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The Writin’s on the Wall
My previous couple of posts may paint me as a stick-in-the-mud, an opponent of “innovation,” a reactionary sonneteer or lover of Tradition (cue Tevye). No. There is a dimension of the avant-garde I enjoy and admire (the two responses need not align, but it’s best if they do), and I believe one of the best spokesman for this dimension these days is Kent Johnson. I bring Kent up merely to direct Perpetual Birders to his Chicago Review takedown of Marjorie Perloff’s “Avant-Garde Poetics” section in the latest edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.Read More
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The Season of Masks
I’ve discussed Kent Johnson’s work on this blog a number of times, but have never dealt with the Japanese poet Araki Yasusada (1907-1972), a survivor of Little Boy’s visit to—or the visiting of Little Boy upon—the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.Read More
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A Question Mark Above Professional Verse Culture
An anonymous commenter replies to my previous post regarding the suppression of Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Above the Sun: “kent’s “case” is utterly uncorroborated. and kent is known for hoaxes. no one believes that he’s been threatened (for good reason), which is why you don’t see “big guns” commenting on it.” I admit that I haven’t seen a copy of the letter threatening legal action, which was sent not to Kent but to his publisher, Richard Owens, of Punch Press. Perhaps he will release it.Read More
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Kent Johnson and the Pros from Dover
I’ve already posted a number of times about Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara (see all my posts dealing with Kent here). I haven’t gotten my act together to write intelligently about his book itself, though I will say—in the way of a news broadcast teaser—that it’s a remarkable book that has been overlooked even by those who have discussed it, because there’s a good deal more to it than the O’Hara-Koch controversy.Read More
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Poet Bumper Stickers
Some hilarious items here, including the sure-to-be-perennial… I’m naught kyddyng (as Kent might put it). I should add that this isn’t the actual bumper sticker.Read More
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What Is the Sound of One Reviewer Clapping?
The folks at Michigan Quarterly Review know the answer. I’ve got a stack of books myself that bloody well deserve a sentence, so maybe I’ll try my hand at this. Let’s see….Read More
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Juggernaut
The juggernaut of WTF? reactions to the threatened prepublication lawsuit against the publisher of Kent Johnson’s all-but-in-the-mail book A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara rolls on. Richard D. Allen addresses it here, as does the proprietor of Habenicht Press here. My favorite, though, is the commentary by Mark Scroggins (here), who summons no less a witness against Knopf & Friends than John Milton—specifically citing his pamphlet against prepublication censorship, Areopagitica.Read More
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From the Eye of the Kent Johnson Storm
Doubtless a stack of otherKnopf titles you will notbe allowed to comment onfreely Actually, not the eye, but the expanding tentacles of it. See Edmond Caldwell’s commentary here (love the oppressive helicopter image) and here. John Latta, in a nota bene squib at the end of this post on his blog today, unholsters the correct word for the tactics of Knopf et.Read More
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Damn the Caesars
Un-Effing-Believable! So now anyone who speculates on the genesis of a poem may find himself or herself on the wrong end of a lawsuit? Ridiculous. I’m with Michael Hansen, just waiting for “the lovely limited edition heading my way in the next few weeks,” coming from Richard Owens of Punch Press, who publishes a magazine called Damn the Caesars.Read More
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A Stray Thought
I was reading Kent Johnson’s post on John Latta’s Isola di Rifiuti blog this morning when a stray thought zapped flylike through a small tear in the screen of my concentration. The post continues a debate between Johnson and Tony Towle over a famous poem ascribed to Frank O’Hara, but which Johnson speculates may in fact have been an imitation of O’Hara written in homage to the deceased poet by his friend Kenneth Koch.Read More