The Big House of Poetry: In Memoriam Kent Johnson (1955–2022)

I once—and only once, (un)fortunately—met Kent Johnson. Chicago Review brought him to the University of Chicago to give a reading in 2013 (I think), at the Taft House. He read in a sort of mock-Poundian, oracular voice, which was funny. The poems were funny too; but the humor had thorns. He wore Ray-Bans (at night, like Corey Hart) because he could, and looked both cool-cat and crazy as a wombat. In the middle of the reading he stood up and vomited on the floor. He sat down and started reading again, oracularly, as if nothing had happened. Everyone but me left the room (a half-basement, poorly ventilated) eventually. After a while, he looked up from his crumpled sheets of poems and said to me: “Alright, enough, let’s get outta here.”

As often happens after poetry readings at the U of C, folks ended up at Hyde Park dive The Cove. Kent was in his element in such settings. A raconteur, he regaled his audience of mostly graduate students with anecdotes about the avant-garde, of which he had an endless store. (He was in Leningrad with the Language poets in 1989, for example, after which Ron Silliman called him an “American cockroach.”) When the night came to an end in the wee morning hours, someone offered to call Kent a cab. I said I could drive him to his hotel: Kent looked at my almost finished beer with a raised eyebrow (see no. 6 of Kent’s 33 Rules of Poetry). “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m like Socrates, I can drink all night and not get drunk.” “Mmm, The Symposium,” said a sweater, approvingly. “OK,” Kent said, took three shots of mezcal, and we were off. We discussed Language poetry and Georges Bataille on the short ride. “Salud,” he said when we arrived at the hotel, kind of tumbled out of the car, and seemed to disappear suddenly into the night.

Some of that is true, and some of it—in a Kent Johnsonian spirit—I made up. Highlight from the KJ bibliography: I Once Met: A Partial Memoir of the Poetry Field.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Kent was something of a mythical figure at Chicago Review, and beyond—something (no one, still, I think, is quite sure what Kent was—I once made an effort, inadequate I’m afraid, in an email to him: “you’re a one man poetry rumor-mill-cum-archivist-cum-two-penny-trash-peddler-cum-town-crier-cum-revisionist-historian-cum-gadfly-cum-on feel the noize! I don’t know how you do it other than that you can’t not”)—something, then, that gets passed down from one editorial regime to the next, like the weird assemblage of shit that lives in the journal’s offices, or the outdated software. He was a chore—his correspondence must be of Voltairean proportions—but he was also a tireless advocate for CR, a frequent contributor, and a friend who brought gifts.

When I became managing editor of the journal, the first full issue that I worked on was 60:3, The Infrarrealistas. He’s not in the table of contents, but that issue happened because of Kent. One of the many things that Kent—comrade of the Sandinistas—was is a great advocate for, reader of, and translator of Latin American poetry, especially of work often neglected by the poetry “establishment” (I’ll have more to say about that bogeyman in a moment). The Infrarrealistas issue is an example of that—outside of Bolaño, the Infrarealist movement hasn’t received much attention.

Highlight from the KJ bibliography: A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua.

I wrote a review for the issue, and when it came out Kent wrote me a very kind email (I don’t think he remembered me from 2013) praising the piece: I wasn’t sure at the time if he was being ingenuous, or if he was just buttering me up because of my role at CR. I’m now sure that it was both. Another of the many things that Kent was is an extremely generous reader of, champion of, publisher of, and—mentor isn’t quite the right word, because he was too down-to-earth for that—something like a mentor to young writers.

Kent was most infamous as the supposed author of poems by Araki Yasusada, a fictitious Japanese survivor of Hiroshima. Kent never publicly admitted authorship, but it’s become something of an open secret (perhaps incorrectly, and I suspect that there’s more to be discovered). Some have denounced the Yasusada project, and Kent’s involvement as the supposed author, as racist, imperialist, and as an example of the appropriation of historical trauma. Others have argued that the project in fact brought to light structural racism and imperialism in the world of institutional US poetry. I won’t add anything here to the extensive commentary on the Yasusada Affair—interested readers can easily find their way into it—except to say that Kent himself wrote some of the most illuminating commentary about the whole thing. A late photo of Kent (currently his banner photo on Facebook) has his face almost completely hidden behind a biography of Pessoa. Kent, like Pessoa, was a master of heteronymity, and, again like Pessoa, it will probably take some time and some gumshoe scholars to sort it all out—if it ever will be sorted.

Highlight from the KJ bibliography: Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada.

Kent seemed bent on stirring things up: he was restless. Because he was constantly kicking up dust, and constantly saying things, he put his foot, or hoof, in his mouth (some might find this way of putting it too kind) from time to time (he himself admitted as much). He was constantly rubbing up against everything, like a sly and perhaps slightly guilty cat, so he rubbed some people the wrong way. He was constantly clowning around, so some people began to think that this joker was nothing more than a clown. He was a kind of Shakespearean fool. He was a gadfly. Or, as Jeremy Noel-Tod put it, Kent was that guy.

