In Memory of Kent Johnson, poet and crazy activist of the imagination (1955 – Oct. 25, 2022)

8 / 29 / 20

From “Because of Poetry” / by John Bradley

A review in Sulfur of Kent Johnson’s rambunctious and defiant new book,

Because of Poetry I Have a Really Big House (Shearsman Books, $18.00)

“Say, isn’t that John Ashbery?” I asked. “Over there, speaking with some young poet who’s trying to look like a young John Ashbery?” I told him, though I sounded just like the Kent Johnson in the “Matterhorn” poem who tells Fred Seidel that he sees John Ashbery. “That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows Ashbery is dead,” said Kent. “And besides, why would the Poetry Institute put John Ashbery in a poetry re-education camp. They love his poetry.”

More and more confused, I turned again to a poem to help me right my balance. “’Could someone tell me why I’ve never been / selected for the yearly Best American Poetry?’” I read from “Could Someone Tell Me Why.” Is it a crime, I wondered, to write such a thing in a poem? I must have said this aloud, as Kent told me that he would be released from the re-education camp as soon as he wrote a poem that was chosen for Best American Poetry. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or serious, and I nervously laughed. “But that means you’ll be here forever!” I said, to cheer him up. I could hear John Ashbery laughing nearby.

from the archive; first posted August 29, 2020

Thank you, David, for posting this delightful review by the inimitable John Bradley, who has long carried forward the surrealist tradition in marvelous ways. Just wanted to clarify that the magazine is not related in any way to Clayton Eshleman’s legendary and long-retired Sulfur. The magazine, in fact, is somewhat new and based in Egypt. Other singular U.S. poets of surrealist bent present here are George Kalamaras and Garrett Caples.

Posted by: Kent L Johnson | August 29, 2020 at 06:22 PM

See, too, Eric Powell, “The Big House of Poetry”:

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.” >>>

Bill Moore: The Best American Poetry, a distinction that eluded him although the story of his Yasusada hoax gets covered in one of Lehman’s forewords. What can I say? I’m sorry he’s dead. He was full of shit but extremely entertaining. I dropped him because of a thoughtless remark he made, but as a hoax-maker he will be remembered, or not as the case may be.”

Bill Freind: Another appraisal for your comment: in a long essay in The Notre Dame Review, the former Yale Younger Poet award winner David Wojahn claims that Araki Yasusada is a much better poet than Kent Johnson or than the late English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. He also claims, referring to you, that it is difficult to understand how someone who comes across as “a windy and slightly paranoiac jerk” in his published commentaries on the matter, could ever be the author of writing like Yasusada’s, which he feels is brilliant, heart-breaking, and historically significant.

KJ: Well, I agree with everything Wojahn says. It’s what I’ve been saying to smug, deaf ears all along. I am not Yasusada.

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