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18th June, 2015
Dear Bob,
Kent Johnson's I Once Met is a beautifully made book, every
aspect: the size, the spacing of words on the page, the placement of the
photographs. And those black and white photographs you chose to include - of
Mandelstam and Shimpei Kusano, along with other strange and wonderful characters
- deepen the reader's response to the text, each photograph suggesting
further possible and impossible meetings. The last photograph of the old
pensioner in the Surrey Hills, taken in 1949, could just as easily be
Fernando Pessoa walking up a hill in Lisbon, or Robert Lax doing the same on
Patmos. Exquisitely chosen each.
Which goes for the cover: A fine twentieth century Chinese painting of a man
fishing in a river, encouraged, almost, by the presence of a tree, as if
protecting his back. The immediate response has to be one of dialogue: a
dialogue with all poets, from all times, back all the way to ancient Tu Fu
and Li Po. It is a discreet nod to the tranquility and transcendence those
great Chinese poets brought gloriously into the world, silently enfolding the
contents of the book into the care of centuries of poetic conversation. Add
that to what you say is Kent Johnson's interest in fishing, and yes, his
infamous involvement with the so-called Yasusada Affair, and everything fits.
Even the Yasusada Affair itself could be seen as yet another example of this
continued dialogue, these encounters with poets, real or imagined. As could
his stunning translations (along with Forrest Gander) of the great Bolivian
poet, Jaime Saenz. (How did Cid Corman put it? 'Poetry becomes / that
conversation we could / not otherwise have.') This book confirms and continues the conversation of what
it means to make poetry - to write and to be read, to respond to what is written
and to the writers who create it. Some, naturally, seem to be fine people,
good company, thoughtful and considerate; others, perhaps, leave something
more to be desired. And more, the words in the book sing beautifully to the
spirit of Chinese poetry - with its many instances of poets meeting other
poets for a cup of wine and a deep night's conversation, gazing up at the
moon, discussing absence and presence: the quarrel and the company, the agony
and joys of parting and meeting. Often enough, as with this book, with wars
and conflict as the interminable background.
As for the writing, I do not think I have read a more charming, intelligent
and entertaining book. Or not since the one Johnson wrote a couple of years
ago around and about Frank O'Hara that Richard Owens published, A Question
Mark Above the Sun. Richard did a beautiful job of making that book. Equally,
to my eyes, your production of I Once Met is
as faultless. Kent Johnson - at least in the incarnation which he presents
as himself in these pages - comes across as such an honest and open character
(even if he does tend to court and simultaneously shy away from controversy,)
whether he's confessing, after a long train journey home with Vanessa Place
from a conference on Conceptual Poetry at Princeton, to being surprised -
since they hold such differing views on poetry - in finding he likes her as
an individual 'quite a good bit', even though he remained ' no less skeptical
at all' about Conceptual Poetry; or, insisting on 'reciting rhyming,
satirical doggerel that poked fun at the leading lights of the post-avant'
in
the supposed bastion of conceptual and experimental fare which is Buffalo.
Equally, when he is in Cambridge, England, saying, somewhat the worse for
wear with drink, to the Austrian poet Franz Josef Czernin: 'I would in ecstasy
wash your feet in my hair', only to be told by Tony Fraser that the High
German Franz says in response means, 'he really likes you, but that he's glad
you aren't doing the driving.' Perhaps one of the shortest poems reveals much
of how the others work: 'I've never met the famed poet Ron Padgett, but I
almost did. I raised my fist before his door and paused. There were cicadas
screaming to death in the rich summer trees. Why ruin it, I said, and walked
away.'
Only just having finished the book, I feel like jumping right back into it. I
don't see how it won't become a classic, much in the way of Joe Brainard's I
Remember. Yet it is absolutely itself. A book which should be in the hands of
anyone interested in poetry. However, it is not to be mistaken as simply
writing about poets and poetry, rather it is poetry. Powerful, moving and, at
times, hilarious poetry. Often saying beautiful things: The two poems to his
sons, for instance. Of his youngest son, Aaron, he writes: 'And the more
worthy man than I that he is destined to become is as certain as the
mountains he so loves are perilous and real.' When I returned home, I
immediately read them to Jasna in the garden over Turkish coffee. Both poems
took her breath away. Susan and you deserve the highest praise for bringing
out such a wonderful and important book in such a fine fashion.
Please, do pass on my thoughts to Kent. I'd like him to know there's someone
over in Cornwall who now has a smile on his face that he put there. It might
well be a permanent smile.
Love, John
21st June, 2015
Dear Bob,
I checked online and found a very positive review on Jacket by Cralan Kelder
of the original limited edition Longhouse publication of I
Once Met from 2007. Appended to the end of that review is
a note by Clayton Eshleman, defending himself against the comments that Kent
Johnson made about meeting him when he was a young poet, putting his own
interpretation of their meeting. (Funnily enough, anyone reading the entry
on
Eshleman would not think it warranted any such response or self-defense.
