I’m convinced that, for whatever reason, Kent Johnson just isn’t having fun if he isn’t up to mischief. Fortunately – an adverb I use with some caution – Johnson has boundless energy when it comes to attracting same. First there was Araki Yasusada, mild-mannered Hiroshima native & fan of Jack Spicer, in some ways the most successful literary hoax since Ern Malley. Much about Yasusada was so evidently politically incorrect – aided none too subtly by having his name reversed as tho it were English (the Japanese would have called him Yasusada Araki, rather like bad-boy photographer Nobuyoshi Araki). This project was followed by The Miseries of Poetry, a series of collaborative “traductions” between Johnson & the equally non-existent Alexandra Papaditsas. Published by the estimable Skanky Possum in 2003, this book appears to be entirely out of print & none of the usual rare book search sites show any copies available for sale. Miseries, which for some reason my imagination always hears as The Miniseries of Poetry, is a 24-page chapbook with a 9-page intro and no less than 12-pages of blurbism purportedly written by everyone from John Ashbery to Alan Sondheim. The book is dedicated to Johnson’s first born with the admonition

Reject Poetry with all of your might.

Most recently, Effing Press, the Possum’s cross-town (and friendly) rival in Austin, brought out Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War, a chapbook that is unique in Johnson’s endeavors – even including his relatively straightforward work as anthologist & literary translator – in that it is a book of poems Johnson claims to have written himself. This is the volume that Johnson compared to Eliot Weinberger’s What I Heard About Iraq as one of two books that

stand as full and open responses to the war

That’s an interesting claim to contemplate, particularly since – like Double Flowering & The Miseries both – it is obsessed with poetry’s relationship to institutions in the global economy (and within that obsession, always the question of identity). Lyric Poetry begins with an open letter to the McCarthyite thugs of Campus Watch, imploring them to turn their lights on Johnson (and the book’s verso notes that “All royalties are to be donated to Campus Watch U.S.A.,” even tho the initiated will understand that Lyric Poetry will generate no royalties). This sort of overt begging for attention, especially in a meta-critical frame, is almost the signature Johnson move. Reading it always feels lurid like coming upon a friend in the act of masturbation, then pausing to watch.

The book then proceeds through a series of nine works, followed by an afterword every bit as winsome and winning as the preface, a review of a Charles Bernstein piece read at an event for the anti-war anthology Enough, in which Bernstein – whose piece is referenced, but largely undescribed – is determined by Johnson to be “exclusivist and fundamentalist in his poetics” apparently because Bernstein has failed to produce the kind of instrumentalist anti-literature that characterizes Weinberger’s pastiche parallelogram. The argument is that if language poets aren’t writing agit-prop anti-war pieces, therefore their politics are corrupt. It’s a deliberately thuggish move on Johnson’s part, and he means it as such, essentially playing Denise Levertov to Bernstein’s Robert Duncan.

But this is not a condemnation of Johnson or his tactics in that piece, which I see less as an assault & more as the perpetual Johnsonian plea for attention, leavened by a serious concern for the war AND a sense of the history of just such one-act morality plays over the past century. Indeed, instead of Levertov, Johnson could just as easily be playing Robert Silliman Hillyer to Bernstein’s Ezra Pound, condemning Pound’s poetics for its politics. Johnson knows, perhaps more than most, that suborning one to the other would be the intellectual equivalent of suicide, an act we’ve seen played out on more than a few occasions.

Further – and I almost want to put that word in caps as well – FURTHER, the nine works that come between these two deliberately falsified provocations demonstrate exactly the kind of knowledge about which his postface feigns ignorance.

The first, “Mission,” is an adaptation not of Archilochus, as Johnson claims, but from another 7^th century Greek poet, Mimnermus. Thus Johnson:

We decamped from Pylos, barbarian town smack in a boulder field

and set oar to lovely Asia, making fair Kolophon our base. We gathered

our strength for a fortnight, writing poems and sharpening our swords

by the sea. On the morning the oracle spoke in tongues, the main column

followed the rushing river through the forest, while our unit of ten went upward

and west, along a tributary stream. At a small waterfall we stopped to rest

on some moss and gazed at our golden helmets and shields in reflecting pool.