In recent years Kent’s contrarian stance took the form of an almost maniacal obsession with the Poetry Foundation, to Kent the Moloch of the contemporary poetry field. “The Poetry / Foundation, its loaded legatee, // has bosses who blithely brag of expert / ties to Wall Street and the Intel agencies / (not that such much troubles most lib / bards)!” Kent wrote, characteristically, in his Rexrothian series One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Kent’s assault on the “PoFo” was hosted online at Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, the lively web junction that Kent edited along with Mike Boughn from 2016 to 2020. Dispatches was firmly in the tradition of the avant-garde “little magazine” and “the mimeo revolution of the 50s and 60s,” as Boughn put it, but for the digital age. When they decided to shut it down, Kent asked for comments. I sent the following, which was how I felt—and how I feel: “Dispatches spared no sacred cows, let no sleeping dogs lie, always called out the elephant in the room, aped the uptight and eager to censor, monkeyed around, sang like a lark, tossed pearls to swine, and rose like a lion to class warfare. The zoo of contemporary poetry will be poorer and more boring without it.” He loved it. Another of the many things that Kent was is an editor in the highest sense of the term and the role: a gatherer of writings, an opening for writers, a place where people could come together and things could happen.

Highlight from the KJ bibliography: Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance.

Toward the end of my time as editor of CR, I started preparing for a 75th anniversary anthology. As part of the process, we contacted former editors to ask them what pieces from their time they thought we should include. Josh Kotin recommended a series of mock reviews that Kent wrote on contemporary British poetry, collectively entitled “Corroded by Symbolysme: An Anti-Review of Twelve British Poets, Being Also a True Account of Dark and Mysterious Events Surrounding a Famous Poem Supposedly Written by Frank O’Hara.” As things came down to the wire (in CR’s fashionably late style), and we were engaged in the enjoyable but difficult task of narrowing the thing down to a reasonable (? expert opinions differ) size, I made the case that we should publish the second installment of Kent’s “critical novella,” which was about J. H. Prynne. Everyone read it and everyone agreed; not only that, we decided that it needed to follow Prynne’s essay “Mental Ears and Poetic Work.” Kent was genuinely delighted to have the piece included.

Personally, I think Kent was at his best when satirizing the political pretensions of fellow poets, whether of the Cambridge school or of the Language and post-Language flavor. In his anti-review of Prynne, recounting a made up or embellished conversation with the doyen in Cambridge, Kent provides what is one of the best critical accounts of Prynne’s poetry (that I’m aware of, at least). Then he says (talking to Prynne):

You know, a very Adornean attitude, modernist formalism as cultural resistance and all that… But can you see how there is a more interesting paradox here, and I wonder if it’s a kind of paradox at the heart of the avant-garde—one your heroes Olson, Dorn, and O’Hara really didn’t have to confront so immediately, but which you do, sitting as you are at the manifest limit in this garden? Well, that’s maybe too preciously clever, “manifest limit in this garden,” but looke, these avant-garde formalist/analytic gestures are getting openly, eroticallye, I would say, sucked right into the archive and shackled away in the Museum at ever increasing rates of speede. On a somewhat more banal level, my problem with this asyndetic cut-up stuffum is that it’s all, after about twenty-odd years, a pretty old and exhausted porne star. And anyway, who besides academic poets with an avant chip on their shoulder is cruising this opaquem and rather unpleasant stuffum anyway?

At this point, he realizes that Prynne has fallen asleep. He nudges “the (and I say this sincerelie) great poet, J. H. Prynne” awake, and Prynne says: “All this bloody flying back and forth to China! Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry.” This is just brilliant, and brilliantly funny, stuffum. Kent finds a way to seamlessly move from genuinely insightful criticism of the poetry to demotic conversation to enjoyably swift narrative, all peppered with archaisms and theory jargon. So, another thing that Kent was, and is: a gifted satirist, with the keen critical insight that is a precondition of all great satire, and at a time when satire seems increasingly to be, like Benjamin’s chess player, wizened and out of sight. Like the best satirists, too, Kent often aimed his most withering satire at himself.

Highlight from the future of the KJ bibliography: a collected (or at least selected) edition of Kent’s critical and satirical prose.

Kent kindly made a point of sending me a personalized copy of his book Because of Poetry, I Have a Really Big House. I moved from Chicago to Ljubljana, Slovenia (where I am now, writing this text) in the fall of 2020, and Kent’s book is one of the few I brought with me. He then invited me to participate in a forum on the book. I wasn’t able to, unfortunately, but I told Kent that I took his book with me on vacation to the Croatian island of Vis. This made him happy, and he told me that he hoped to visit the Croatian islands before he moved on from this dream of life. “I so want to go back to the Balkans,” he wrote. “I’ve been enchanted by the Balkans ever since I read King Ottokar’s Scepter, in the TinTin series, when I was ten or so. When I was in Bosnia, the little towns outside Sarajevo were uncannily like the pictures by Herge.” Another thing that Kent was is a wonderful and tireless correspondent: full of life and joy and encouragement and friendship. Kent may have been that guy, but he was also—in every sense—a good guy.

Highlight from the future of the KJ bibliography: a collected (or at least selected) edition of Kent’s letters and emails.

Kent—comrade, friend—winking from the abode where the eternal are: we’ll keep trying to eat the rich, and take their really big houses to turn them into free palaces of poetry. Salud!

The following poem was dictated to me by the spirit of Kent Johnson, summoned in a séance at midnight as Halloween bled into the Day of the Dead: