Kent Johnson, A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem "By" Frank O'Hara, Starcherone Books, 2012.
In this self-described "thought experiment" — part fiction, part literary detective work, and always daring — Kent Johnson proposes a stunning rewrite of literary history. Suppressed upon initial release, but nevertheless hailed as a 2011 "Book of the Year" in TLS, this is a one of a kind book by one of our most provocative contemporary authors.
This book of experimental criticism is, at the least, of forensic interest to readers of poetry and, at the most, a study in extremes of generosity and stinginess. Whether it is Johnson (Homage to the Last Avant-Garde) who is generous and his detractors stingy—or vice versa—is another question altogether. The author delights in "thought experiment[s]" and provocation: his book offers readers, among other things, an unfinished "critical novella" containing a startling hypothesis about poets Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch: Is it possible that O'Hara's last poem, "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island," was authored, in truth, by his friend Koch in the wake of O'Hara's sudden death by dune buggy on Fire Island? The author argues that the poem may have been written by Koch and deliberately attributed to O'Hara in an act of egoless munificence. Unfortunately, because Johnson was denied permission to quote from the (conceivably elegiac) poem under discussion, the text is full of odd elisions. As if to make up for this deficiency, the book is padded with essays by the author's partisans, who defend his critical methods, some with eloquence. Though this rarefied text will likely appeal to a similarly niche audience, Johnson's work is admirable for its imagination and inventiveness.- Publishers Weekly
Kent Johnson‘s new book has now been published, despyte the concerted efforts of a cabal of poets, literary estate executors, and lawyers for bigwig publishing houses to keep it from ever seeing the light of day (so to speak). Publisher Richard Owens (Punch Press, Damn the Caesars) must take a goodlie portion of the credit for seeing this project through. Not only did Owens bear the brunt of the pressure — in the form of threatening messages and letters on an almost daily basis in the weeks preceding publication — but his work as desygner, printer, and editor mark the product as a truly collaborative effort. More to the point, thanks to Owens and his close working relationship with Johnson as they dodged the slings and arrows of litigious fortune while putting this together, the form of the book folds perfectlie with its content in ways that one almost never encounters anymore. Which is to say, even more precisely, that the ethos of Punch Press, with its emphasis on handmade products and keen awareness of historical small press literary culture, is the perfect match with Kent Johnson’s career-long project of troubling literary origins and authenticity.
Specifically, of course, Johnson troubles the origins of the posthumously published “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” which, as the book states in its opening pages, “is universally regarded as one of the preeminent poems in the Frank O’Hara canon.” The entire argument and background of the book is set out succinctly in its opening paragraph:
- What you have in your hands is a kind of thought experiment. It proffers the idea that a radical, secret gesture of poetic mourning and love was carried out by Kenneth Koch in memory of his close friend Frank O’Hara. I present the hypothesis as my own very personal expression of homage for the two great poets. The proposal I set forward here, nevertheless, is likely to make some readers annoyed, perhaps even indignant. Some already are. A few fellow writers, even, have worked hard through legal courses to block this book’s publication. The forced redaction of key quotations herein (replaced by paraphrase) is one result of their efforts; the edition’s beautiful original covers have also been suppressed.
And upon having read it, my first reaction is, I’m not sure what all the fuss was about in terms of the recent lawyerly saber-rattling.
The text itself was perhaps best described by Owens during his recent visit to Buffalo to see it through the final stages of printing — he called it a literary-critical Tristram Shandy. Indeed, Johnson so dramatizes the metanarrative of his thesis that this is the first book of critical inquiry about which I’m afraid to say too much, for fear of giving away the plot. And it does have one, compleat with villayns and heroes.
The first of these emerge during the highly entertaining section “Corroded by Symbolysme: An Unfinished Novella.” The section fancifully details Johnson’s sojourns in England during various conferences, and his mysterious encounters with British poets intent on preventing the publication of the original “tape essay” by Tosa Motokiyu in which the alternate “True Account” authorship theory was first proposed.
Prominent among these is J.H. Prynne. Apparently the leader of this odd “fellowship of the ring” dedicated to preserving the legacy of Frank O’Hara, Prynne goes white on first hearing of the impending publication of said tape essay during a meeting with Johnson, and the latter subsequently reports incidents of harassment from anonymous callers bearing British accents.
That’s the central plot of the section — eerily foreshadowing the actual harassment detailed in the appendices to the book — but it’s really a critique of authorship and legacy, a meditation on transatlantic poetic relations (or lack thereof), and a subtle reconsideration of critical tropes related to language poetry, all of which reflect on and interlace with the book’s central thesis.
The English literary world Johnson describes is a Lynchian vision of Cambridge pub crawls, where poets are prone to illustrate discussions of their work by bursting up and reciting poems on the spot, prompting the awed patrons to clap in a “respectful waye, not sarcasticallie, as would have been the case if this had been the Unyted States.” Invariably, there are pub denizens left “dabbing their eyes” after the reading; invariably, the poet finishes with “sweat pouring from his sideburnians.”
Johnson follows up these encounters with email exchanges with the poets (these include — besides Prynne — Andrew Duncan, Tim Atkins, and Martin Corless-Smith) in which he further queries them. (There is an added wrinkle here, involving Johnson’s “preferred font size,” which very humorously comments on the typographical hierarchy of such exchanges as they’re received from various figures and integrated into the text… but again, I don’t want to spoil it for you.) The argument is advanced obliquely, by suggestion; with the exception of the Prynne-O’Hara conspiracy that hovers over the whole section, that portion of the thesis remains secondary to interrogations of “subjectivity and myth” (Duncan); the “analytic wing” of language poetry (Prynne); translation (Atkins); the lyric, fragment, and authorship (Corless-Smith); and so on.
Meanwhile, Tony Towle emerges as the villayn of the second half of the book, in which the tape interview finally appears, followed by Towle’s excruciating, exasperatingly meticulous efforts to disprove the facticity of events (such as the tape interview) that Johnson repeatedlie takes pains to specify as fictitious to begin with. (As Johnson has explained to Owens, Motokiyu’s collaborators during the interview with Joe LeSueur are apparently figments of Motokiyu’s imagination, which certainly calls into question the veracity of the interview itself. Nevertheless, as Johnson points out, LeSueur’s words are essentially real… As the notes to the essay make clear, “[t]hese remarks by LeSueur … appear, albeit in slightly revised form, in his memoir, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara.”)
Johnson unpacks Towle’s objections to the Koch-as-author idea, attempting to refute and qualify them one by one. Not being an O’Hara or Koch scholar, and not being terribly invested in the question of who wrote the actual poem, I would rather not comment on the strength of the arguments or which of them seems most convincing. I will just say that:
- 1) While the weight of the evidence that is brought to light does not definitively prove anything, the work Johnson and Motokiyu have done at the very least effectively calls the authorship of the poem into question. 2) The recent discovery, by John Latta, of the Koichi K. O’Hara poem, reprinted in the book with accompanying commentary, at the very least proves that Koch (assuming he is the actual author of this poem, as one must strongly suspect) was willing to write in O’Hara’s voice, or imaginatively collaborate with him, whichever one prefers.
And in doing so, they accomplish nothing so much as help Johnson prove his point. In fact, their indignant refusal to entertain his “thought experiment” is the point. This is what seems so remarkable — did Towle and the other poets who’ve signed on with the censorship effort in regards to this text, not to mention the Koch and O’Hara estates, not foresee the way in which their strenuous and highly public objections would feed right into Johnson’s project? And bolster his main point?
It staggers the mind. All of these legal wranglings, which forced Owens to remove any direct quotes from the poem in question, as well as any tangential text that might conceivably transgress nebulous copyright laws, only underwrite and extend the collaboratively porous nature of the bookum. Already, of course, the first portion of the tome is composed as much or more of responses from various figures with whom Johnson ruminates on finer points of poetic authorship; the second half is suffused by Towles’ and others’ contributions and objections, so that one is left to wonder how much of this text can actually be attributed to Johnson. Meanwhile, due to the elisions, the book is so riddled with holes and gaps that the reader is forced to consult any number of bios and poetry collections to get a sense of the missing references.