We spoke in low voices of the beauty around us, of the dark, darting trout,

and of the strange, haunting songs in the towering trees. We spoke of time, and

friendship, and truth. Then each of us drank deeply from the pool.

Aided by the gods, we stormed Smyrna, and burned its profane temples to the ground.

And Mimnermus:

When we left the lofty city of Neleian Pylos, we came by ship to the pleasant land of Asia; and possessing overwhelming violence, we settled at lovely Colophon, leaders full of terrible hybris. From there, we set forth from the Asteis river and by the will of the gods took Aeolian Smyrna.

Johnson follows with a poem called “Baghdad” whose unacknowledged (but patently obvious) primary source turns out to be Margaret Wise Brown, tho note along the way the swipes he takes at Williams & Vendler:

O, little crown of iron forged to likeness of imam's face,
what are you doing in this circle of flaming inspectors and bakers?

And little burnt dinner all set to be eaten
(and crispy girl all dressed with scarf for school),
what are you doing near this shovel for dung-digging,
hissing like ice-cubes in ruins of little museum?

And little shell of bank on which flakes of assets fall,
can't I still withdraw my bonds for baby?

Good night moon.
Good night socks and good night cuckoo clocks.

Good night little bedpans and a trough where once there and inn
(urn of dashed pride)
what are you doing beside little wheelbarrow
beside some fried chickens?

And you, ridiculous wheels spinning on mailman's truck,
truck with ashes of letter from crispy girl all dressed with scarf for school.
why do you seem like American experimental poets going nowhere
on little exercise bikes?

Good night barbells and ballet dancer's shoes
under plastered ceilings of Saddam Music Hall.
Good night bladder of Helen Vendler and a jar from Tennessee.
(though what are these doing here in Baghdad?)

Good night blackened ibis and some keys.
Good night, good night.

(And little mosque popped open like a can, which same as factory
of flypaper has blown outward, covering the shape of man with it
(with mosque): He stumbles up Martyr's Promenade. What does it
matter who is speaking, he murmurs and mutters, head a little bit
on fire. Good night to you too).

Good night moon.
Good night poor people who shall inherit the moon.

Good night first edition of Das Kapital, Novum Organum,
The Symbolic Affinities between Poetry Blogs and Oil Wells,
and the Koran.

Good night nobody.

Good night Mr. Kent, good night, for now you must
soon wake up and rub your eyes and know that you are dead.

There is an elegance here that is quite apart from the structure of Good Night Moon – as there is in “Mission” & almost anything Johnson writes in verse form. But Johnson’s question about Helen Vendler’s bladder is a good one? What is it doing here? And what is the point being made by equating a burned child (crispy girl) with fried chickens with William Carlos Williams? Is Williams being equated here with Col. Sanders & napalm? Like so much that is going on in these poems, these details are like free-floating improvised explosive devices salted throughout what is actually beautiful poetry. It’s a combination that Johnson has been perfecting since the earliest of Araki Yasusada & here it’s particularly effective. But it’s also particularly irresponsible, which I suspect it actually has to be in order to be so effective. Johnson’s poems are like unchained pit bulls tossed into a school yard – somebody is going to get bit. But you almost have to admire all that taut muscle & those unstoppable jaws.

The next piece, “Poem Upon a Typo Found in an Interview of Kenneth Koch, Conducted by David Shapiro,” offers a parody of a particular side of the New York School, that uptown side both Koch & Shapiro have always inhabited. As written, the poem is both loving & spiteful:

7. I remember those good old days, whilom it was me, and Will and Ben and Chris and the wholesome lads of the laste avant-garde.

And, of course, a footnote crediting Shapiro for turning Johnson on to poetry,

thus changing my life. (Whether I should thank Shapiro with all of my heart or send him a very powerful letter bomb is a question I often ask myself.)

That parenthetical sentence is the only one in this book I completely believe.

This poem is followed by what I take as partly a parody of Projectivist poetics, partly a satire on the current generation of poets: “When I First Read Ange Mlinko.” As with the New York School piece, it is both loving & spiteful.

