Epigramititis:

Kent Johnson

118 Living American Poets

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

Copyright 2006 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed by CafePress.com in the United States of America ISBN 0-9759227-8-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2004116023

Cover art by Larry Fauntleroy Book design by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition

Praefatio
From the start, it should be kept in mind that these are only poems. Death rushes towards us; the skin sags and flaps; the hair pales and flies off in an onrushing wind. Very soon, indeed, we shall die. A long time ago, when poets anointed their privates with olive oil, the epigram was held in highest esteem. 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. (What he was going to do with it, that is, to the other poet, or to the other poets significant other, if not to both.) Im not trying to sound outrageous; Im just stating the facts. The epigram was an honored vehicle of vigorous, uncompromised speech, and its common practice undermined, in very healthy ways, the genetic tendency of literati toward conformity and sycophancy. Of course, now and then things would get out of hand, and the poets might end up bruising one another in a brawl. But more often than not, it was all quite chivalrous and entertaining to the polis. No less than theater (ah, Euripides, ritual foil of Aristophanes! [see Cauda at books end]), the epigram was a public, competitive pitch upon which players made their histrionic bobs and feints, much for the end of injecting some virtue into the body politic. Thus, by and by, in the afterglow of invectives catharsis, poets more often than not would meet in the commons to drink and laugh and argue intricate questions of prosody and other ultimately pointless things.

(Panting dogs lie near them in the sun. A boy, high up in an orange tree, pokes with a stick at a papyrus kite. Workmen, hoisted from hemp belts by pulleys and ropes from a columned roof, give Jupiters hair a fresh coat of golden paint. The pointy, red penis of a dog emerges from its sheath, and the dog licks at it for a little while and then goes back to sleep. They look like seabirds, one of the poets mutters, remarking on the workmen dangling horizontally in the dusty air, tapping his fingers on the table and yawning, baring his rotting teeth. And another lifts his bull-like buttock to fart in rapid, high-pitched reports, like a toy train crossing a scale-model bridge [though such comparison would obviously not occur to them, actual trains not appearing until the 18th century]. And then everyone laughs affably and long, and a dog senselessly barks, and another lifts its leg to pee, and a bumblebee buzzes and gets caught in the stickiness of the gods new hair, and the boy, covered in moist blossoms, comes down,
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triumphantly, from the tree. And then the poets go back to arguing about poetry some more: the latest explorations of the 2nd Aslepeadean by The Younger Martians, the teenage bards of far Antiparos; the latest selling out to Caesar of this or that onceexperimental playwright of Sparta, etc. etc.)
But 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 aboard huge metal cylinders that fly faster than Mercury through the sky, bound for conferences in the provinces. Yes, poets these days are, for the most part, strategically polite and scriptedly protocoled toward their peers. After all, to publicly proclaim, as Catullus often did, that you are going to violently fuck another poet in the ass probably wont do much for your tenure or career. In any case, none of the badinage here goes so far as that (this particular poet has no interest, for one, in sodomy with other males, though not that there is anything wrong with that, of course, 4/5ths of male poets today being of the Brokeback Mountain kind), so these relatively tame bagatteles of amusement or affection, bemusement or contempt should cause no great upset to anyone. As I said, they are only poems. And no one listens to poetry anymore, anyway. And, as I also said, very soon, indeed, we are all going to be dead. --Kent Johnson

[nota bene: A few of the poets here died between the writing of their epigram and the publication of this book about Living American Poets. See what I mean? As well, it should be noted that this is only a 1st edition. The 2nd edition will be composed of a yet to be determined number of new epigrams.]

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Authors Note: This book if fated to be assiduously ignored by the Poetry Establishment, mainstream and experimental, the two sides of its ancient coin. There will be few, if any, words expended on it. This is to be expected, especially from the experimental side, where silence has been raised (imagine silence being raised--what could that mean?) to the level of an Occult Art. Ah, but this silence--the silence of the silencers and the silence of the minions who obediently keep silence--shall be dissected and displayed by those who will come, with their cold, critical calipers, long after we are gone. Death is coming, as I said, but Time Time does not die.

