier and diplomat, took the authority of the state and its aristocratic basis as givens. His polemic was for establishing an epistemological and moral place for poetry in relation to two rival literary genres that seemed to have more broad authority: philosophy and history. Sidney’s essay was an exercise in wit, an ironic modesty posing as audacity, or perhaps the other way round. How could poetry, with its quite evident fictiveness, surpass philosophy and history with regard to truth? Quite easily! “Poetry asserteth nothing and therefore never lieth.” And in terms of edifying moral examples, history was clearly full of villainous evil and philosophy replete only with abstractions. Only poetry could portray the world and human character in their ideal forms, ripe for current perusal and imitation. If these arguments appear dubious, Sidney anticipated and attended to that problem in his opening, as he related a conversation with the royal equestrian — and recalled that horses and horsemanship were ancient and renaissance figures for poetry. The horseman tells the poet of the exceeding nobility and greatness of his profession, its antiquity, its association with the great figures of every age, the unique and matchless skills necessary for its achievement. His presentation is so compelling that Sidney remarks that “if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse.”
William Hogarth, Time Smoking a Picture, 1761. Palau Antiguitats.
The defense of poetry stands at the same level as the defense of horsemanship. Both pursuits are gracious and beautiful. They rest on the authority of their own histories and powers of ingenuity and, like the other arts and sciences, they exist without ambivalence in the aristocratic order. Poetry is its own reward and its own defense. Its best advocacy consists in doing it brilliantly. That’s what Sidney’s great sonnet sequence, “Astrophil and Stella,” demonstrates. It’s not an examination of passionate love; it’s a logical, extravagant playing out of every variation of the sonnet form. You read it and just think, all right, that’s how it’s done. Shakespeare’s sonnets are more profound; ultimately, they’re better poems. But just in terms of exuberant skill and the pleasure of composition, “Astrophil and Stella” is the best sonnet sequence ever written. And why do they love each other, these two characters? Why, because one is a “star” and the other is a “lover of stars”! They love each other by definition. The justification and authority of poetry are self-evident because they are congruent with the authority of the social and linguistic orders.
With Shelley, three hundred years later, the situation is entirely different. The authority of the dominant political order adheres now in reductive notions of utility, what Shelley calls the “calculating faculty” through which “the rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.” The purpose and authority of poetry, Shelley argues, aims toward liberation. Shelley provides an anthropology and history of poetry in which he hopes to convince us that poetry reaches toward eternal principles of joy and freedom. This may or may not be convincing — we must take what we can get, I suppose — but what is certain is that poetry must challenge the authority of the existing order.
Poetry must be oppositional. But this is also the moment when poetry became schismatic. Not all poets agreed with Shelley’s assessment. The authority of eternal beauty, freedom, and joy might not be seen by all poets as antithetical to emerging capitalist modernity. There might well be poets entirely comfortable living and writing in the existing social order. And this political divide might well manifest itself in formal choices, with political conservatism aligning with formal traditionalism. This is when “The Poetry Wars” began, and Wordsworth’s attack on genteel, aristocratic forms and subjects of poetry in the Preface to The Lyrical Ballads was the first major offensive in that war.
Wordsworth’s polemic was earnest, as was Shelley’s. But mockery could be the more potent weapon for poets attacking poets deemed toadies of the ruling order, as we see in Byron’s brutal “Dedication” (published only after his death) to the mock-epic poem Don Juan:
Bob Southey! You’re a poet — poet Laureate,
And representative of all the race;
Although ‘tis true you turn’d out a Tory at
Last, — yours has lately been a common case: —
And now, my epic renegade! What are ye at,
With all the Lakers in and out of place?
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye
Like four and twenty blackbirds in a pie;
And that opening is the mildest torrent that Byron unloads on Southey and the “Lakers” Coleridge and Wordsworth, accusing these poets of complicity in colonial massacres in Ireland and of bad writing: “The vulgarest tool that tyranny could want,/ With just enough of talent, and no more,/ To lengthen fetters by another fix’d,/ And offer poison long already mix’d.”
Honoré Daumier, The Illusions of Artists — Grand Prizes, 1842. Studio International.