I find it to be a worthy addition to the Johnson canon. Which is, of course, to say that it’s a worthy subtraction. Which is, again, never just an addition or subtraction from his own authorial canon, but an addition or subtraction from any number of possible canons, from your canon, O’Hara’s, Koch’s, from the canon itself…
Sadly, this printing of the book has already sold out via subscription; please keep an eye out for the trade edition, to follow soon.- Habenicht Press
This book is one of the more challenging to read yet one of the finest examples of poetic license and excavation of facts and findings and ultimate rights to authorship - the gift to the literary public by Starcherone Press, Ted Pelton editor. Controversial since it first appeared and continuing to receive as much adulation as irritation, this striking expose of information about authorship as written by Kent Johnson who proposes that one of Frank O'Hara's best known poems was actually written by his close associate Kenneth Koch. But before commenting on the book, it seems only fair to present the poem in question in a condensed 9non-formated) version for the reader to be reminded:
A TRUE ACCOUNT OF TALKING TO THE SUN ON FIRE ISLAND
The Sun woke me this morning loud and clear, saying "Hey! I've been trying to wake you up for fifteen minutes. Don't be so rude, you are only the second poet I've ever chosen to speak to personally so why aren't you more attentive? If I could burn you through the window I would to wake you up. I can't hang around here all day." "Sorry, Sun, I stayed up late last night talking to Hal." "When I woke up Mayakovsky he was a lot more prompt" the Sun said petulantly. "Most people are up already waiting to see if I'm going to put in an appearance." I tried to apologize "I missed you yesterday." "That's better" he said. "I didn't know you'd come out." "You may be wondering why I've come so close?" "Yes" I said beginning to feel hot wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me anyway. "Frankly I wanted to tell you I like your poetry. I see a lot on my rounds and you're okay. You may not be the greatest thing on earth, but you're different. Now, I've heard some say you're crazy, they being excessively calm themselves to my mind, and other crazy poets think that you're a boring reactionary. Not me. just keep on like I do and pay no attention. You'll find that people always will complain about the atmosphere, either too hot or too cold too bright or too dark, days too short or too long. If you don't appear at all one day they think you're lazy or dead. Just keep right on, I like it. and don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural. The Sun shines on the jungle, you know, on the tundra the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting for you to get to work. And now that you are making your own days, so to speak, even if no one reads you but me you won't be depressed. Not everyone can look up, even at me. It hurts their eyes." "Oh Sun, I'm so grateful to you!" "Thanks and remember I'm watching. It's easier for me to speak to you out here. I don't have to slide down between buildings to get your ear. I know you love Manhattan, but you ought to look up more often. And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space. That is your inclination, known in the heavens and you should follow it to hell, if necessary, which I doubt. Maybe we'll speak again in Africa, of which I too am specially fond. Go back to sleep now Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem in that brain of yours as my farewell." "Sun, don't go!" I was awake at last. "No, go I must, they're calling me." "Who are they?" Rising he said "Some day you'll know. They're calling to you too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept. Frank O'Hara
In Johnson's introduction he sates `What you have in your hands is a kind of thought-experiment. It proffers the idea that a radical, secret gesture of poetic mourning and love was carried out by Kenneth Koch in memory of his close friend Frank O'Hara...The proposal I set forward here, nevertheless, is likely to make some readers annoyed, perhaps even indignant. Some already are. A few fellow writers, even, have worked hard through legal courses to block this book's publication.' This brilliantly illuminating book, with fine introductions and comments from such scholars as Eric Lorberer, David Koepsell, Joshua Kotin and Ron Paste add to the importance of the analysis o the book and the poem in question. Koepsell states `Johnson upends and dispels all the traditional notions of authorship and its role in creation, scandalizing many in the process.' "Johnson's book celebrates the unbound word, our Promethean glory as creators free of the debt of credit. Hi sown act of creation, obscured as truths wrapped in fictions, touches upon the duty and ethos of the author and audience, spinning together, weaving something beautiful and alive, new, and unchained.'
And after the very fine introductions to Kent Johnson's gifts we launch into one of the more experimental treatises about O'Hara, Koch, authorship, elegies, and thoughts that brought the detective Johnson to make his controversial investigation and proof. AS Johnson state, `For what could be deeper, more poignant and perpetual testimony to measure of his person and work than that a poem may well have been written for him by another, as if BY him, in mourning, love and homage - a poem in which the departed speaks through the dark Sun of his own death and from the very place he will die? And what could be more apropos, than the unanswered - perhaps ultimately unanswerable - mysteries about its making? Would O'Hara mind the mystery, if the poem is actually his? I dare suspect he wouldn't.'
This book, both in content and in the clever layout (multiple typefaces and fonts of varying sizes enhancing the poetic content of the book), is an artwork unto itself. This is sophisticated literary investigation and critique and should be read by every writer and by those who love the works of O'Hara and Koch - and Kent Johnson! - Grady Harp
Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “By” Frank O’Hara is a remarkable book, a work with subtly dizzying implications. It suggests that Frank O’Hara’s well-known poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” may have been written by O’Hara’s close friend, poet Kenneth Koch, and passed off as O’Hara’s. Johnson supports this with biographical details and textual criticism, delineating multiple possibilities and counter-possibilities. Pretty soon the (or rather, this) reader is withdrawing, wondering why anyone cares who took O’Hara’s typewriter or what kind of paper he used – indeed, why it matters who wrote it at all. At its most basic, that’s the point of the book.
Although Johnson has built a deeply nuanced argument for his thesis, the literary estates of the two dead poets view his suggestion as a malicious attack on the work of Koch and O’Hara. When an earlier edition of Johnson’s book was scheduled to come out in 2010 from Punch Press, the estates exerted pressure to have the book entirely suppressed. Random House, a publisher of both poets, joined the estates in threatening Richard Owens’ tiny Punch Press. Nonetheless it became a 2011 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, and now appears in expanded form from Starcherone Books Inc. The estates have refused permission for Johnson to quote any O’Hara or Koch poems, but Johnson gleefully notes every redaction and offers a paraphrase. Just what were you expecting to accomplish? he seems to ask the estates. And just what are you protecting? It is a testament to Johnson and Starcherone that this book has come out, joyfully bearing its redactions like war-wounds.
The crowning jewel in the volume is Johnson’s review, titled “Corroded by Symbolysme: An Unfinished Novella,” of four British avant-garde poets’ “bookums” (books). It’s a four-part review-cum-mystery-thriller, complete with idiosyncratic olde spellinge and a secret society set up to protect the secret of Koch’s authorship of the O’Hara poem. Stand aside, Dan Brown. Criticism, review, and fiction coalesce with fantastic results. The microcosm of the British avant-garde poetry scene gives Johnson plenty of opportunity for complex, nuanced parody and ironically high-flown musings on literature. Female poets do not feature, but it appears to be a section of a larger project that Johnson is working on, so this may be remedied. The reviews also put forward a kind of artistic credo from Johnson, whose work revels in the paratext, which he describes as “infinite” to J.H. Prynne.
The very form of this book seems to bear this stamp; while Johnson’s work takes up the bulk, the book feels like a symposium on itself. It’s a book by a poetic community about the strangeness of poetic community. There’s a kind of shamelessly wonderful onanism to it. In another sense it’s an orgy, an immense co-operative project. It consists of a preface, a foreword, the introduction followed by the novella, followed by the first appendix of responses to the book from the blogosphere and beyond, a second appendix (for this edition), two afterwords, and an anonymous poem, presumably by Johnson. Contributors include Eric Loeberer, David Koepsell, Tony Towle, David Shapiro, John Bradley, Edmond Caldwell, Richard D. Allen, David Hadbawnik, Mark Scroggins, Michael Kelleher, James Pate, Joshua Kotin, and Ron Paste. Their pieces are often very thought-provoking. Many of them feel the need to restate and rephrase key sections of this very book. Although very necessary in their initial context on blogs etc., this gives the volume a rather cumbersome and repetitive feel. (The very structure feels odd, as Johnson’s introduction demands we leap straight to Appendix I’s first essay to find the book’s raison d’etre.) This ungainly feel, however, adds to the satire, and chimes in with certain key refrains in Johnson’s novella.
As such, one feels a wry Johnson watching over the other authors, the host at the party who has silently slipped hallucinogens into everyone’s drink. They’re all endlessly laughing at Johnson’s joke, retelling it to each other. Touching the carpet. Of course, most of the poet-critics don’t mind – but Tony Towle, in particular, is having a bad trip. Which is not to say that these additions aren’t enlightening and entertaining; in particular those by Kotin, Bradley, and Hadbawnik.
Johnson is a forger-critic so content to hide in plain sight that he probably won’t bat an eyelid at this label. Johnson makes of the author-question a new occasion, a new expression. As such, this cannot help but involve some self-expression on his part. But it also does much more. He wants to find the biting point between the author and anonymity. Johnson is best-known for his involvement in the Araki Yasusada hoax. The publication of Yasusada’s poetry by major literary journals such as the American Poetry Review, Grand Street and Conjunctions during the early 1990s created an embarrassing scandal for these publications, who had to defend themselves against charges that they only published the poetry because it was clearly tailored to American preconceptions of what Japanese poetry is. Because Yasusada, shock-horror, never existed. Johnson has claimed that Tosa Motokiyu is behind it, but Motokiyu is the persona of another dead, unknown Japanese poet.[2] The re-appearance of Motokiyu in A Question Mark is striking.
Motokiyu advances, in an appendix, the book’s central thesis. In doing so he refers to books published after his “supposed” death, Johnson notes.[3] It momentarily seemed to me that Johnson was coming closer and closer to outing himself – not that it matters who perpetrated the wonderful Yasusada corpus. But it’s clear from interviews that Johnson never will, even if it was him. Perhaps it was Koch. He’s content to muddy the waters and spread seeds of doubt into the authorship of other oeuvres. Now, with A Question Mark, he’s yoking together a superlative body of work that includes his edited collections and the Yasusada material.