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Introductio
The quick, compressed insights of the epigram have made it a favorite form for writers from the Roman Martial to the English Herrick, whose translations of that satirist are spread generously throughout his work. Here's one translation of Martial from Hesperides:

POETS Wantons we are; and though our words be such, Our lives do differ from our Lines by much.
Or this one, To the Detracter: I ask't thee oft, what Poets thou hast read, And lik'st the best? Still thou reply'st, The dead. I shall, ere long, with green turfs cover'd be; Then sure thou't like, or thou wilt envie me. D.H. Lawrence, more recently, in his book of poems Pansies, invigorated the form with robust moral surveys:

ELEPHANTS PLODDING Plod! Plod! And what ages of time the worn arches of their spines support!
or

THE MOSQUITO KNOWS The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he's a beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn't put my blood in the bank.
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and

IMMORALITY It is only immoral to be dead-alive, sun-extinct and busy putting out the sun in other people.
The epigram is a versatile form, and it has been used at various times to cut, slice or wickedly reduce the subject by pithy measure. Still, others offer complicated evaluations, investigating broad space within formal restraints, reducing language to extend and amplify meaning, often to contrary results. One example is Edward Dorn's Abhorrences, wherein he writes:

THE PROTESTANT VIEW that eternal dissent and the ravages of faction are preferable to the voluntary servitude of blind obedience.
and

WHILE YOURE AT IT As long as you're closing The Window of Vulnerability would you mind shutting that door of paranoia And while you're at it, would you mind sweeping the carpet of disdain. And then there's the container of trash to carry out. When you're finished with that you might go to the kitchen where you'll find the skillet of rashness. Uh, just throw in a few slices of the bacon of compatibility and fry well.
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The following epigrams by the playfully observant and seriously comic Kent Johnson were conceived on a different scale but with the same candid accuracy, making brief evaluations of certain poets of our milieu. The blend of art and criticism combined here extends fine delight and insight, flavored with the salt and peppering of his personal favorings and rejections. The responses of readers will no doubt blossom with laughter, nervous consent, or outright loathing. But that's the point. These small pieces are fun, authentic studies of an obscure group of writers. Some are offered in a spirit of contest, others as a kind of embrace. The rest (I'm shutting up now) speak for themselves.

--Dale Smith

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Stanley Kunitz
From the era of the horseless carriagenay, 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.

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Charles Simic
In this 17th century wood-cut my Uncle Ratko bought in Calcutta, the man stuck in the kayak has come to cut a figure like that of Charles Simic.

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David Antin
Shortly after 9/11, he spoke in writing on the listserv Poetics: If you encounter a terrorist on a plane, you dont politely request that he return to his seat, you pull out a .45 and you shoot him. History is unstoppable in its teleological drive to unity: Pop culture merges with the Humanities; the Talk Show merges with Talk Poetry. And huge decompressed machines fall, like ideologemes, out of the air.

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Jorie Graham
One time, when I was reading Yeats, I thought, "How do we separate the fiction from the plot?

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Bruce Andrews
In a sermon about Brecht in Crayon magazine, he spoke in parables from the Mount of the need for poets to rediscover the V-effect. But verily, verily, I say unto you, Bruce, if you had a clue on Brechts relevance to the reified stage of our present poesy, youd more usefully be reflecting, and with some good old-time self-criticism, on the

A[uthor]-effect !

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Charles Bernstein
Pity the aardvark; he seems at once lost in the Ivy of the zoo and strangely at home, too.

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Robert Pinsky
I, too, dislike him, though I'm not sure why.

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David Lehman
In the Preface to the 1999 edition of The Best of American Poetry, he called me "incontrovertibly brilliant" and invited me to read at the KGB. But then (O bitchy fickleness, thou marrow of all poesy, of the last avant-garde, even!), he decided he didn't like me.

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Stephen Burt
Poet and critic, we claim him as our Randall Jarrell (the younger version). Oh, goodbye, Helen Vendler, goodbye, for you are their Matthew Arnold. We wash you out of your shattered turret with a hose.

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Nada Gordon
Gary Sullivan looks faintly like Jean-Paul Belmondo, but her face launches a thousand dreams deep into French B movies.

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John Ashbery
John Ashbery is a very important poet who drinks gin sine finis. Strangely, no one has yet written about the convexed bond betwixt the wet withouts of his poetry and the dry withins of his martinis.

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Kenneth Koch
Thanks to his poem about a garbage can lid being smashed into a likeness of King George the Thirds face, my sixteen year old son is now writing poetry. This activity has recently led him into drinking alcohol and experimenting with drugs, which makes it difficult for me to say, but Ill say it anyway: Thank you, Kenneth Koch, for your marvelous contributions to Poetry.

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David Wojahn
I love his article where he says that Araki Yasusada is a much better poet than Ted Hughes or Kent Johnson.

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Jackson Mac Low

Once I was on a panel entitled "Buddhism and American Poetry" at Poet's House. Armand Schwerner held forth for a long time on the shikirichi and Anne Waldman shouted sutras with a massive intensity. I remember that Jackson Mac Low didn't say very much, nor did he move very much, really. But at the end of the evening he shook my hand and said, "Nice to have met you."

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