Poet/translator Chris Daniels has an enthusiastic review of Kent's Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz. This was first posted at Chris Murray's Texfiles.
I give this brief, well-made chapbook fifteen stars: five
red giants for aesthetic value, five white dwarves for honesty, and
five supernovas for sheer courage. All fifteen stars to be shared by
effing press. I refuse to quote from this chapbook, which ought to be
read in one sitting by every citizen of the USA.
Kent Johnson’s
Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz begins very fittingly with a dedication to
his sons, both of whom are either near or at an age to be drafted. On
the same page is Kent’s fatherly reminder to them that there is not a
measureable bit of difference between Republican and Democrat
politicians. Every Senator is a millionaire, after all. On the verso,
we find Adorno’s famous tagline, which has become a cliché, and a
pungently apt rejoinder from an anonymous critic with distinctly
anti-bourgeoisie sentiments, both taken from the wall of the men’s room
at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.
I won’t waste a single
indefinite article trying to lull you into a comfy stupor with my
command of the thought of the ingenious reactionary Theodore Adorno.
Firstly, I have no command of Adorno’s thought; secondly, to steal a
line from a favorite critic of mine, I prefer my Marxism straight up,
thank you very much, and I like to chase it with compassionate
indignation, for that delectable combination tastes of the true
ambrosia: rational solidarity in human relationships; and, thirdly,
screw the old snob, anyway.
My friend Kent Johnson has been reviled, ignored, argued with and loved.
Kent’s arguments have been many, and they have usually ended up refining the ideas of both Kent and his interlocutors.
Most
of us who love Kent, do so in part because he has spent no small amount
of his time unanswerably exposing, with much subtlety and good humor,
the fetishization and auto-fetishization of authors (including hmself)
and their work.
The fetishization of artists removes them and
their artistic labor from the material world of social relationships in
which people make and do things. Fetishized artists, their labor and
its product inhabit a rigidly hierarchical universe in which great,
wise, good and aesthetically infallible Geniuses like Bach and
Shakespeare (both of whom, like any other prolific artist, produced
much that is mediocre by anybody’s standards) spring forth out of a
mythic empyrean aswim with particles of their own inexplicable
superiority to the rest of us. This results in something very much like
the junk science that informs Erik von Daaniken’s agonizingly stupid
Chariots of the Gods. The claim that human beings couldn’t possibly
have built the pyramids at Giza without the help of Superhumanly
Advanced Extraterrestrials is an insult to the human imagination, mocks
the generations of poor people and slaves who were forced to drag those
immense blocks of sandstone over the course of centuries and centuries,
and denies the potential for cultural achievement inherent in every
single new-born human being. A strong component of class arrogance and
entitlement is always present in this impoverished mode of “thought”.
Attitudes like this should be unthinkable to any man or woman of
conscience.
When fetishization is present, and it almost always
is, everything becomes very mysterious and no one really means to say
what they just said. The great English monosyllable “work” no longer
means “labor”, but “oeuvre”, an also noble French word which, when used
by a certain relatively small class of predominantly White Anglophones
and Anglophonettes doesn’t really mean “consummate writing of such
profound import that rubes addicted to Pop Culture will never, ever get
it”. Or else, it doesn’t really mean “project”, a noncommital,
corporate word that lends its utterer’s pronouncements a technocratic
sheen. Mystification ultimately only serves the very few.
Those
very few of us who revile or ignore Kent, do so because his clearcut,
tenacious critique, and his excellent poetry, which is always
bittersweet, even when it is hilarious, tragic, outraged or, most
typically, all three (and more) at once, make us uncomfortably aware of
our own pretensions.
Even his most insensible enemies have got
to love him in their hearts, for any fool can see that Kent does not
spare himself. He ridicules himself mercilessly everywhere. This can be
seen most clearly in The Miseries of Poetry. On every page of that
wonderful book, including the opening section with its dozens of blurbs
(to which I proudly contributed), he positions himself in front of his
own petard and giggles impetuously while lighting the fuse. Kent always
stands hoisèd before us, smiling, a bit shyly, the way he did the whole
time I met him, but always unashamed, through the unfashionably plain
motley of charred wadding (made from back issues of certain corrupt
poetry journals) that he wears with such grace.
In this small
but important collection of poems, essays and things containing
elements of many genres, Kent sticks his neck out as far as it will
possibly go and then he just leaves it there. He is not afraid of
censure. He knows that those who want him to shut up are offended
because their own hypocrisy has been exposed by Kent’s courageous
willingness to struggle against Liberal Capitalist USA’s moral and
ethical bankruptcy as it resides within himself, and then use his
imagination to transform his inner struggle into political poetry of
high aesthetic value and emotional complexity. Instead of embracing
Kent’s struggle as their own, and following the example he sets, his
defamers, many of whom are inexcusable snobs who should know better,
will sneer reflexively or spit out ad hominem attacks born of envy,
reaction and political despair.
This is the poetry of a man who
cares deeply about humanity and its future, which is your future, and
mine. This is the poetry of a loving and compassionate husband and
father who hopes for a sustainable society based not upon the anarchic,
irrational accumulation of wealth by a miniscule, parasitically
murderous segment of the global population, but upon the meeting of
basic human needs for each and every one of us on the planet. This is
the poetry of an artist who understands that capitalist patriarchy not
only has failed to encourage and allow the development of human
potential in the vast majority of men and especially women who live in
every nation on this planet, but has also been the direct cause of
untold millions of deaths over the course of the last five centuries.
This
is not a book of poems that will be enjoyed by the type of individuals
who call those who disagree with them “fascist” at the drop of a hat
without really knowing what that word means. This is not a book of
poems for prideful bag men and women for a Christ whose teachings they
have perverted into a gospel of greed and racist and sexist violence.
This book should be read by every one of them, but they will not read
it, and, if by some outside chance they do manage to read this book to
the end, they will pile on in a tizzy, as they always do when they need
a scapegoat for their own filthy consciences.
Sit back and try
to relax while Kent Johnson’s new chapbook rips you a new one, right in
the middle of your forehead. Don’t be afraid. It won’t kill you. It
hurt Kent just as much as it will hurt you. Trust me, you’ll see so
much better afterwards that you might even trade in your copies of
Being and Time and Of Grammatology for something real, like the Penguin
edition of Capital, Volume One and Sharon Smith’s Women and Socialism.
You might start changing in earnest, first the way you think about the
brutal society we live in, and then your very life in all its
contradictory relationships to the human beings around you.
It’s
time for us to leave the cradle. Time for us to wipe the ironic smirks
off our faces. Time for us to realize that Capitalism has long sold off
its revolutionary potential. Now is the time for us to leave behind the
soothing unison of monotonous, barely reformist postmodern lullabies of
Cloudcuckooland ethereality we’ve grown to depend on, and to learn the
overwhelmingly beautiful, polyphonic chant of human solidarity in each
and every one of its limitless modulations rooted in the material world
wherein our joy, our tenderness, our sorrow, our love and our struggle
are one, and our true, dignified identity sings forth in hope: we are
human, simply human, sisters and brothers, and there are billions of us.
Chris Daniels, July 2005
I'm printing and binding the latest effing book Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz by Kent Johnson this weekend. Good times. Also, starting the redesign for the effing website. If you are a GoLive user and you have some advice for a dumb ass let me know. After a month of seering dry heat central T has finally seen some glorious thunderstorms. 
Finishing up the Collected Spicer during Thursday night sessions. Also read Chemo Sabe by Ed Dorn last night. Funny, sad, penetratingly true. An absolutely beautiful chapbook production. I had never seen it before but had read most of the poems.
$8