“What a small worlde the worlde of poetry is…” a heavily ironized Johnson muses in his novella. He’s right: the world of poetry and its readers is small. It is this small audience who will likely take most enthusiastically to the book (probably already knowing his work), revelling in Johnson’s barbs and hopefully responding to his call for reform – a call, I think, for greater modesty in authors, coupled with more experimentation and, most importantly, radical actions to back up radical words. Would this be enough for the book’s dedicatee, the revolutionary Mayakovsky? I have no doubt that the poet’s brain matter, housed in Room 18 or 20 of the Moscow Brain Institute, will miraculously have an increase in serotonin levels this autumn. Each reform is a straw on the dromedary’s back.
neworleansreview.org/
Transcript of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch Conversing at an Unspecified Cafe,
As Found on WikiLeaks
A Commentary on Kent Johnson's A Question Mark Above The Sun (Punch Press)
by John Bradley
Kenneth Koch: The mojitos aren’t bad here.
Frank O’Hara: But the sazeracs are heavenly. KK: So to speak.
FO: Yet to not speak leaves one feeling like a question mark dipped in mustard.
KK: Which reminds me. What do you think of the hubbub over A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “By” Frank O’Hara?
FO: Well, the black cover’s too nondescript, but I must say the quotation marks around “By” are worth the price of the book.
KK: You always were a sentimentalist.
FO: And the word “mystery” adds just the right touch.
KK: Did you see the Sunday Times? Great essay on the discovery of the author of the first mystery, published in 1865.
FO: I always wanted to write a mystery. And now I live in one.
KK: I hear the publisher of A Question Mark had a photo of you on the original cover, but the O’Haraistas threatened legal action.
FO: Oh my. They really do love me, don’t they?
KK: Perhaps a bit too much. All those redacted lines, in the book, from your and my poems. It looks pretty sorry.
FO: But those bold square brackets look so . . . so erotic.
KK: Really? It chills my balls. Looks like the CIA got their hands on the manuscript.
FO: Kenneth, you’re so sensitive.
KK: You have to admire that Ken Johnston.
FO: Isn’t it Kent? Kent Johnson?
KK: Come on. Everybody knows that this Kent Johnson is really Anne Waldman.
FO: Who’s John Ashbery.
KK: Who’s Marie Ponsot.
FO: Conspiring with Gary Snyder.
KK: Who’s really Craig Paulenich.
FO: Who?
KK: [Sound of street traffic.] Anywho, Kent Johnson’s got a lot of nerve. I’ll give him that.
FO: Nerve? For saying that there’s something a little fishy about the events surrounding “A True Account . . .”?
KK: Now, Frank.
FO: Now, Kenneth.
KK: We agreed not to talk about this. A signed compact, not to discuss the authorship . . .
FO: Of the greatest poem ever written . . .
KK: Or any of the circumstantial circumstances . . .
FO: Regarding the miraculous discovery . . .
KK: Of said canonical poem.
FO: Look, whoever this Johnsonian fellow is . . .
KK: If he’s a fellow . . .
FO: You have to admit he’s the only one who sniffed the funky odor clinging to the poem.
KK: You just like the way he has me wearing fluffy slippers in that taped essay-interview whatever the hell it is in the back of the book.
FO: He did nail you on that one. Note: I’m now looking down at a pair of fluffy slippers as we speak.
KK: Hey buddy, I’m not even going to mention someone’s purple wig and leopard-skin pill-box hat.
FO: As I see it the real mystery is why no one noticed the question marks floating over “A True Account . . .” before.
KK: Maybe they did but were afraid.
FO: Afraid of what? Offending my ghost?
KK: Yeah, and your estate, and their lawyers.
FO: And your estate, and their lawyers.
KK: And our publishers, and their lawyers.
FO: And the lawyer’s lawyers’ lawyers.
KK: I should have been an attorney in my former life.
FO: And I should have been a Gaulois.
KK: I can’t find them here. I looked at the newsstand to get you a pack, but they never have them.
FO: They always have those clove cigarettes, though. I adore the way they smell.
KK: You would.
FO: They make me feel like I’m in a detective story written by a man with six toes.
KK: Who hasn’t washed them in two and a half weeks.
FO: You’ve got to admit Kent Johnston . . .
KK: Didn't you just say Johnson?
FO: He's a dogged detective, slowly piecing together the clues that can never quite explain the inexplicable.
KK: In other words, he’s a pain in the ass to those who don’t want the sanctified literary world rocked. I hope the legal threats and the nasty comments on the book only increase its sales.
FO: Look at you. The barbarian at the gate. Weren’t you just telling me something about a contract?
KK: Compact. Signed in sazerac and mojito. But don’t you think that Johnston . . .
FO: Johnson.
KK: Or anyone, for that matter, has the right to say—Maybe this or that literary work could have been written by whozit?
FO: Kind of like that poem “Phone to the Poets in Moscow” by one Koichi K. O’Hara?
KK: Ouch. I can’t believe somebody found that. Still, no one can really say who wrote this “Phone” poem.
FO: Just like no one can really say who wrote “A True Account . . . ”?
KK: Ok, ok, let’s just suppose, in a supposing sort of way, that I wrote it, the “Phone” poem. And let’s just suppose it was a tender act of friendship, of homage, and poked a little fun at all of us. But this really has nothing to do with “True Account . . .”
FO: Well, it does show that you felt inclined at times to compose in my name, or in my persona. Not that I’m Koichi K. O’Hara.
KK: Not that anyone is.
FO: And it does raise some fascinating questions about authorship. About influence. About the way a poem is regarded, and how much it depends upon the name tagged on at the end.
KK: “A True Account . . .” would be considered astounding, Frank, no matter who wrote it.
FO: Would it? What if it had been written by, oh, Don Ho.
KK: Who?
FO: Ho.
KK: Hah! He could never have written it.
FO: Or Amy Clydesdale, of Barkwood, Montana. Or Francis Dewdrop, of Isis, Mississippi. You see what I mean? That poem might never have even gotten published. Or if it was, it would be in The Infarcted Fractal Review, and no one would ever see it, except for maybe a few of Dewdrop’s friends and family.
KK: I think you need a refill. [He can be heard saying “Waiter.”] Look, the poem is famous, or infamous, and you’ll forever be the one who gets credit--as it should be. [Someone laughing in the background.] As it should be.
FO: But.
KK: No buts allowed.
FO: But the certain issues remain: 1.) Shouldn’t someone be allowed to propose, just propose, an alternative theory of authorship? Of any literary work? 2.) Shouldn’t the book be allowed to be published? 3.) Why the nasty threats over the book by our beloved estates?
KK: You mean The Furies.
FO: 4.) Why the silence by other writers and publishers when the book was threatened? 5.) Why are there so many dicks in the literary world?
KK: Oh, there are dicks everywhere, my friend. Even here. Why just this afternoon on the bus . . .
FO: And 6.) What happens if someone ever finds evidence suggesting . . .
KK: Now be careful, Frank.
FO: Suggesting that perhaps I am not the author of the poem with the talking sun talking in it?
KK: One of your disciples’ disciples’ disciples would destroy such hypothetical “evidence.”
FO: Or one of your disciples’ disciples’ disciples.
KK: And even if the “evidence” was made known, no one would believe it.
FO: Or want to believe it.
KK: Same difference.
FO: “Go back to sleep now, Frank.”
KK: Hey, that’s my line.
FO: If you say so, Kenneth. As some poet once said: “To be rid of troubles / Of one person by turning into / Someone else.”
KK: [Glasses can be heard—probably their drinks just arrived. Someone mumbles “Thanks.”] Here’s to “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” May the mystery never be uncovered.
FO: And here’s to Ken, I mean Kent, Johnson and A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem “By” Frank O’Hara.
KK: May your photo one day be allowed to beautify the cover.
FO: Right next to yours, my friend, right next to yours.
KK: [Indecipherable.]
Kent Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, Shearsman Books, 2008.
Homage contains a wide variety of poems and prose, representing all strands of Johnson's work: versions from the Greek, traduced to an extraordinary degree; anti-war poems, overflowing with rage; stink-bombs tossed in the direction of some famous poets, mostly meant in an ironic, joshing way. But not all. And then there are memoir poems of persons met and places visited, that may well be documentary in nature, or may also be artfully disguised. Memory is, after all, an awkward thing, and not to be trusted, just as politicians and their henchmen are not and there is no irony in their treatment in this book. No, sir, none at all.
Download a sampler PDF of work from this book here.
just as we come falling into this dreaming: a sky
reflected where we are sailing, and where we reach out
without reaching the beloved who faces us, and who
also is reaching, while we watch the thoughts come,
and watch the thoughts go.
reflected where we are sailing, and where we reach out
without reaching the beloved who faces us, and who
also is reaching, while we watch the thoughts come,
and watch the thoughts go.