The next piece, “Forwarded Message Follows,” ostensibly is an email from one Ossama Husein at Sudan State University, addressed not to Johnson but to “Dear Mr. David Bromige,” inviting him to the Khartoum Translation Conference, where

We passion to invite another poet of America, Mr. Kent, who also is credenced in your two countries and perhaps others, to be a racist. (In his reply to our Central Council, he spoke: “I am honestly not sure.”) Still we are opened, and we have most little, but our flowing tents which appear (to all purposes and meanings) to be sailboats in the deserts, are yours.

At one level, this is the crudest imitation of English as a Second Language imaginable. Yet soon we have embarked on a very credible translation Leonel Rugama’s most famous poem, “The Earth Is A Satellite Of The Moon,” whose very last line is

Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the moon.

After which the alleged author writes:

Well, in realness, I do not know why I give this poem, except that I know you very much like poems. Don’t you agree it was translated, without doubtfulness, by someone most self-congratulatory, so angry at his own country, yet blind as Oedipus to the terrorisms of non-white peoples? (Forgive me. I am smoking opium from Afghanistan. It betters my English, which you can tell is getting better as this letter, like a martyr, spills.)

The remainder of this book is every bit as masterful & lame, almost always at the same time, as these pieces. My question here is this: is this a full and open response to anything, let alone the war. It is worth noting at this point, as the reader who doesn’t see Johnson’s attack on Bernstein until the book’s end will almost inevitably sense, that Johnson himself has enacted consistently throughout this book the very same position that Bernstein himself advocated at that reading in 2003. Which is to say that Johnson is using Bernstein to attack himself. An almost perfect Johnsonian move, that.

It is entirely plausible that this is major poetry. Is it major war poetry? Is it war or anti-war poetry at all? Hardly. And I think that is the crux of what is so very hard to figure out about Johnson. At some level, he wants to be the next Richard Pryor of poetry, but it’s very hard to get props for using the N-word – and the blatantly racist parody of Sudanese English is exactly that – if you’re a Midwestern white boy. So what we end up with here is some superb writing, often penned completely without judgment & filled with many nasty little moments therein. That doesn’t make this book bad, but it does make it very weird. At some level, it makes me long for the moral clarity of the Fugs’ song, Kill for Peace.

Over the years since I first met Johnson in Leningrad, I have been both impressed & appalled at his hijinx, often both at once, and will concede to having been the person who brought Double Flowering to its eventual publisher, Roof Books. Johnson & I are, I believe, equally appalled at the horrors of the war in Iraq, famine in Africa & unprecedented oil profits here at home. We differ only in our idea of how poets might go about opposing it. Lyric Poetry may be a remarkably polished tantrum, but it’s a tantrum nonetheless.

Kent Johnson
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After sending me the note I posted yesterday, Kent Johnson went on in a later email to muse the following:

What seems funny to me, frankly, is that the "non-mainstream" poetry world has produced exactly two books so far that stand as full and open responses to the war – Weinberger's and my own Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz.

To which he appended, in a later email, “That I've heard of, at least.”

All of which made me think about the nature of anti-war poetry itself. When I wrote directly of Weinberger’s dystopian epic, Eliot wrote to say that he’d never claimed to be a poet, and doesn’t claim What I Heard in Iraq to be a poem. But if it’s not a poem, it certainly is poem-like in many of its strategies, and many of its effects.

Today is the 40^th anniversary of the composition of “Wichita Vortex Sutra II,” for my money the greatest anti-war poem of the Vietnam era. It may even be Ginsberg’s finest poem. By now, everyone pretty much knows the story of how “Sutra” was written, Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky & friends driving around Wichita, Kansas, with a tape recorder turned on, later apparently to be transcribed & linebreaks added. I wonder if that recording itself still exists and, if so, what it would take to get it up on Ubuweb or PENNsound? Certainly the final product doesn’t have the happenstance feel of something tossed off or even improvised, although it surely carries tell-tale signs of the spoken.

When “Wichita Vortex Sutra II” was created, the war – dating it from the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” – was just 18 months old. It would be another 98 months before the last helicopter would wobble upwards & pull away from the U.S. embassy roof in what was then called Saigon. Roughly 85 percent of that conflict, at least from the U.S. vantage, still lay in the future, tens of thousands of American casualties yet to come, literally millions of Vietnamese (for whom the war was already well into its second decade in 1966).

