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too likely to be likely : kent johnson One of the readers at tonight's Discrete Series event is Kent Johnson. The e-mail invite gives his bio as follows: "Kent Johnson has edited Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof, 1998), as well as Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English, forthcoming from Combo Books. He has also translated (with Alexandra Papaditsas) The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum, 2003) and (with Forrest Gander) Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (California UP, 2002), which was a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation selection. He was named Faculty Person of the Year for 2003 at Highland Community College, in Freeport, Illinois, where he teaches English Composition and Spanish." What this bio doesn't mention is that Araki Yasusada, apparently, doesn't exist. (Thanks to K. for the tip-off.) Selections from the Yasusada notebooks were published by a handful of journals under the pretense that they were newly discovered work by a Hiroshima survivor who died in 1972, but, as this interesting article by Marjorie Perloff points out, the writings contain inconsistencies, obvious anarchronisms, and things that may or may not be in-jokes; the most likely author is Johnson himself, although Johnson continues to disclaim authorship. So the question arises: if Johnson is, in fact, the author, what exactly was he trying to accomplish? Is this the poetry world's equivalent of the notorious Sokal hoax, an ugly attempt to "pull one over" on editors? Or is it something more benign: a heartfelt attempt to imagine the perspective of the "other" through the time-honored tool of the pseudonym? Of course, as Edward Said famously points out, when imagining the perspective of the Japanese, Westerners are prone to indulge in stereotypes and exotic generalizations: in adopting an air of "Japaneseness," some of the Yasusada work runs the risk of being "Orientalist"—or is it working as a parody of Orientalism? Can a parody of Orientalism itself be guilty of Orientalizing? Were the Yasusada poems a repugnant, cynical attempt by a (presumably Caucasian) poet to gain attention in a marketplace that feels good about multiculturalism and the poetry of victimized peoples? (In 1999, Charles Bernstein referred to the Yasusada poems as an expression of "white male rage.") Or are they a tour-de-force of postmodern gamesmanship, where this entire set of questions is intended to arise as part of the work, a brilliant conceptual framework "bundled with" a set of striking poems? Can they be both? Do these questions even matter? Does the identity and "authenticity" of the author matter when trying to assess whether a poem is "good" or not? Does intent? The later Johnson material only further compounds these questions: after thinking about all this stuff, the title The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek begins to sound distinctly tongue-in-cheek, an impression that is not exactly put to rest by the fact that Johnson claims his co-author to be "Alexandra Papaditsas," a recently deceased Greek poet with a horn growing out of her head. And this forthcoming Language Poets in Leningrad: Post-poems and Elegies, 1998-2003 also seems a bit too likely to be likely. None of these questions are particularly clarified by this interview with Johnson. But I'll let you know what I think after the reading. (Which reminds me—I enjoy the elliptical way Drew Gardner blogs poetry readings (say here); this may be a model to actively emulate.) Labels: poetry_commentary

Friday, April 09, 2004 6:39 PM   Comments: Post a Comment