—“Poem for an Anthology of ‘Poems of the Mind’”
The striking cover of Kent Johnson’s remarkable new book Homage to the Last Avant-Garde
nicely conveys its peculiar nature: Lenin aggressively and confidently
points his hand to a spot in the future; below him three rows of
soldiers point their weapons or industrial tools in the same direction;
below them a photographer in a proletarian cap records that yet
invisible future event, while to the right a red Soviet flag waves in
the style of socialist-realist art. Here is one aspect of the “Last
Avant-Garde,” its present correspondent (in Jack Spicer’s sense) being
the Iraq War, seen from the Utopian moral angle of a revolutionary
ideology. Homage is saturated with horrifying, sublime poems of
destruction, such as “The Impropriety of the Hours,” “Baghdad,” and
“Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, or: ‘Get the Hood Back On.’”The military origin of the expression “avant-garde” as it relates to poetry has been amply discussed; what have not been explored are its implications. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde is a meditation, in counterpoints among voices and styles, on the nature of poetic community. Is a poetic community a sentimental utopia, with poets praising and invariably supporting each other, or is it more war-like, involving jealousies, rivalries, the creation of a new text always disturbing, misreading, savagely destroying and enhancing, the surrounding texts? As his reputation as a pit-bull implies, Johnson believes in the dialectic fertility of the latter. “Homage” parallels “After” in Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, Spicer being the “Lenin” in Johnson’s pantheon of American poets. Is “After Lorca” an homage to Lorca or a predatory pursuit? Lorca in the poem resists, resents Spicer’s advances, while Spicer evokes Lorca’s petulant voice (from the echo chamber of the grave), his dissolving body, retrieving fragments or “imagined” translations (which Spicer calls “centaurs”) and a few “fraudulent” letters. The parable which is After Lorca says that what a poet can receive from another poet is a few torn, “ingested”/imagined fragments. Homages are therefore necessarily predatory (militant), doing violence to the passage of time and the alternating subjectivities of two languages or poetic styles.
At the center of Homage are twenty translations, which Johnson calls “traductions,” ranging from the pseudo-literal to the totally imagined, of ancient Greek fragments (or “recently discovered” poems) from his book The Miseries of Poetry. A deep melancholy infuses these magnificent texts—as good as any “traductions” in the English language—pierced as they are with elisions, ruptures caused by the passage of time. They constitute a meditation that says: so few of these ancient poems, still redolent of the dung hill of life, survive; but the surviving fragments are more intense because of their incompleteness. This linguistic magma pulled up from the grave—corresponding to Spicer’s communications with Lorca or from Mars—full of suffering, violence, fury, and a delicate beauty, constitutes the heart, the very essence of Johnson’s poetry. It permeates the war poems—the bombs falling both on Hiroshima and Baghdad—as well as Johnson’s confrontational relationship with the poetic community and his “editorial” relationship with the “translator” of the Greek fragments, Alexandra Papaditsas. In a resonant passage in The Miseries of Poetry, unfortunately omitted from Homage, Johnson describes the life of a poet and its relation to language through the parable of the Cameroonian stink ant, which gets infected by spores of a parasitic fungus during its climb to the tops of the trees in the rain forests. There it dies while the fungus in its body lives on, consuming the nervous system and the remaining soft tissues. Ultimately, “a spikelike protrusion erupts from out of what has been the ant’s head.” The protrusion bursts, the spores fall to the jungle floor and the cycle restarts. In Johnson’s poetics, “the translator” has a similar protrusion in her head, “a large keratinous horn. . .”
The poet is thus host to the parasite of language. The translations are the fruits, the spores, of its life cycle, necessitating the violence of his/her total consumption/consummation. The same passage says, “This large ant [is] one of the very few capable of emitting a cry audible to the human ear.” It is this barely audible cry, of suffering, of burning violence, which makes all the miseries of poetry worth living through.
The debates around Johnson’s poetry have been framed by the Yasusada controversy of Doubled Flowering—which is unfortunate, because it diverts attention away from the utterly serious exploration of the nature of poetry and the poet’s relation to society that Johnson’s work constitutes. While Homage to the Last Avant-Garde is a “selected,” more truly it represents a framing of his total work, where his political poems, translations, and satirical sorties on the American poetic community can be seen within a coherent conceptual framework. I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone who wants to confront Johnson’s work seriously.
I will end this review by quoting two of Johnson’s “traductions.” The first, “Mission,” embodies the exquisite synthesis between violence and beauty Johnson’s poetry can achieve within the frame of a political poem:
Mission
We decamped from Pylos, barbarian town smack in a boulder field,
and set oar to lovely Asia, making fair Kolophon our base. We gathered
our strength for a fortnight, writing poems and sharpening our swords
by the sea. On the morning the oracle spoke in tongues, the main column
followed the rushing river through the forest, while our unit of ten went upward
and west, along a tributary stream. At a small waterfall we stopped to rest
on some moss, and gazed at our golden helmets and shields in the reflecting pool.
We spoke in low voices of the beauty around us, of the dark, darting trout
and of the strange, haunting songs in the towering trees. We spoke of time,
and friendship, and truth. Then each of us drank deeply from the pool.
and set oar to lovely Asia, making fair Kolophon our base. We gathered
our strength for a fortnight, writing poems and sharpening our swords
by the sea. On the morning the oracle spoke in tongues, the main column
followed the rushing river through the forest, while our unit of ten went upward
and west, along a tributary stream. At a small waterfall we stopped to rest
on some moss, and gazed at our golden helmets and shields in the reflecting pool.
We spoke in low voices of the beauty around us, of the dark, darting trout
and of the strange, haunting songs in the towering trees. We spoke of time,
and friendship, and truth. Then each of us drank deeply from the pool.
Aided by the gods, we stormed Smyrna, and burned its profane temples to the ground.
The second, “A God,” can be regarded as a terse summary of this review, or perhaps even as Kent Johnson’s poetic manifesto:
A God
Fear and joy,
love and rage,
sorrow and lust,
all of it molten
and pulsing from
within, forging
the body’s chambered
form, like some incubated
god, writhing himself into being.
[If you need the complete text of the “stink ant” passage, which I am quoting from The Miseries of Poetry it is on page one of Miseries, in a chapter entitled, “Vestibulum [spora tradere]”. Kent Johnson is quoting a passage from a text by Slavoj Zizek.]- Murat Nemet-Nejat love and rage,
sorrow and lust,
all of it molten
and pulsing from
within, forging
the body’s chambered
form, like some incubated
god, writhing himself into being.
I’ve always been inspired by poets who risk their perceptions in poetry. I have affinities for those who align themselves along some precarious edge where social values and personal decisions collide. As a group, however, poets typically flee the edge -- or they define it with such banality no sense of danger could ever hinder the forward progress up the ladder of American letters. Poetry, like the art world Dave Hickey describes in his book on art and democracy, Air Guitar, thrives on career hierarchies. Poets must know their place in the professional scheme of things. Those who act out or try in some way to bring reflection to the role of the poet as a participant in the contradictory social forces we inhabit as U. S. citizens tend to get chewed up in the jaws of the machinery.
Kent Johnson has been a critical and serious force in poetry for more than a decade, showing how established practices and affinities among certain groups in the so-called avant-garde create a situation in which careers are rewarded over breath-taking and original writing -- and he’s hated for it (duh).
In Homage to the Last Avant-Garde -- perhaps his finest contribution to the dilemmas of contemporary writing -- he brings critical reflection to the political and social contexts in which poetry is written. A satirist basing much of the work here in responses to various poets and traditions of writing -- particularly the New York School -- Johnson’s perspectives are aerated too with warmth and generosity. A hot lyricism radiates just under the surface of his satiric wit, and this is the most telling aspect of his writing.
The earnestness and commitment he brings out, however, can be overlooked due to the satiric charge of the voices he invents. And in an age that values irony and contempt for the weakness of others, Johnson has been read as a trickster-gadfly-pain-in-the-ass-of-the-pimple-of-poetry. Meanwhile, of course, the poet-pimps manage their assets on blogs and in their spheres of limited cultural influence -- spaces Johnson enters too -- like a mosquito on bare ankles at sunset. His commentary at the Harriet Blog -- managed by the fabulously endowed Poetry Foundation -- has argued for greater reflection on the role of politics in poetry. His work in today’s world of meltdown economics, Abu Ghraib-styled social surveillance systems, and other Bush-era, boot-clicking social forms of compliance provides a massive check on the behavior of poets whose theories often conflict with their practices.
One thing Johnson is good at is deflating some of the esteem poets give to their heroes. In “The New York School (Or: I Grew Ever More Intense),” he describes his morning toilet routines interspersed with voices that recount horrific scenes of loss and terror in certain Asian, African, and Arab nations. It’s a weird juxtaposition. “I turned over the bottle of shampoo,” he writes, “and Frank O’Hara came out. I rubbed him all into my head, letting the foam rise, knowing I was just warming myself up, excited by the excess of what was to come.” Later in the poem, Barbara Guest squirts out of a shaving cream can and James Schuyler is squeezed out of toothpaste. There is Ted Berrigan after shave and Kenneth Koch mouthwash. Between these satiric paragraphs we find narratives such as this:
I couldn’t help it, I thought of this: One day, a fortnight or so after my mother’s death in Shishido, I was up in the hills playing with some friends. Suddenly one of them said, Look, the baby’s hands are all swollen. I touched the baby, which was still strapped to my back, and screamed -- it was stone cold. My friends began to panic and jump up and down, shouting, It’s dead, it’s dead. I felt awful having something dead tied to me, so I ripped off my jacket and dropped the baby, before joining the others as they ran back down the hill as fast as their legs would take them, shrieking.So readers have to deal with these prosaic frames, alternating between poetic satire and horrific narrative. This performative presentation never explicitly states an argument, and it’s possible that some might find the satire directly aimed at those poets of the New York school whom Johnson so enthusiastically squishes into his own warm man-body. But really, the satire is aimed at contemporary poets who are too preoccupied with their investments in particular schools of thought or practice to apprehend how their writing obscures and defies the memories of the dead in places around the world. The poignant thing here is that the New York School poets featured in this poem all came to public significance during the 1950s and '60s as the Cold, Korean, and Vietnam wars raged around the globe. Johnson suggests that the time and social space made available to these poets, and many others, was bought through the suffering of those in far away places. The American practice of poetry is paid for in blood -- literally. And that’s not something people want to hear -- nor is it much under anyone’s control. But Johnson is unrelenting, forcing readers to digest his imagery so that, in Robert Duncan’s terms, evil is not something to oppose; instead, it is to be completely imagined by the poet. In another paragraph, doing just this, he writes:
a young girl…climbed out of the burning car in which her mother, father, and sister sat dead, their open-eyed bodies on slow fire. In shock she walked around in tight circles, her fingers hanging by nerves and skin from her hands… She simply walked in circles for about five minutes, an impassive look on her face, until she slowly knelt and curled up in apparent sleep on the street, the shooting continuing above her body for another twenty minutes or so. During that time, she bled to death.If an avant-garde is supposed to be at the front of culture, showing others new perspectives of the world and how to live in it -- promoting, among other things, real social change -- then Johnson’s critique is damning to those who understand poetry’s value as a mere expression of formal methodologies. He asks for a genuine understanding of the relationships between imagination, poetic practice, and political power. More than anything he insists that poets are not innocent of the political forces they may critique.