This is the context in which we should understand Kent Johnson, whose new book I discuss more specifically below, at the end of this micro-history of poetry-field agonism and position taking. He is the contemporary purveyor of Byron’s rage and ridicule toward the poets and poetics of his time. He continues Byron’s invective, insisting that the poet’s vocation be consistent with political values of emancipation and able to produce great and lucid writing. That’s a pretty high bar, but this is poetry we’re talking about — the thing that makes nothing happen, but for which people can die from the lack of; the thing whose imaginative spirit produces the legislation that would save us if only we would attend to it. Part of this joint critique of complacent politics and bad writing — and their relation with the dominant authorities and ideologies of their time — concerns the sources of the poet’s sinecure. If the poet is “established,” who establishes the establishment? Who’s their Daddy? For where the poets’ treasure is, the theory goes, their hearts will be also.
Daddy — the place where the poetic establishment has been established — has, since the mid-twentieth century, been the American university and the growing presence of MFA programs. The critique of university poets is not new. Kenneth Koch, the Byron of his time (he even published two book-length mock epics in ottava rima), ridiculed the university poets’ lack of aesthetic and moral conviction in his poem “Fresh Air” in 1955. Here is a small excerpt:
Where are the young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities,
Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit,
They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) Poems about maple trees and their children,
Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d’Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island,
Oh what worms they are! They wish to perfect their form.
Or this:
Supposing that one walks out into the air
On a fresh spring day and has the misfortune
To encounter an article on modern poetry
In New World Writing, or has the misfortune
To see some examples of some of the poetry
Written by the men with their eyes on the myth
And the Missus and the midterms, in the Hudson Review,
Or, if one is abroad, in Botteghe Oscure,
Or indeed in Encounter, what is one to do
With the rest of one’s day that lies blasted to ruins
All bluely about one, what is one to do?
Jack Spicer. 1960sdaysofrage.
“Fresh Air” was one of three of Koch’s poems included in the anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. Published in 1960, this book laid out the directions and dimensions for a non-academic modern American poetry. It drew on poets from New York (Koch, Ashbery, O’Hara, Schuyler, Guest), from the West Coast (Duncan, Spicer, Ferlinghetti, Adam, Blaser), the Beats (Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder), and the one quasi-academic institution, Black Mountain College with its extraordinarily experimental curricula across all the arts (Olson, Creeley, Duncan; and one should also add John Cage, though he is not in this anthology). Allen wanted a comprehensive view of what he considered the third generation of American modernists — the poets who, he argued, are the true inheritors of the work of Whitman, Stein, Williams and Pound. These were the sites where the real poetic work was being done: by poets in relation to their peers, to the tradition, to other arts, and to the larger social and political world; and creating their own structures of publishing, selling, and reading. These poets, Allen asserted, are “our avant-garde, the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry” (xi). Academic associations and employment among these poets are almost non-existent. Almost all went to college, of course, many to elite colleges. But, except for the few on the faculty at Black Mountain (and Madeleine Gleason at San Francisco State), none identified themselves in their bios as teachers at any level. A more common biographical reference was service in the Second World War. Twelve of the poets were in the military, merchant marine, American Field Service, or worked as military or civilian nurses in Europe. This common experience — common also to vast numbers of people in that generation — perhaps militated against the elitism that at least partly characterized the modernisms that came before and after them.
These poets share the sense that an academic profession will not be helpful toward a poetic vocation. Whatever “poetics” one arrives at will come through immersion in the writing of poetry, not through separate, theoretical, investigation. Olson is the exception here, with his extensive theorizing about projective verse and poetic fields. But, on the whole, the New American Poetry’s energy is not that of theory, and its home is not the university. Its worlds are worlds of social life and perception and of poetic traditions that continue in the present with metamorphic intensity.
Book cover of Charles Olson’s Projective Verse, 1959. Harper’s Books.
The New American Poetry assumed a certain oracular relation to poetry. Certainly, Ginsberg did. And Duncan, who today may be the most revered of the NAPs, wrote that the transformations that poetry performs are a kind of “magic,” and that “metaphor is not a literary device [pace the New Critics and their progeny] but an actual meaning arising from… the co-inherence of being in being...” (432). Poetic form itself links us with “numinous powers, quests and workings of the spirit,” and inspires a deep reverence which, “in academic circles… is thought of as a vice not a virtue.” (434). For the New York group, the poetic vocation was wit, and Frank O’Hara’s contribution to poetic theory was to make poetic form akin to a pair of pants: it must be loose enough to let you move around, but tight enough so that everyone would want to go to bed with you.
This poetry was equipped to run, dance, worship, and have sex. But to some younger poets with more university training, the NAP lacked rigor. What was the philosophical grounding of the poetry? What was its ideological relation to language and to the subject and to referentiality? On what theoretically valid basis could poetry engage in a thorough critique of its society? And the poets of NAP did not, on the whole, have either the theoretical chops or the interest to respond to questions like these, at least in the terms they were posed.
Enter then a new, loose grouping of poets in the mid-1970s who called themselves, loosely, “Language Poets.” Like the NAP, the Language groups were geographically dispersed, though with deep roots on the West Coast. Continuing the formal experimentation of the NAP, their engagements with the modernisms of Stein and Williams, the French and Russians, but adding large doses of hermeneutics of suspicion, Marxism, Saussurean linguistics, poststructuralism, and new varieties of experimentation drawing on the mathematically based projects of the French Oulipo movement, LANGUAGE envisioned a new poetry detached from conventional syntax and reference that would challenge existing political systems at their most basic linguistic levels.
Like the NAP non-movement, the LANGUAGE non-movement created its own journals (most prominently, the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, 1978-1981, edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews) and presses (e.g. Roof, Sun and Moon, Tuumba). LANGUAGE, toward its inception, was exuberant and irreverent, like any informal movement of young, exuberant, irreverent writers — though more self-consciously intellectual. As Bernadette Mayer, something of a crossover figure between NAP and LANGUAGE, advised: “Work your ass off to change the language & don’t ever get famous” (The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 83). Nobody worked at a famous university. Getting famous was the least of their worries.
John Ashbery, The Pause That Refreshes, 2016. The Paris Review.
But then some extraordinary things happened. LANGUAGE poets began to get jobs — at universities. And these were mostly not jobs in MFA programs (whose proliferation is, of course, another interesting story in the history of contemporary poetry); these were jobs in English Departments where not just the writing, but the broader understanding of modern poetry would be formed. Important scholars like Marjorie Perloff and Jerome McGann became interested in LANGUAGE and were intrigued by its uses of contemporary theory. By the 1990s, LANGUAGE poets were working at a lot of exalted intellectual places. SUNY Buffalo (then to become University of Buffalo), long a bastion of Black Mountain College avant-garde practice, converted to LANGUAGE. University of Pennsylvania became the center of the most advanced avant and “post-avant” work in poetry. LANGUAGE poets and allies became installed at Brown, Berkeley, UC-San Diego, Bard, Fordham, and Wayne State. LANGUAGE poetry was now the Thing, to be loved or hated. LANGUAGE was determined to overturn whatever poetic establishment stood in its way. Its position, like that of any Left faction in politics or art, was that it possessed the real truth about language, politics, aesthetics, and social institutions. And therefore, it must triumph.
In 2010, Rae Armantrout was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
LANGUAGE poets now were being published in The New Yorker; their books were coming out at Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, and Wesleyan.
Although its epistemology and metaphysics were resolutely anti-foundational, LANGUAGE was, in a sense, a Platonic movement. It believed in a particular truth regarding the relation between language, politics, and social institutions; and believed that poetry that did not grasp this truth must be, if not banished, at least severely discredited. And this it sought to do. The Poetry Wars were in full swing.
Into this scene, meanwhile, adjacent, tangential, meandering came Kent Johnson in his idiosyncrasy, somewhat impersonating adroitly a rather adroit Village Idiot with a history of forgery. The non-author of the Yasasuda poems began to wonder how it was, how it had transpired, that the latest, most sophisticated poetic movement — and whose sophistication resided in its critique of all existing discourses and institutions — had come to a position of prominence approaching dominance in those very discourses and institutions. Ambition, of course, was always part of the poetic vocation. The stakes of poetic ambition were both enormous and minuscule. Enormous because this was poetry! To become a poet was to enter the traditions of Homer and Sappho and Dante and Li Po... well, we all know the drill. It meant to be in the room where happens the most moving and mind-and-spirit-bending constructions of symbols of which our species is biologically capable. To be a poet was to embody the fullest, truest species being in a life defined by finitude, socialiality, care, desire, and language. And damn, there were some people in the history of poetry who could really bring it. Anyway, that was the idea. But poetic ambition has always also been minuscule, for its rewards, for the most part, are so pathetically small. All these poets — and competing for what? To get a book into the Penguin series?! To get a reading at the Writers House, recorded for Penn Sound? To get some teaching gig somewhere so that you actually can be thinking about poetry during your working day?
