Kent Johnson (poet) explained

Kent Johnson (June 23, 1955 – October 25, 2022) was an American poet, translator, critic, and anthologist. His work, much of it meta-fictional and/or satirical in approach, has provoked a notable measure of controversy and debate within English-language poetry circles.

Life and career

From the late 1990s, Johnson was widely thought to be the author of the Araki Yasusada writings, which a reviewer for the Nation magazine, in 1998, called “the most controversial work of poetry since Allen Ginsberg's Howl.”[1] Johnson, however, never officially claimed authorship of the material, presenting himself only as “executor” of an archive supposedly composed by a writer, or writers, whose choice was to maintain a principled anonymity in relation to the work. In recent years, the Yasusada discussion has moved from the realm of literary scandal and gossip into considerations of more scholarly kind, and a substantial number of academic articles have engaged the topic, pro and con. In 2011, a book of critical studies, Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums: Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada, was published in England, to which Johnson was one of eighteen contributors.[2]

Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War (its contents later included into a larger collection, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, 2009) was published in 2005. As the first book of poetry in the United States to respond to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was the subject of numerous reviews and blog commentaries, a good deal of the latter hostile. The title poem of the collection, “Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, or: Get the Hood Back On,” angrily confronts the torture committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, though it does so in a manner quite non-conventional for “anti-war” poetry: The poem proceeds in a series of stanzas set in the voices of American military prison guards, who calmly chat with Iraqi prisoners and sociably describe their quite normal backgrounds at home, before graphically informing the prisoners of the tortures to which they will be subjected. The poem, however, concludes unexpectedly when the voice of a generic U. S. poet joins the chorus of torturers, and in good-natured tone tells his captive to stop pleading and just accept the horror of his fate, because there is, after all, nothing that poetry can do to help him.

Latterly, Johnson became the focus of controversy, including threatened legal action, when he published a book that proposed, by means of an elaborate, forensically detailed hypothesis (supplemented in the book by a quasi-detective novella), that the poet Kenneth Koch may have been the hidden author of “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” one of Frank O’Hara's canonical poems, composing it shortly after O’Hara's death, and then placing it under his late friend's name in a sui generis act of comradeship and mourning.[3] First published in a limited edition in 2011, an expanded, second edition of this book, titled A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem "by" Frank O’Hara, was published in 2012 and named a “Book of the Year” by the Times Literary Supplement.

Johnson lived most of his childhood and adolescence in Montevideo, Uruguay, returning to work there in the mid-1970s. In the early 1980s, on two extended visits, he worked with the Sandinista Revolution as a literacy and Adult Education teaching volunteer in rural zones of Nicaragua. Since 1991, he has taught English and Spanish at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois. In 2004, he was named State Teacher of the Year by the Illinois Community College Board of Trustees.[4] He has received a Pushcart Book of the Month Award, an Ohio Board of Regents Grant for research in the U.S.S.R., an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a PEN Translation Grant, a Finalist nomination for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a travel grant from the University of Chile, and a Visiting Writer Grant from the U.S. Embassy in Uruguay.

Johnson died on October 25, 2022, at the age of 67. He was survived by his wife, Deb, and his two sons.[5]

Selected works

Poetry and chapbooks

Edited collections and translations

Prose and critical fiction

Selected interviews

Selected essays

External links

Notes and References

  1. Gander . Forrest . Review: Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada . The Nation . July 13, 1998 .
  2. Book: Scubadivers &Chrysanthemums: Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada. 14 Jan 2012. Shearsman Books. England. 978-1848611849. 240. 11 December 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20160817000512/http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/product/3971-bill-freind-scubadivers-chrysanthemums. 17 August 2016. dead.
  3. Web site: Allen. Richard. Why Kent Johnson shouldn't be worried about the letter he received from the Koch estate, assuming it actually exists.. wewhoareabouttodie.com. 10 Dec 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20141215030553/http://wewhoareabouttodie.com/2010/09/09/why-kent-johnson-shouldnt-be-worried-about-the-letter-he-received-from-the-koch-estate-assuming-it-actually-exists/. 15 December 2014. dead.
  4. Web site: Author Notes. Jacket Magazine. 14 Dec 2014.
  5. News: Kent Johnson, academic behind a notorious poetic hoax which he turned into a serious debate about artistic truth – obituary . 20 December 2022 . The Telegraph . 20 December 2022.

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