The criticism often hurled at satirists, of course, is that they remain distant from their own critiques. They possess a vantage from which to view the world that is untouchable and remote. What makes Johnson’s satire so compelling, however, is the trust he establishes with readers. He exposes his feeling and beliefs in order to discover something beyond his feeling and beliefs. Like all of us, he too is at the mercy of systems of power and authority that are only comprehended through great effort. It is depressing, however, to realize how few poets do get the stakes here -- and elsewhere (particularly as the economy continues to fizzle out with extraordinary ramifications for everyone).
Elsewhere in the book, “Traductions” of ancient Greek lyrics show the hostility and argumentativeness of ancient poetry communities. “Let the assholes of Assus preach about Truth and Form,” Johnson “traduces” in a poem attributed to Ammonides. “In the real world, a philosopher flying over a burning city is strangely beautiful.” Ancient poets elsewhere are smeared “with cow’s / shit”; they are told by Eros to lay off the “dog-style fucking”; or, more simply, they are “fucked with black luck.” These poems from the ancient Greeks, in a section called, “The Miseries of Poetry,” seem to reveal Johnson’s affinity for Jack Spicer’s engagement with the outside. The poet channels voices from afar, who speak, through the psychic and elemental static, through him. The poet is submissive to this sense of transcendent mission, “fucked with black luck.” Any sense of accomplishment, as though the author were in possession of genuine gifts, stinks of many dog turds in this context.
Finally, “Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, or: ‘Get the Hood Back On,’” a poem that brilliantly implicates red-blooded American virtues in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, is a fine example of a poetic practice that balances satire with self-inspection, challenge and critique with lyric amplitude. “Hi there, Madid,” Johnson writes in a concluding and controversial stanza,
I’m an American poet, twentyish, early to mid-thirtyish, fiftyish to seventyish, I’ve had poems on the Poets Against the War website, and in American Poetry Review and Chain, among other magazines, and I have a blog, and I really dig Arab music, and I read Adorno and Spivak, and I’m really progressive, I voted for Clinton and Gore, even though I know they bombed you a lot, too, sorry about that, and I know I live quite nicely off the fruits of a dying imperium, which include anti-war poetry readings at the Lincoln Center and the Poetry Project…In this complex piece, satirical attacks against an American presence in Iraq go beyond a vague, “holier-than-thou” position to implicate a complex weave of American social types. How, as Charles Bernstein once asked, should poets “pursue our own forms of ethical and aesthetic response” in the face of “the sort of pronouncement by fiat and moral presumption of President Bush and his partisans”? This question, in a sense, is Johnson’s thesis. But what would perhaps trouble Bernstein and others are the claims, implied by Johnson’s performative satire, that we are all spectators to a calamity no one can relieve. We are a good, decent people who will destroy any opponent to our faith in system, resource and even aesthetics.
As editor of the Araki Yasusada notebooks, Kent Johnson has, over more than a decade, emerged as a volatile figure in what remains of the avant-garde, as well as other, less well-defined poetic communities. His argument within poetry communities brings with it brilliant insight not only for other poets, but for all of us who live in a world that is currently teetering on the brink of change -- and not just in the elective sense offered through Obama and McCain’s ululating refrains. Johnson’s humor and vulnerability make this volume alive to the poetry’s full potential. As Johnson notes,
Our poems will be completely / forgotten, rot in the landfill of oblivion. With wry smiles and toasts / to the ancient ones, we console each other:
In that common mass grave, we shall never be alone.- Dale Smith
1
I think I’ve begun about fourteen reviews of Kent Johnson’s new and terrific quasi-select’d Homage to the Last Avant-Garde (Shearsman, 2008) by now, all stow’d up in my tiny brainbox. It’s a big mystery why I can’t put any of it down on paper. Kent Johnson keeps saying, “I’d love to know what you think of the book,” and I say, “Patience, Master, patience” as if I were cloistered in New England with a slightly puffy physiognomy behind which I build little spring-traps of syntactical ingenuity about trapping God, or someone rather “like Him.”
2
Is Kent Johnson a nervous Nellie, or what? I think he positively thrives on yatter and scorch, that version of the lyrical big itch that accounts for Art and Trouble (two manifestations of one compulsion) amongst all us humankind. He’s always looking to “mix it up a little,” flinging down the fat puff’d up old-style boxing gloves of ego for a little delight in exchange and engagement. Man least likely to consider (or care) about the possibility of looking a little foolish. Besides, he likes people, in all the muddle and mayhem and mopery. And then there’s Kent Johnson backing off a little, peevish and bewilder’d: “I must be the biggest pariah in Poetryland by now.” “Nobody’ll even talk to me.” Endearing crazy vulnerability and that obscenely huge grease-slick of high ambition. And all of it highly nuanced and terrifically “up front.”
3
One thing I love here in the Homage: how some of the select’d pieces—old “rocks” out of the now-classic pamphlets The Miseries of Poetry and Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz—get new settings, to shine slightly abashedly and askance in a book model’d pertly after Jack Spicer’s Book of Magazine Verse. Here’s the old Skanky Possum chapbook of Greek poems “drawn from glorious antiquity,” aimiably English’d with the assistance of Alexandra Papaditsas, “victim of the rare syndrome Cornuexcretis phalloides, wherethrough a large keratinous horn grows from the head,” become “Twenty Traductions and Some Mystery Prose for “C”: A Journal of Poetry. (One only misses the forty some “blurbs” for the work Kent Johnson coerced out of an equal number of comrades through, undoubtedly, promissory puling and sexual shenanigan.) And here’s the brute avant-castigatory mode of the Effing document with the Adorno title become “Seven Submissions to the War for The World. One is forced to consider (imagine) the alignment of lines like Kent Johnson’s “Listen, Tawfiq, you tafila, / OK, so you’re a sorry-assed academic with a Ba’ath mustache, / but put your brains back into your head” next to early World-fodder like Ted Berrigan’s “The true test of man is a bunt” or Joel Sloman’s piece listing the measurement of each part of ’s body, and wonder at how irremediably the world’s changed. It’s an audacious move, part of Kent Johnson’s continuing project of swiveling the telescope back around to examine its own makers.
4
Continual restlessness, constant reprise, incessant renegotiation of a poem’s place vis-à-vis the world, its audience, its mise en scène: the grand upshot of Kent Johnson’s energetic tampering with the status quo is a kind of radical confoundedness. “Uh, where the hell am I?” Kent Johnson’s admiration for (some ’d claim emulation of) the heteronym-donning Fernando “Person” Pessoa is well-known: during one period in the late ’nineties I suspect’d a whole slew of rather ordinary people of being somehow “projections” of Kent Johnson—Kazim Ali, Patrick McManus, Paul Murphy, Ron Silliman, Jacques Debrot, Jeffrey Jullich, Jordan Davis, Geoffrey Gatza, Millie Niss, Eliza McGrand, Mikhail Epstein, and innumerable fleeting “others.” (Anybody recall one “Ammonides” writing in to the Poetics List?) Setting aside, though, the rather tiresome subject of “the subject,” (multiplicity of, author-function no longer singularly assignable to, &c.), what one encounters in the shifting panoply of works of Kent Johnson is something like what Harold Rosenberg call’d an “aesthetics of impermanence,” wherein circulation and intervention become of primary concern. Not the static masterpiece unchanging, but the pertinent (potent) gesture for the current moment. As such, what one sees come forth in Kent Johnson’s Homage is adamant certain re-contextualization: how it needs read now. The effect is often vertiginous: every piece seems familiar, every piece seems “off,” and sublimely new.
