MiPOesias Magazine

FRANCOIS LUONG

Poetic Inflammation

Kent Johnson, Epigrammatitis: 118 Living American Poets.
BlazeVOX [books], 2006. 267 pages, paperback. $20.

About meanness in poetry, Tony Hoagland once wrote in an essay that “the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless observer in all of us, the perceptive angel who sees and tells, unimpeded by nicety or second thought,” and “there is truth-telling, and more, in meanness.” Epigrams have been traditionally the vehicle to convey this sentiment, especially toward other poets, such as in Catullus who wrote in #105 “Prickface tries to scale the heights of poetry. / With pitchforks the Muses poke him back down on his ass.” With his massive tome Epigrammatitis: 118 Living American Poets, Kent Johnson wants to resurrect this poetic tradition. As we learn in the book’s “Praefatio”:

those times of combative collegiality are long gone, and the epigram is a mostly forgotten thing. Poetry is a kind of business now, with health insurance, including dental, and paid travel. (…) Yes, poets these days are, for the most part, strategically polite and scriptedly protocoled toward their peers.

And more importantly, “to publicly proclaim, as Catullus often did, that you are going to violently fuck another poet in the ass probably won’t do much for your tenure or career.” Regardless, Johnson seems intent in provoking controversy, something he is familiar with, considering his involvement in the Araki Yasusada hoax ten years ago.

Johnson is particularly effective when his attacks are directed at members of the establishment. Opening his book with “Stanley Kunitz,” he writes:

From the ear of the
horseless carriage … nay, ere
the era of the buggy, the debris
of forgetfulness has been covering,
in strata, the obits. Aye,
a lot has happened in American
poetry since the birth of
Stanley Kunitz.

What Johnson is bent on here is the public persona and the reverence toward a poet, regardless of his talent or current output. One could argue that Johnson is justified in his invective in the light of Kunitz appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate for the celebration of the new millennium in 2000. But what we really celebrate when we celebrate, for example, the centenary of Kunitz is a sense of nostalgia in poetry, the illusion that poetry had once a greater status than it does now. As such, another thing Johnson attacks is the imperatives of the poetic establishment, its want for accessibility, clear narrative and natural language. Consider “Louise Glück”:

In her latest book, The Seven Ages,
the photogenic Poet Laureate dramatically inquires
“Why not? Why not? / Why should my poems /
not imitate my life?” It is a moving question, yes,
and in response to this longing for verisimilitude, I
would tender a proposal. It is that the poet heroically insert,
in her next book, a scratch and sniff pad, nigh a couplet
that rhymes “my romantic and nostalgic art” with
“last night’s pork and sauerkraut-smelling fart.”

Surely, Johnson might be a bit crude here. But is this any different from, say, John Skelton’s “The Tunnying of Elynour Rummyng,” where the self-proclaimed poet laureate wrote “She is vgly fayre ; / Her nose somdele hoked.” And the crudeness of Johnson’s lines points at a question: where does the imperative of elegance and eloquence in poetry come from? In a way, this discourse of elegance is a new phenomenon, reminiscent of the Victorian era.

The members of the poetic establishment are not the only victims of Johnson’s scrutiny. Members of the “fringe” are not unprotected from Johnson’s invective either, as demonstrated in “Michael Palmer”:

O Ideal Reader,
Upper-Middle-Classed,
Pretty Girlie-Man,
Master of Fine Arted:
Through the Gate Whose Name is Author,
You shall be lost within
The Maze of the Market,
and you shall be, etc.
astonished by the letter, etc.
Whose Name is M, or L, or A, etc.

One will say that Michael Palmer the poet does not have an MFA and is not a member of the MLA, but that is not the point. What Johnson undermines here are the assumptions about readership of both traditional-lyric and experimental poetries. Both groups assert being the more democratic, the traditional verse narrative by its “accessibility,” the experimental kind by its “polyphony.”

Yet, going through Epigrammatitis, it is surprising how tame the book actually is. When Johnson writes in his “Praefatio” that “a poet of respectable standing could say vile, wicked, and funny things to another poet, telling him, for example, exactly what he was going to do with what he had just anointed with olive oil,” one would expect a lot more venom in the poems presented here. Yet, Johnson is often unexpectedly kind to other poets. In “Carolyn Forché,” for example, Johnson writes:

Yes, so maybe, as you say, some of her poetry’s formulaic.
And, yes, her misty photo on The Country Between Us was
a stupid mistake. But show me an “experimental” poet who’s
walked, with a purpose, into three or four wars. Then I won’t
laugh at your pathetic, theory-curled, petite-bourgeois lip.

Granted, the praise here is well-deserved and the lines still reveal something quite middle-class about contemporary poetry. But there are times when those praises seem hollow. For example, Johnson writes in “Henry Gould” “Maybe his theology is wacky, / but, hey, look at Dante.” Such gentleness dilutes the apocalyptic nature of the book. One wishes that Johnson was not so polite at times.

Some could accuse Epigrammatitis of being situational poetry, but that is exactly the point of the book. And despite its flaws, it is an interesting, and perhaps necessary, project.

Francois Luong was born in France, but now lives in Houston, where he received his Bachelor's Degree in English and studied under Tony Hoagland. Previous work has appeared in Pebble Lake Review.