Larry Rivers, Young Archer, 1995. Heritage Auctions.
But poetry is what it is. The market remains small and unremunerative. The jobs are mostly part-time, perfect aesthetic complements to a gig economy. And yet, poetry now has become nearly fully integrated into the academic economy, which is an economy, as we know, based on a system of stardom and waste. There are the brilliant elite — with tenure and endowed chairs and universal acclaim and constant invitations to give talks and readings, perhaps even book tours for the very brilliant indeed. And there are those teaching the intro creative writing courses, trying to get a chapbook out on a small press, writing a review here and there, trying to get local readings, and maybe health insurance... and dreaming, always, of the tenure track, of moving from the branch campus to the flagship, of a book on at least one of the bigger small presses — one that actually tries to sell a book once in a while and has a real distribution network. These are the poets who are not brilliant. Sorry. I mean, of course, we’re all brilliant. But some poets’ brilliancy shines from positions of authority.
And yet, in the terms presented by Language Poetry, this authority was always precisely what was in question. As Kent Johnson perceived it, this astonishing success, this capture of the center by a previously marginalized and often denigrated movement, was not just a “selling-out,” though it was that; it was a brilliant cornering of a poetic futures market. Language Poetry saw that with their theoretical acumen, they could simply jump past the now-stodgy New American Poets world of readings in basements, tedious, dated, self-indulgent outpourings, and at best maybe a job at an MFA program, and instead ride the theoretical poststructuralist wave directly into English Departments where, at least by the younger crowd, they would be quite welcome.
But what then? What now? The enigmatic and entirely obvious rule of capital continues to rule, and which of us now living in comfort can claim to oppose it? Poets never really did too well at legislating, and now they’ve stopped trying altogether.
Kent Johnson published Homage to the Last Avant-Garde in 2009 and Homage to the Pseudo Avant-Garde in 2016. In these books, in strange, genre-less poems or in rhymed doggerel or in odd small narratives about poets he happened to meet or in Whitmanesque or Ashberian lists or in juxtapositions of poetry and atrocity or in a series of poetic bumper stickers or in a lengthy lecture by a Pseudo-Stalinist Pseudo Commissar of (Pseudo) Poetry, he assaulted the pretensions of poetic establishments: the departments, conferences, travel perks, associations, prizes, dramas of hierarchy. These are quite wild books, somewhere on the edge of something not exactly identifiable. To call them “satire” would be understatement. They are attacks — full of joy, energy, the love of poetry and its true vocation if such thing can any longer be located. But they continue to hold up as examples Johnson’s true heroes of poetic modernity: Vallejo, Brecht, Mayakovsky, Rukeyser, Levertov, Niedecker, Koch (yes, even him! Johnson compares him to Alexander Pope), Hikmet.
Denise Levertov’s statement for Don Allen’s New American Poetry anthology. Poets.org.
I was once talking with one of the targets of Johnson’s attacks. The subject of Kent Johnson came up. We were talking about OBU and the role of Dispatches in publishing it. “I guess you don’t like him much,” I ventured. “It’s not that I dislike him,” the poet replied. “It’s just that he’s a despicable person.”
So, now Kent Johnson checks in with Because of Poetry, I Have a Really Big House. This is a smaller book than the “Homages.” It’s still silly; it’s still angry. It still holds to an idea of poetry as separate from the pursuit of a career. Because of Poetry seems a book of exile. Its central poems are a series of ten entitled “From One Hundred Poems from the Chinese” — a tag toward Rexroth and Pound — in which the speaker appears to be an outcast from the Wars of Poetry, a former courtier now trying to live at peace in the landscape-like mountains of the provinces far from the intrigues of court. His tranquility is continually interrupted, however, for there are no secluded mountains, even in his imagination. Old comrades drop by as well as lost AWP members looking for the conference hotel. “Where have the anti-careerist poets gone?” he laments , having provided a concise description of the state of contemporary poetic careerism and the acquisition of poetry futures:
… Granted, the selloff started with
the general recouping of the Po-left
into Academe, circa
mid-to-late 80s. Later, the Poetry
Foundation swabbed up lumpen Avant
surplus for cheap, on auction block. It’s all
pretty much a bought, cheerful Duma now:
The residual Middlebrow Mainstreamers
on the right; the opportunistic
Liberal Innovators on the left; the
insurgent POC/PC arrivistes in the
center, tacking to and fro, and with
breathtaking skill, sailing
the Rules of the Game...