5
One of the “Five Sentimental Poems for Angel Hair” is a piece about fishing, and fathers and sons, and truths and falsehoods, and making do, and it’s about John Ashbery’s poem “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” and Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter,” countless things. It’s titled “Sentimental Piscatorial”:
The fishing was good this morning, thoughAll that makes for a reading experience that simply teems with possibility and complexity. There is, undeniably, something “moving” at the center of it—though the evident knowledge of the “false Andromache” that produces that emotion be unstinting, ineffable. There is, too, the complicated play between private and public Kent Johnsons: whole vasty degrees of difference ranging from denial-stealth (“almost drowned / in its green, but that was a long time ago, and I didn’t”) all the way up to something like braggart-exhibitionism (“the heteronymous masterpiece of “Tosa Motokiyu,” of whose manuscripts, it is by now widely known, I am one of the caretakers”). And interlard’d with that complexity, is one of degrees of truth and falsity (“how could a picture of a horse be a true picture unless it were a false horse?”) And that (complexity)’s most acute pressure point is—both here, and generally—for Kent Johnson the place of the writer’s habitus, the charm’d and charmless, petty and fetter’d, large and withholding multitudes milieu of the writerly “scene.”
we never made it to the Mississippi. The Apple
is a lovely tributary; once I almost drowned 1
in its green, but that was a long time ago,
and I didn’t, because I guess life still
needed something there. Well,
for instance, as I said to my son Brooks,
who is starting to be a poet, many times
(as I’ve said many times to him, that is), if 2
you are going to put your life into
poetry, make sure you stay low, walk slow,
and lay the fly right along the velocity
changes. The sun was just starting to burn-
off the fog, and a doe walked across the riffle
right upstream and didn’t startle. A hereon stood
in the next pool, shimmering, “like
some kind of religious lawn ornament,
when you think about it,” my son 3
said. And so I watched my son fish,
covered in an actual gold, like his
drug-inspired poem of the alcoholic man
with the burning city in his heart. I 4
watched him fish, trying so to impress me,
his back to the sun. 5
1 The first stanza is, perhaps over-obviously, an allusion to John Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-Charged Air.”
2 The second and third stanzas are prosodic glosses on Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter.” Interestingly, the following email response was received from Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion, to whom this poem (sans footnotes) was originally submitted: “Dear Mr. Johnson, I like the poem quite a lot; it has an easy and laconic sound breaking elegantly across an unusual and complex meter (the ionic as base foot is idiosyncratic, to say the least, and quite impressive). Still, I am afraid I have to pass this time around—Guy Davenport, who has the last word with all poems submitted to NC, felt that the poaching, as he put it, from O’Hara in the second and third stanzas was too cute and obvious. But I will tell you that Mr. Davenport found the poem’s ending “strangely moving,” and I can tell you, too, that he doesn’t often offer up such words as “moving” in his reports to me. Please do send us more of your poems. —HK.”
3 When Brooks was a child, I would read him poems at bedtime. Wallace Stevens (the Stevens of Harmonium) and Kenneth Koch were his favorites. I now realize that Brooks would never have said what he did about the heron appearing as a lawn ornament had it not been for Koch’s line in that love poem about the parts of speech, where the garbage can lid is smashed into a likeness of the face of King George the Third.
4 This is an allusion to St. Augustine’s City of God, which is the theme, if you will, of my son’s painting. In the upper corner of the canvas, in tiny, calligraphic lettering, my son has written the following passage from Augustine’s Soliloquia, which he copies from Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, the heteronymous masterpiece of “Tosa Motokiyu,” of whose manuscripts, it is by now widely known, I am one of the caretakers:
For how could the actor I mentioned be a true tragic actor if he were not willing to be a false Hector, a false Andromache, a false Hercules? Or how could a picture of a horse be a true picture unless it were a false horse? Or an image of a man in a mirror be a true image unless it were a false man? So if the fact that they are false in one respect helps certain things to be true in another respect, why do we fear falseness so much and seek truth as such a great good? Will we not admit that these things make up truth itself, that truth is so to speak put together from them?5 This is an allusion to an image in a poem by Whitman, where the sun behind a man standing in the water forms a golden aura around him. But I cannot now recall the exact poem.
6
What Kent Johnson does—unlike anybody else—is interrogate (badger) that place, that “situation,” its ways and functions, how its writers behave and misbehave, lie to others and themselves, trade favors and insults, pose, vindicate, prance, vilify. So that: a note (apparently) written by The New Criterion’s Hilton Kramer, mark’d arch-nemesis on some presumptive rulers’ cosmological maps becomes an integral part of Kent Johnson’s “sentimental” poem. And yet: that radical confoundedness (“where the hell?”) raises up like a myrmidon: that “laconic sound breaking elegantly across an unusual and complex meter (the ionic as base foot is idiosyncratic. . .)”: uh, who’s zooming whom? One’s enter’d a world where the usual landmarks may be topsy-turvy, the nemesis may be correct, “Mr. Davenport”’s report additional proof, and the fact that “the sun behind a man standing in the water forms a golden aura around him” noteworthy only for the its being the case for anyman, or Everyman.
7
Or: here’s what William Gaddis (in The Recognitions) had to say about the poems of Kent Johnson:
Like a story I heard once, a friend of mine told me, somebody I used to know, a story about a forged painting. It was a forged Titian that somebody had painted over another old painting, when they scraped the forged Titian away they found some worthless old painting underneath it, the forger had used it because it was an old canvas. But then there was something under that worthless painting, and they scraped it off and underneath that they found a Titian, a real Titian that had been there all the time. It was as though when the forger was working, and he didn’t know the original was underneath, I mean he didn’t know he knew it, but it knew, I mean something knew. I mean, do you see what I mean?“Something knew.” One of the reasons why Jack Spicer is so central to Kent Johnson’s poetics—that ability to allow the “radical confoundedness” (“This is getting good, isn’t it?”) to out (and it may do so over the erring wanton interventions of several occasions—like sending a poem to The New Criterion). The Jack Spicer, who says (in the 1965 Vancouver lecture “Dictation and ‘A Textbook of Poetry’”):
. . . there are plenty of times when you're so busy writing it and you have to wait for two hours because the thing is coming through in a way that seems to you wrong. It may be that you hate the thing that’s coming through so much, and you’re resisting it as a medium. Or it may be that the thing which is invading you is saying, “yeah, well that’s very nice but that hasn’t anything to do with what this is all about.” And you have to figure that out, and sometimes it takes a number of cigarettes, and occasionally a number of drinks, to figure out which is which . . .Or a number of “presentations.”
8
Is Guy Davenport right? About the “cute and obvious”? Yes, of course. Guy Davenport’s always right. And yet: it is by means of such ploy (faux-innocence gamboling) that the stage is set. (See Kent Johnson’s opening query to “The Best American Poetry”: “Am I the only idiot here, on this hill, surrounded, as I am, by rutting rams and heated ewes?” And moments later one sees James Tate and Dean Young approach, with one loud “Baa-a” and another loud “Baa-a” in return. About as “cute and obvious” as an AWP Conference or an evening reading at the Poetry Project. The honest-to-God fun comes—as it generally does in a Kent Johnson poem—when, confront’d with a burning house, the poets on the hill “squint and espy the ant-like people, running around or passing water buckets in a line. And there goes the little red fire truck, speeding towards its fire, pulled by Gertrude, the ancient Clydesdale.” The house, of course, belonging to one Hejinian.)
9
If I find a hero in Homage to the Last Avant-Garde (a funny thing to look for in a book of poetry), it’s Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. In a poem in the form of a letter to David Shapiro, Kent Johnson writes “Yes, it’s true, the Language poets air-brushed me out of Leningrad” (see the collaborative book, Leningrad by Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten about the August 1989 “international conference for avant-garde writers”). And, while offerings of official “formal toasts to the ‘American Poetic Friends of the Soviet Union’” continue “in a vast hall in a vast, ornate czarist building made all of marble, crimson-draped windows towering to the ceiling, looking out onto the Neva, swarms of cherubs fat and hot for Aphrodite above, a U. S. avantist facing me across the great mahogany table in a kind of late pinkish glow, dapper Aeneas in a polo shirt,” it is reported how hero Arkadii Dragomoshchenko “leaned over to me and with booze on his breath said in heaviest accent, ‘Is this a great quantity of such repulsive fucking dog shit or what?’” (Though not—and here’s Kent Johnson’s genius—to skip out on the indictment, Kent Johnson offers a reply: “‘You think so?’ I burbled, my mouth full of bread and sturgeon eggs. ‘Why, it’s the first time in my life that I feel like a real Poet . . . I think this is fantastic!”)
THE EVERYDAY
64
The orchestra conductor tells the drummers that the beat needn’t be loud so long as it is inexorable. “I love that word, in-ex-or-a-ble,” he says, weighing it, tongue-ing its syllables unmitigatedly.- John Latta
Kent Johnson's Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, a full-length poetry collection that gathers work from previous chapbooks such as the excoriating Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, extends Johnson's ongoing parodic provocation of (and through) poetry. Organized in packets of "submissions" to various journals with experimental reputations, beginning with the experimental Evergreen Review (where Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" first appeared in the 1950s) to The World, the book is a subversive talkback to various generations of the avant-garde, and moves in ways that feel both admiring and admonitory.
It's that ambivalence toward the self-appointed avant-garde--and the ways it seems to fall short of its admirable aims to narrow the gap between art and life, to engage in art as social change, to innovate in ways that make revolution possible--that drives Johnson's project.
