Part of what fascinates me about Kent Johnson’s relentlessly adversarial poetry is that it seems to be the polar opposite of mine. Why do I even accept it as poetry? At the same time, I should probably admit to myself that this great difference between his writing and mine spares me from any incipient tendency toward competitiveness—something I become more aware of, reading him, because competitiveness among poets is a big part of Johnson’s subject matter. The more I feel that another poet’s work has in common with mine, the more likely I am to read it with the underlying question in mind: who’s doing it better? Reading Johnson, I never have to feel that. But for that very reason he makes me feel a bit generic, because his work seems just as unlike everyone else’s as it is unlike mine, which implies that my writing has more in common with everyone else’s than I like to think. I mean, at least we, the rest of us, are not trying to ride roughshod, the way he does, over whatever seems to be poetry—you might say, over the poetry of poetry: which is not necessarily lyricism, but anyway the distant music of language itself. Keeping in mind that the poetry in poetry is, as Robert Frost said, what gets lost in translation, understanding Johnson’s ongoing effort as one to forge an unpoetic poetry affords an insight into the importance of his work on the “Araki Yasusada” oeuvre, an experiment with the language, not of poetry, but of translation. I know Johnson still denies his authorship of it, but that he did write Yasusada’s work remains at least as plausible as his own speculation (in A Question Mark Above the Sun) that Kenneth Koch wrote “A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island.” In any case, Johnson’s ventures into translationese continue in “From: One Hundred Poems from the Chinese,” the second section of his new book, Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House. These are imitations, so to speak, rather than imitation, like Yasusada. He doesn’t hold back on the kind of phrasing that makes you go “Ow!” when you read a tin-eared non-poet’s poetry translations—like, “I’ve grown plodding in my fading years”: Ow!, right? But a recurrent tactic of Johnson’s is to press an annoying affectation so far that you end up finding it funnier than you could ever have imagined at first, and then even somehow beguiling—a gambit most evident here in the 106 numbered charges (in ungrammatical and sometimes faux-antique diction) against someone or other that comprise “To Make an Omelet of Poetry, You Have to Break Some Eggs.” Examples: “19. Did blocketh me on Twitter…. 46. Did done stole the idea of my poem and published it as her idea, the wench…. 62. Did done called me a minor poet, what a joke, I don’t claim to be James Dickey, but she’s a million times more minor than I!” Actually, despite my conviction of the uniqueness of Johnson’s position, I suppose this intentional badness (elsewhere merely intentional flat-footedness) has a lot in common with that brief poetic meteor known as Flarf, with its intention “to be wrong, awkward, stumbling, semi-coherent, fucked-up, un-P.C. To take unexpected turns; to be jarring. Doing what one is ‘not supposed to do’” (Gary Sullivan), its cultivation of “deliberate shapelessness of content, form, spelling, and thought in general…often with the intention of achieving a studied blend of the offensive, the sentimental, and the infantile” (K. Silem Mohammad). But the Flarf-ists did not really persist in this campaign with anything like Johnson’s tenacity, and the lack of any distinct target for their offenses beyond the culture at large left them with a sort of negative lyricism, interesting in its own right but not as unusual as it might at first have seemed. They did not really question poetry’s claim to touch on something transcendent. (And what could be more transcendent than Mohammad’s insanely brilliant “Sonnagrams,” Oulipian transmutations of Shakespeare? I can only wonder whether his apparent vanishing from the poetic scene means that he has ascended bodily into the ether or else, a poetic Icarus, approached too close to the sun and drowned in the ocean of language.) Yeats held perfection of the work and the life incompatible. Actually the latter has never been on offer. Only the work can, on occasion, be perfected. But Johnson not unreasonably suspects that the abjection of the poet’s life undermines the poetry’s value, and he sees hypocrisy everywhere. His animus is against poets as such, himself included, and with names named (or sometimes torqued). His poetry does not pretend to embody or intimate anything “higher,” but to show how poets’ human, all-too-human pettiness betrays any such claim and renders it ridiculous. That, apparently, is how it upholds the transcendent.
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Kent Johnson, Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House, is published by Shearsman Books, Swindon, UK, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.