When I think of anti-war poems & Vietnam, efficacy is not the standard I’m looking at or for. Ginsberg’s poem didn’t stop the war any more than Picasso’s Guernica halted the rise of fascism. Plus Ginsberg’s was not the only significant antiwar poem of the Vietnam period. Robert Duncan’s “The Fire Passages 13” seems the obvious other example, but one could claim the title sequence of George Oppen’s Pultizer-Prize winning Of Being Numerous (and some other poems in that same book) as well, although I tend to think of Numerous more as being one of the great poems of the Second World War. In a time in which every reading by Robert Bly was an anti-war reading, in which poets as diverse as James Dickey, Diane Di Prima & Donald Justice were all penning antiwar poems, the question I come back to – four decades hence – is what remains? And what constitutes an anti-war poem?

Let me ask that question in a more difficult way: are The Pisan Cantos anti-war poems? They certainly do not appear to be pro-war poems as such. But it’s hard to imagine them as any other than as war poems – that is their field of engagement. They are, to borrow Johnson’s terms, “responses to the war.” Yet to concede even that is to suggest that some of the greatest poetry of the Second World War was penned by an enemy in a prisoner-of-war camp. If you exclude The Pisan Cantos as war poems, then it would seem to me you would have to exclude H.D.’s Trilogy, especially her work on the bombing of London The Walls Do Not Fall. Yet to include these works seems to me to move along a path that ineluctably leads to the idea that every poem by Paul Celan, for example, must be read/understood as a war poem.

This question really concerns the epistemological dimension of the poem, the degree to which any text can be said to be (or not be) about. That is an issue that has been fodder for a generation of theory now, and one can track writing’s bad conscience toward this relationship back even before Joyce demonstrated the slippery slope that leads more or less directly from ”The Dead” through Ulysses to Finnegans Wake. Poets approach this from more than a few different angles along that path – Duncan’s strategy in Passages, for example, of addressing the issue directly (albeit through a discussion of a painting, Piero di Cosimo’s painting “The Forest Fire”), as part of a far larger sweep of issues in the poem is not so dissimilar, frankly, from Pound’s own solution.

It’s interesting to think of who didn’t write a Vietnam War poem – virtually all of the New York School, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson – as it is to think of the degree to which this epistemological question lay at or near the heart of the breakup between Duncan & Denise Levertov – Duncan, the antiwar poet, taking a different position when confronted with the collapse of Levertov’s work from 1970 onward into so much reified politically correct scolding. A parallel discussion was going on, it should be noted, with regards to the poetry of Amiri Baraka, as many of his old pals among the New Americans were not so enchanted with his turn toward Maoism. Here, tho, the war was a more peripheral issue, tho I’m sure Baraka would have noted that it was hardly peripheral to black men, who were being wounded & killed in disproportionate numbers. And there was a third debate during that same period, involving Edward Dorn & the rejection of Black Mountain poetics visible in ‘Slinger. It would be interesting for some doctoral student to look at all three of those events together – if there was a “politics” to Dorn’s excommunication, it was certainly oblique.

It’s worth noting further, just because it’s the way Johnson posed the question, that neither “Sutra” nor Passages 13 were themselves books, tho “Sutra” was reprinted as a poster more than once and “The Fire” if I am not mistaken was first published by Poetry magazine (something that could not happen today with its current anti-modern regime). The closest thing I can come to as a book-length response poetically to the Vietnam war by a major poet of that period is Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, just possibly the most embarrassing book ever penned by any of the New Americans, filled with romantic fantasies of what it would be like to be a “real” revolutionary. Dedicated, no less, to Bob Dylan, self-admitted fan of Barry Goldwater that he was.

So I’m not so surprised that more such works don’t now exist – nor for that matter do I think that it means that the current generation of post-avant poets are politically quietist any more than I think the absence of similar writing by Robert Creeley, say, ever meant that he wasn’t utterly appalled and sickened by the brutality & stupidity that was our imperial adventure in Southeast Asia. The issue is much more complicated than this. What is really sad & sick is that, 40 years after “Wichita Vortex Sutra II,” this whole question comes back to haunt us:

Three five zero zero is numerals

Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas

and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet

Our nation “of the fabled damned”

or else . . .

Language, language

Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth

defined as man standing by his word

Word picture:          forked creature

Man