I've already reviewed Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz for Pleiades, and demonstrated how Johnson's chapbook provokes in a specifically political way. That review begins:
Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz is, unquestionably, a provocation; after all, the title glosses Adorno’s famous dictum about the impossibility of poetry after the Holocaust, and the front cover reproduces the contours of the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph showing Lynndie England holding a prostrate man by a leash, framed by cupids flying about, arrows loosed. Implicitly, the imagery conflates the Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib, and sets in motion a series of further provocations—not only regarding the seriousness of the Abu Ghraib scandal and the ongoing nastiness of the Iraq War, but about poetry’s role in light of such war crimes.Johnson has become, with all his work, from the Yasusada and Greek "translations" to his "own" "original" poems, perhaps our preeminent parodist. When his poetry works--and it does more often than it fails--it acts as a cauterizing burn, painfully staunching our wounds. The few moments where Johnson falters, as far as I can tell, are when he seems to stop believing in his own scary abilities to throw his voice into any poetic medium, grows self-conscious and then winks, thus betraying that longing (fairly universal to us poets) to be admired by one's contemporaries.
Of course, Johnson is no stranger to provocation, being the motive force behind one of the great contemporary literary hoaxes—that of the Hiroshima poet, Araki Yasusada, whose poems received wide acclaim and were published in esteemed poetry journals in the mid-1990s until it became clear that Yasusada was likely a fiction. Johnson was widely lambasted, and the poetry world did not entirely face its own complicity in holding ages-old doxa about authenticity and authorship.
This work, a chapbook, is a protest against the Iraq War, but it is also, as the subtitle suggests, a “submission” to the war. It is also a protest against, and submission to, poetry itself, in echoing a second meaning of submission. It is poetry with the bow pointed into its mouth, a crying in as much as a crying out.
Johnson is at his best when he makes us most uncomfortable, when he exposes the rules of the game by playing it so well (cf. Zizek on resistance through precise obedience to the letter of the Law) that he reveals the game's own cynicism.
Dear Kent Johnson, thanks for the discomfort. I've never been good at swallowing bombs.
Kent Johnson’s a complex guy. I know some people don’t like him. I know some people really don’t like him. I also know that there are people like myself who, to use a phrase that Linh Dinh uses in a blurb on the back of Johnson’s new book, are “in awe” of Kent Johnson. Actually, I bet even some of those who dislike him are in awe of him, even if it’s only in a sort of open-mouthed, wide-eyed shock. That there’s such a gap between his admirers and detractors is no surprise when you read Johnson’s work, and Homage to the Last Avant-Garde is no exception.
Kenneth Koch
Thanks to his poem about a garbage can
lid being smashed into a likeness of King
George the Third’s 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 I’ll say it
anyway: Thank you, Kenneth Koch,
for your marvelous contributions to Poetry.
Thanks to his poem about a garbage can
lid being smashed into a likeness of King
George the Third’s 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 I’ll say it
anyway: Thank you, Kenneth Koch,
for your marvelous contributions to Poetry.
It was later that night I learned that his
own son, aged ten, had drowned, in Paris, three years back. And the person who
told me this said that Rodefer’s son looked uncannily like this beautiful
boy from Spain. And so I cried that night, back at my modernized room at
Christ’s College, a room, it was, down the hall from Christopher
Marlowes’s old purported room, and I cried for a long time. And the next
day I went over to Stephen, by the wine box, and put my hand on his shoulder,
and said, That was one fine, powerful reading you gave yesterday. And he turned
and said Thanks, that’s very kind of you to say. And we made awkward small
talk for a while, and we walked out into the courtyard together, where it was
cool in the evening air.
From the tough-guy Johnson, to the sobbing
Johnson alone in a “modernized room at Christ’s College,” to
the contrite Johnson and Rodefer awkwardly chatting, Johnson shows some real
vulnerability. It’s an empathetic poem full of good, fatherly karma.
A number of Johnson’s poems allude to his own sons, whom he
often writes about with the awe and emotion of a proud parent. In a poem called
“Unedited Notes toward a Poetic Essay on the Translation of Poetry”
one of his sons gives him some paraphrased advice about translation for an essay
Johnson’s working on. The poem ends:
And he is in the darkness
now from me and with such velocity, even the sadness of the space where he once
stood, reading, is darkly beautiful for it.
And I can’t really say, looking at all these translations before me, what is faithfulness, nor what is so faithful it has flowered, without shame, into falsity.
And I can’t really say, looking at all these translations before me, what is faithfulness, nor what is so faithful it has flowered, without shame, into falsity.
When I first read
Ange Mlinko in The Poker, I started to bat
my eyes, seductively. Wow, I drank, this makes me want to
both write more and drink less so I might live longer! She’s
fantastic!
My beautiful wife (for she is beautiful to me) yelled up the
stairs: “It’s time for your date with the grill, Buster Lazy
Brown!” That was funny, my yelling wife… .
my eyes, seductively. Wow, I drank, this makes me want to
both write more and drink less so I might live longer! She’s
fantastic!
My beautiful wife (for she is beautiful to me) yelled up the
stairs: “It’s time for your date with the grill, Buster Lazy
Brown!” That was funny, my yelling wife… .
… no
matter how self-
reflexive I get, or
how suspicious you become of my quaint
and insecure prosody,
those dirty-haired,
often-raped
kids
will
still
be
dead
matter how self-
reflexive I get, or
how suspicious you become of my quaint
and insecure prosody,
those dirty-haired,
often-raped
kids
will
still
be
dead
Homage to the Last Avant-Garde
By Kent Johnson.Sestina: Avantforte
O your perfect, vulgate, hairy sestina
–David Shapiro (correspondence with the author)
It’s interesting how no one has yet written a sestina about John Ashbery,
Joseph Ceravolo, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch.
After all, the New York poets wrote a bunch of sestinas, and Frank O’Hara,
of course, though he never wrote one himself, dropped the names of poets in his poems
like crazy. James Schuyler
did too. He lived at the Chelsea amongst wackos of all kinds. Once, on the morning of
this poem, when seven thousand saffron panels billowed in the park, on a day you could take up the tattered shadows off the grass, Barbara Guest
knocked on his door with a flat shape under her arm. Joseph Ceravolo
answered the door. What are you doing here, she said. Maybe I should be asking you that
question, said Joseph Ceravolo.
Well, I’ve got this painting, it’s by Joe Brainard, I wanted to show it to Jimmy, and it’s
called “Tangerines.” John Ashbery
gave it to me after Frank O’Hara died, said Barbara Guest.
What do you mean Frank died, cried Joseph, I just saw Kenneth Koch
down at the San Remo, and he didn’t say anything about that! Ha ha hee hee, laughed
James Schuyler,
arranging some jonquils in the kitchenette, you two are a stitch and a half! And they all
laughed and laughed, like a happy rain, because the world was new, and irony was so straightforward then, in the Kennedy era. And just then the phone rang.
(It was Frank O’Hara!)
You’ll never guess what, Jimmy, said Frank. What, Mr. Frank O’Hara?
said Jimmy, with a mock ceremoniousness. Well, don’t tell Joe Ceravolo
because I want to tell him myself, and don’t tell Kenneth, either, because you know how
he takes these things, but they are here from Holland to make a movie about me. Can you believe it? Oh my God, Frank, squealed James Schuyler,
I can’t believe it, that is so fantastic, and even though I am a bit envious, I
am happy, too, but please can’t I tell John Ashbery,
he’ll be thrilled, he loves everything Dutch, in fact he just won some prize, and he might
go there, and I’ll tell him not to say a word to Kenneth Koch…
Joseph and Barbara exchanged quizzical looks. Jimmy, what the hell are you talking
about, demanded Barbara Guest,
who was still standing there in the doorway holding her painting like some acoustic
panel waiting for sound. Oh, Barbara, do be a good Guest
and come on in, said Jimmy, in his famous punning way, It’s Frank O’Hara,
and they’re making a movie about him, and it’s all in Dutch, O poor Kenneth Koch,
he’ll go mad like King George the Third, he’s always wanted to be translated into Dutch!
Actually, interjected Joseph Ceravolo,
he’s just been translated into Swedish, by a countess from Minneapolis. A man shouldn’t
complain… The sun went behind a small cloud. Barbara was absentmindedly running her fingers across the inscription W.H. Auden had written for Jimmy in a first edition of Some Trees, by John Ashbery,
it said: To my friend in Foetry and all other things, Mr. James Schuyler.
(signed) W.H. Auden. The sun came out again and gently burned the world.
James Schuyler,
she said coyly, in a Katherine Hepburn kind of way, do you think he said Foetry on
purpose, or is that just his handwriting? Barbara Guest,
said Jimmy, clearing his throat and replying in formal kind, I’ve tried to figure that one
out myself, it seems almost like a pun, doesn’t it, and when I asked John Ashbery
himself, he got all distant and mysterious as a girl in a Vermeer, so I just don’t know. By
this time, Frank O’Hara
was beginning to wonder what had happened to Jimmy, who had become so distracted by
the conversation with Barbara he had simply forgotten about Frank, and because he was on his lunch hour and had to meet Leroi Jones at the Automat, Frank decided to hang up. Joseph Ceravolo
said, Um, Jimmy, you kind of left Frank hanging, didn’t you? Just then, Kenneth Koch,
still in his twenties (or so he claimed), came bounding up the stairs, crying out the names
of northern European cities, the energy in and around him so electric, it looked like he could take it off and put it back on, like clothes. It’s Kenneth Koch!
said Joseph. Hi Kenneth! said Barbara, it’s so nice to see you! Hello? Hello? Frank?
