Trickster Johnson

Best known for the Araki Yasusada incident, Kent Johnson is a deadly serious, brilliant subversive. "I am in awe of you," I emailed him recently, and I meant it. Johnson's soon-to-be-released book, Homage to the Last Avant Garde, begins with a prefatory fuck you, thank you poemette to Kenneth Koch, then an inventively bizarre anti-war/comic jab at the New York School. Composed in a form Johnson dubs the Mandrake, in which “The first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth stanzas (all of them as a group called the “flower") must make some kind of reference to one or two poets of a preceding poetic generation," while “The second, fourth, sixth, eighth, tenth, twelfth, and final fourteenth stanzas (all of them as a group called the “fruit") must be rendered in prose, with a majority of these stanzas constituting quoted material." The first howling sample, “The New York School (or: I Grew Ever More Intense)," begins:

I turned over the bottle of shampoo and Frank O’Hara came out. I rubbed him all into my head, letting the foam rise, knowing I was just warming myself up, excited by the excess of what was to come. Soon, I began to make noisy climax sounds. The scent of oranges and oil paint from a general store in the outlaw town of Shishido (with all its exotic wares) filled the stormy air.
I couldn’t help it, I thought of this: “One day, a fortnight or so after my mother’s death in Shishido, I was up in the hills playing with some friends. Suddenly one of them said, “Look, the baby’s hands are all swollen." I touched the baby, which was still strapped to my back, and screamed—it was stone cold. My friends began to panic and jump up and down, shouting, “It’s dead, it’s dead." It felt awful having something dead tied to me, so I ripped off my jacket and dropped the baby, before joining the others as they ran back down the hill as fast as their legs would take them, shrieking."

In subsequent prose poemy chunks, Barbara Guest, Ted Berrigan, James Schuyler, Joseph Ceravolo and John Ashbery are squirted, squeezed or splashed out as shaving cream, after shave, toothpaste, deodorant stick and hand soap, while Kenneth Koch is a mouthwash tasting of "secrets and codes, of pre-Socratic papyrus and pussy willow, of communion wafers and coleslaw." These vignettes of high-brow bodily maintenance are juxtaposed with scenes of absurdity and/or horror, false yet in-your-face real, the fabulous cheek by jowl with dumb details plainly told. This alternation of trivia with the unspeakable is also found in an Iraq War poem that ends:

Hi there, Madid, I’m an American poet, twentyish, early to mid-thirtyish, fortyish to seventyish, I’ve had poems on the Poets Against the War website, and in American Poetry Review and Chain, among other magazines, and I have a blog, and I really dig Arab music, and I read Adorno and Spivak, and I’m really progressive, I voted for Clinton and Gore, even though I know they bombed you a lot, too, sorry about that, and I know I live quite nicely off the fruits of a dying imperium, which include anti-war poetry readings at the Lincoln Center and the Poetry Project, with appetizers and wine and New World Music and lots of pot. And because nothing is simple in this world, and because no one gets out unscathed, I’m going to just be completely candid with you: I’m going to box your ears with two big books of poems, one of them experimental and the other more plain speech-like, both of them hardbound and by leading academic presses, and I’m going to do it until your brain swells to the size of a basketball and you die like the fucking lion for real. You’ll never make it to MI because that’s the breaks; poetry is hard, and people go up in flames for lack of it everyday. By the time any investigation gets to you, your grandchildren will have been dead over one thousand years, and poetry will be inhabiting regions you can’t even begin to imagine. Well, we did our best; sorry we couldn’t have done better… I want you to take this self-righteous poem, soak it in this bedpan of crude oil, and shove it down your pleading, screaming throat.
Now, get the hood back on.

In another anti-war piece, high-tech, cold-blooded carnage is mythologized and poeticized with human beings becoming “combusted in a whoosh," "a fire fountain" or “bizarrely flashed and vanished in brilliant light," all alluding to our sickening Shock and Awe. As the beneficiaries of Empire, our criticisms of its rapacious crimes are often tainted with frivolity, hypocrisy or a sort of pornographic titillation, yet to remain silent is even worse, thus Johnson is condemned to use "a tragedy that is not mine to give some moral pressure to a poem." With his gross details and transparent methods, he strips away false sanctimony while implicating the refined, morally righteous reader as well as himself, both parties to this diversion we call poetry.
In "Imitation, Traduction, Fiction, Response," published in Jacket and not included in this volume, Johnson yearns for "poetry’s return to fiction, its old and forgotten home." He's obviously not talking about the "I do this, I do that" or "guess what I saw yesterday" sorts of narrative, which are common enough in today's poetry. I also doubt he's hankering for more of the epic. Poetry was fiction back then simply because there was no prose to speak of. To get the illiterates' attention, you had to close your eyes, strum and sing. Johnson's own brand of fiction is derived from the fabulist Borges, Michaux and magic realism, but with a slightly nasty, scam artist edge. Johnson's at his best when he's satirizing, parodying, clowning around or crawling under the table to pull our legs, as in "Twenty Traductions and Some Mystery Prose for 'C': A Journal of Poetry," which overflow with fake quotations, fake poems by real Greek poets, real poems by fake Greek poets, all done with a clarity, elegance and poise reminiscent of Guy Davenport's (real) translations from the Greek. Stripped of his masks, playing it straight, Johnson can fall a little flat, as in "Five Sentimental Poems for Angel Hair," or he can get a tad overbearing, as in "33 Rules of Poetry for Poets 23 and Under." Perhaps Johnson is trying to show us his more genuine and congenial side, but at least this reader prefers the fabulously, wickedly fake Kent! Let's close, then, with an imitation:

To John Bradley

--after Du Fu’s “To Pi Su Yao"
It’s hard to know if we have talent. Here and there, a drunken
grad student expresses admiration. It’s pathetic, really: our cars
are junk, missing half their hubcaps; in the place on our vitas
where the “prizes" should go—about the same number as the hubcaps.
The wheels start to fall off: beer bellied, flatulent, we’ve become
the objects, from afar, of our children’s disdain. Twenty years beyond
the prime of life, inadequately covered, we buy Viagra with our overtime pay.
Who gives a fuck about either of us or our elected tribulations?
We’ve been reduced, here, at Sullivan’s Tavern, to our own audience.
Though the workers from the tannery stare at us with contempt,
we appreciate each others’ poetic merits. Our poems will be completely
forgotten, rot in the landfill of oblivion. With wry smiles and toasts
to the ancient ones, we console each other:
In that common, mass grave, we shall never be alone.