And there we are, an insult for everyone, like Queen Margaret’s invectives in Richard III. And we must not forget finally Johnson’s choice derision for the latest avant arrival, Conceptual Poetry, whose contribution to the death of subjectivity has been to copy public documents and publish them as verse. Johnson observes how, “with insufferable Warholian hauteur,” the conceptualists display “the clearest, most cynical acquiescence to these ideological conditions.” This is the “Big Tent” of poetry. The Poetry Wars are over. And what can an old warrior do but retreat to the mountains and wonder — in a delightful diatribe whose sentiments many of us must share — why he has never had a poem included in the yearly volume of Best American Poetry. “I’ll tell you this,” he complains, “It seriously dills my pickle.” If only the lessons of the New American Poetry had truly been learned, Johnson laments in the odd counter-history, “Let Us Now Give Thanks to the New American Poetry.” If it weren’t for the lasting triumph of the NAP, post-avant American poetry would be an unctuous, molelike mess,
...far
from the wild and sovereign and
honorable spirit that guides the
Field today, thank God, against
the careerist and protocoled
rituals we’ve all so wisely
eschewed...
The most moving, or emotionally undisguised, poem in the book is a translation and rewriting — a “translucination” — of Brecht’s great poem, “To Those Who May Come After” (“An die Nachgeborenen” 1939). Johnson updates the poem to our current “time of bedlam” — of climate change, conflicts of class and race, the inevitable complicities of all who live under the umbrella of capital and in which now, as when Brecht wrote, “We/ Who yearned to lay a foundation for tenderness,/ Could not ourselves learn to be tender” (35)... and in which the “small Poetry wars” really have little importance after all.
The poem asks those future generations to think of us with “forbearance and compassion” — perhaps even extending to those combatants of poetry. I tend to agree, certainly to sympathize, with Johnson’s critiques. I find them funny, painful, and true to my own limited experience. At the same time, there is the transhistorical problem: How do you make a living and still be able to write? By the late 70s or early 80s, as ideologies of austerity grew hegemonic, just having a “job” was no longer enough to get poets through their youth with roofs over their heads. A job would no longer pay the rent. You needed a career. It may be that the tilt toward careerism in the Poetry Wars at exactly that time was largely the result of the precipitate leap in real estate prices and the simultaneous contraction of the academic job market — two more symptoms of the growing dominance of capital. To live on the borders of poverty and to work at a low-prestige job became highly unhip in most artistic circles. Kent Johnson was willing to do it though. His forgeries, lampoons, and poetic rants in a variety of voices were written from his very uncool professional roost at a community college in Illinois.
It will be interesting to see what “those who come after” will make of Johnson’s non-career in Poetry. //
Bertolt Brecht with his son Stefan in 1931. Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Works Cited
Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. Berkeley: University of California Press [1960], 1999.
Andrews, Bruce and Charles Bernstein, eds. The LANGUAGE Book. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron. Byron: The Oxford Authors, Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
Johnson, Kent. Because of Poetry, I Have a Really Big House. Swindon UK: Shearsman Books, 2020.
---, ??. Doubled Flowering: Froom the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. Edited and translated by Tosa Motokiyu, Ojiu Norinaga, and Okura Kyojin. New York: Roof Books, 1997.
---, ??. El Misterio Nadal: A Lost and Rescued Book by Roberto Bolaño, purportedly compiled and with an introduction in 2001 by Roberto Bolano. Ed. Isabel Quiroga and Jorge Mosconi. Trans. A.B. New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2018.
---. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde. Swindon UK: Shearsman Books, 2008.
---. Homage to the Pseudo Avant-Garde. Toronto: Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017.
Koch, Kenneth. Selected Poems 1950-1982. New York: Vintage, 1985.
The OBU Manifestos. Toronto: Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017.
The OBU Manifestos, vol. 2. Toronto: Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017.
O’Hara, Frank. “Personism: A Manifesto.” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. Introduction by John Ashbery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. 498-99.
Plato, The Republic of Plato. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 2016 [1968].
Pound, Ezra. Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1971[1926].
Rexroth, Kenneth. One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. New York: New Directions, 1965.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defense of Poetry.” English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay. The Harvard Classics. Online.
Sidney, Philip. The Selected Poetry and Prose of Sidney. New York: Signet, 1970.
Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