Frank? said James Schuyler.
From my window I dropped a nickel by mistake, said Kenneth, looking fixedly at the
floor and nearly shouting, so I raced down and found there on the street, instead, a good friend, who says to me, in Dutch, Kenneth, do you have a minute? And I say, Yes! I am in my twenties! I have plenty of time! And so he tells me he’s been translating my poetry, and it’s going to be published! In Holland! Jimmy quickly hung up the receiver and a look of absolute panic came down over his face. Joseph Ceravolo
(for this was a gift he had as a person and as a poet) radically changed the subject with
the swift and elegant authority of a guillotine: Well, Kenneth, that is so fantastic, and even though we are a bit envious, we are happy, too. But look at this wonderful painting Barbara Guest
has brought to show us… Kenneth looked up. You have TANGERINES in it, said
Kenneth. And hey, by the way, he literally yelled, as he started to do jumping jacks at a great velocity, What’s up with Frank O’Hara?
Wait until he hears about Holland! Last time I saw him he said he felt like he’d
never write again! I’m writing a lot, though! So where’s he been? Huh? Uh,
said Jimmy, he’s, uh, been editing a new, um, sestina… full of, you know, cartoon characters… by John Ashbery…
Kenneth Koch’s eyes got big as pool balls. A sestina? A sestina by the poet of “The
Tennis Court Oath,” John Ashbery?
Yes, said James Schuyler, nervously lighting a Gaulois, uh, W.H. Auden suggested he try
one… I think… Just then, the phone rang again. Joseph Ceravolo, who was nearest the death-black machine, answered. Hi Joseph, the pleasant voice said. Was that Kenneth I heard shouting right before I hung up? (It was Frank O’Hara!)
Ah, hi, uh, no, no, there is no, ah, Olivia Oyl who lives here. Sorry. Goodbye. Click.
The backs of all the chairs were turned towards the sun, and then Kenneth, past his seventieth jumping jack, started to get this feeling of exaltation. And! But!
he yelled. He yelled so loud, it was as if the conjunctions could couple, like in the form of a centaur, the living to the dead. Now wait a second, they asked for Olivia Oyl? I mean, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me, said Barbara Guest.
Into the Heat-Forged Air
Far from the Rappahannock, the silent Danube moves along toward the sea.
–John Ashbery
Far from the Pirin, the pointy Appenines plummet toward the sea.
The grey and mauve Virungas undulate pleasantly, much like
The Darlings in their slumber. Chuckling nomads make lean-tos
Within the Schwatka. Troop carriers rust their wheels
On the Taurus, and jackals roam
The Toba Kakar. The Sentinel Range is white with
Dust, as are the peaks of the Ahaggar, covered in
Dust. The Tibetsi are grey and dry as bone.
The Sierra Madre is neither sentient nor unsentient.
Whilst the Titiwangsa appear to walk in the sky, the Verkhoyansk
Splash about in the sea. The Mackenzies are phlegmatic,
Almost diffident beneath their weathers.
Eons have crosshatched the Silvretta Alps,
Pure porphyry. Ophitic basalt predominates
In the Aberdare; its radiating crystals of feldspar recall
Dandelions in seed. Not so the Hafner Group, whose pure
Slate is uniform and dark. Slowly, the Koryak
Crash into the Kurai. The grave and dry Drakensbergs
Couldn’t give a darn what anyone thinks, but
The Glarus crackle companionably in the sun. Bombers draw
Vapor circles over the Lesser Khingan. People die of thirst,
Fleeing over the unforgiving Rockies.
The Pegunungan have never been climbed,
Sheer and crumbly their needle peaks.
The Bergamo Alps are sheathed in mist. The Massif Central
Is imposing from afar, but palm-fringed are its valleys.
The Kunlun are huge. The Glockner Group tilts
Forward and laughs, like a girl at an angle, held up
By a gale, while the Rieserferner Group is one of
The shortest ranges of the world,
Likewise the tiny Angokel.
Still, the Sistema Penibetico goes on forever.
The Rhaetian Alps eat climbers like candy,
Yet the Cherangany are mild. In the Brooks Range, ferns
And cairns become abundant; giant sloths are joyous on the
Plessur. The Ratikon is all hollow, a carapace of slate.
The Wetterstein has a ruined tavern half-way up. If there is a
Geological example of neurosis it is the Brenta Group. Not so
Its neighbor, the Karawanken, serene and languorous in its smooth
Rock skin. Strangely, the Dolomites are made of limestone,
As are the Ortlers. Migrants trek down the Cottians, carrying
Torches. The Mont Blanc Group is famous; the Cairngorms are
Covered in primeval pine. The Caucasus are stern and dark.
The Carpathians span five countries, all once members of the
Warsaw Pact, but the Juna are smothered in crows and the roaring of
Caws. The Pyrenees are sullen, aloof, though this
Is all part of their insouciant charm. Even as the Altay turn to mud,
Night envelops the Nulatos. Chinamen jump with a thump
On the Jotunheimen, while the Sierra Morena blushes
In the evening, powdering its breasts with cloud. The Svecoffenides
Are lugubrious, a lure for poets. The Table Mountains are flat,
Awash in runic trash. No one can believe the Golden Mountains.
But the Stone Mountains are airy, made of chalk, tunneled and
Hollowed out like Swiss cheese. The Bystrzyckie Mountains are
Unknown, devoid of life, while the Urals are vast and crisscrossed
By capillaries of gold. The Vosges, avant-garde of ranges, has not
Much changed since the invention of photography. The Appalachians
Are growing smaller by the day. The Wicklow Mountains were once
A redoubt of the IRA; now they are mottled with ocotillo and
Mesquite. The Endless Mountains end abruptly on the outskirts
Of Harrisburg. Meth labs crumble like sandcastles in the Green
Mountains. Adult stores are buried under strata in the Smoky
Mountains. The White Mountains are full of wind. The East
Catches the light; the Rubies have knife-like ridges.
The Shoshone Range loves to whisper its name on the wind, and
True to its name, the Snake Range is full of them. The Toiyabe Range
Bakes its rocks under the superheated sun. The Endicott Mountains
Release their small snows, teasing the streams. More children are lost
In the Black Hills than any other range; at least half are found years
Later, in the shadows of the Punamints, mendicants with no
Memory of their pasts. The Anti-Lebanon is covered with checkpoints,
But not so the Otztals. The Tian Shan are so trodden, whole areas
Are like sponge; still, the Tatras are slick and hard. Deer bed down
In the Elburz with the lion. From above, the Hindu Kush look like
Sutures, raised and purple, along a thigh. Snowcranes turn to ice
On the Hida, blown upward by massive drafts; they fall like toys,
On the hot stones. Sunnis squat in caves in the Safed Koh; in every cave
A little cage, and in every cage a sparrow from the Alleghenies. Prayer
Wheels make clacking sounds in the Western Ghats. Strange concussions
Are heard deep inside the Zangezurs, though no one knows why.
The Vindhya Range is mute, intractable, along the spine of India:
How does consciousness arise? The Cordillera Darwin swarms
With thistles and ferns. Black helicopters fly over the Cordillera Negra,
Never to be seen again. The Cordillera de Lipez is hollow, its rock
Thin as eggshell. The Cordillera de Sarmiento is a block of stone.
The Sierra Ventana is covered in dust; it blinds those who would seek
Meaning in form. The Cordillera Pelada is covered in blue dust.
The Parcell Mountains are taut as a bass string, even when covered in dust.
UFO’s hover over the Sandias. The Sierra Nevada is sprinkled with corpses,
Turned to quartz, while the Torngats have Sasquatch, otherwise known
As Bigfoot. The Superstitions are dotted with radio dishes, but tiny elk
Rut in the Kigluaiks. The Eje Transversal has nothing to say. The Anvil
Range smells like wild cabbage or fennel, and the Glenyon Range does
Too, though more subtly. The Bitterroot puckers its lips
In the rain, and the Cabinets hold many wonders. The Gallatin Range
Is lousy with moles; the Garnet, its sister, is 90% iron. The mountains
Are indifferent to our yearnings, our joys, and our sorrows.
The John Long Mountains look like a boy praying toward Mecca;
Bats prowl their starry skies. The Castle Mountains have
Been reduced to conglomerate clods of granite and chert,
A hilarious hulk of hubris. The Klamaths are retiring
And diffident, but no less noble for that. Great howling
Armies clash in the Ouachitas, but the Nadaleen Range
Is encased in dust. The Ozarks are conflicted between
Tradition and modernity, though the Chilkat Range
Is a lizard’s dream. People climb the ten thousand paths
Of the Himalaya, seeking who knows what. On the Schober Group,
Lava flows upward and downward. The Niedere Tauern
Just sits there; no one knows its true nature. Amazingly,
The Lepontine Alps run upward and downward and in all directions.
After entering the Sumava, it is said not a single person meets another,
For there is only the activity of the Sumava.
Hands are pressed to cave walls deep inside the Anti-Atlas.
The Granatspitz are puny next to the Thurnwalds.
The Montes Rook, towering and hermetic,
Form the smiling mouth of the frozen Moon.
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