Proving, perhaps, one of the impressions the reader gains of poets: that they
are a remarkably sensitive bunch!) What I don't quite understand is how
anybody who is mentioned in the book could take what is written there as if
it were actually written about them. Or why such narcissism? I see each
encounter as poem: I have no interest whatsoever if it is true or not, nor
even if Kent Johnson ever met these particular people. They are playing the
characters of poets or writers
in a poem, whether they exist or not, whether what happens in the poem
happened or not. Of course, they all do exist, from what I can tell: painted
quite wonderfully and clearly, usually with a few precise brushstrokes. But
I - as reader - never once considered that everything said was the actual truth
(whatever that vast and unyielding animal is). What I was reading were poems!
As poems, they can do and say what they like. Or where's the freedom? How
does he put it in the Author's Comment at the start of the book? 'I have
tried my best to be true to the experiences represented here. In a few
instances, where my memory flagged, or where poetic license seemed to proffer
- in spirit of Picasso's famous maxim about art, lies and truth - a deepening
of the genuine, I have, in the venerable traditions of that non-existing
genre called "non-fiction", not-so-secretly embellished.' I love that phrase
'a deepening of the genuine' -
masterful; as is how he ends the
paragraph, after saying that anyone can amend or deny anything written in the
book as they see fit, with the declarative: I stand by every word.' What
could be clearer? So who could
take the book as anything other than containing that truth which is the poetic
imagination? The words sing because they are song and they are song because
they tell simple facts about all meetings and all partings, not simply those
that pass as having taken place with whoever's name is uttered within each
section. Strangely, perhaps, I am reminded of Leonard Cohen's response when
he was awarded the Governor General's Award, I believe for his Selected
Poems: 'Much in me strives for
this honour but the poems themselves forbid it absolutely.' The poems in this
book refuse absolutely to be nailed down to any trivial day-to-day truth
telling - they are speaking of far more permanent things: the grace and
gravity and beauty of any meeting happening, of there even being meetings to
happen and people to meet, of there being anything at all instead of nothing.
Change the names, make up the poets: the poems would be as true. Create
legends. Create myths. Poems tell the truth beyond what historians consider
it to be. Otherwise these poems would be mere gossip. There is an act,
however small, of myth making taking place within these pages. Of course,
Kent Johnson has been in this territory before; indeed, he should be proud
of the memory of the Yasusada Affair which is several times mentioned within
its pages. He should be proud
of having a part - however small he claims it to be - in the creation of such
a myth. How many do that? In fifty
years most of the poets in the book will be dead and their work, currently
judged valuable or not, will be long forgotten. Will it make the book any
less song or less true? No. Not at all. The book - the very stillness at its
heart - is pure. There is no stain upon it. Let those who wish to see it in
such a light walk away declaring themselves half-blind. It is a wonderful
creation and - this might seem crazy, I know - I do not see it having much
at all to do with anybody mentioned in it! They are not important enough -
in
the history of poetry - to become these poems. Not until they themselves have
become myths - as has your own Emily Dickinson. Do you think she is upset
over being mentioned in the book? No, she is happy as a jaybird, doing a
little jig for celebration in her grave. Would she be upset if she happened
to be alive and living in Amherst today? Unlikely. I imagine she wouldn't
have the vanity to consider that she is the Emily Dickinson mentioned in
these pages, even if Kent and her did hang out by a swimming pool (Dickinson
wearing a bikini and sunglasses!), sipping mojitos, 'casually sharingÉthe
fathomless mysteries of her impossible mind.'
The thought just came to me that maybe it wasn't Eshleman's response that
Cralan Kelder noted at the bottom of his review, but something Cralan made up
for the fun of it. Now, that would be grand.
Enough. What I have said is what I have said. It is my truth for this moment
in time. It won't change, either, not as far as my response to Kent Johnson's
book is concerned. But if someone wrote down a version of what I have said
here in a poem (however unlikely and foolish an act that would be!),
subsequently publishing it in their own book and on reading it sometime later
I took offence because it was different to what I remembered happening or
saying, then wouldn't I be the fool? Especially if the work they happened to
make was both beautiful and true.
Love, John
¥
28th June, 2015
Dear Bob,
I have one ear on an old radio interview with John Berger, mostly about his
book Hold Everything Dear. The conversation is typical
Berger: intense, emotional, each word weighed before it is spoken, almost as
if an oracle is in the process of speaking. It is a voice I have always
enjoyed, but a voice very different to Kent Johnson's, whose I
Once Met I have just finished reading through for the second
time. Actually, I enjoyed the book even more this time round. On first look
Kent Johnson and John Berger might appear to have little in common, but I am
not so sure: Both are passionately engaged with the world as they find it,
both are declared socialists, both have lived abroad for portions of their
lives, both translate from foreign languages, both seem to possess a
wonderful sense of the company of writers (living and dead), and both are
very much outsiders to any declared literary scene. Now, I'm not at all sure
this is a path worth going too far down, but listening to John Berger, having
just read Kent Johnson, seems, in a sense, a continuation; a continuation, at
least, of sense making. Both writers actively relish the world and the
activity of being in the world. Perhaps the major difference, obvious to any,
would be Johnson's finely tuned sense of comedy and self-deprecation. After
all, I Once Met is an
intensely funny book, not that the humour refuses the tragic, or excludes
mention of many of the concerns both writers share: the horrors of war, their
belief in socialism, the disease of imperialism. Worth noting here the places
Kent Johnson visits in I Once Met -
among others:
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Leningrad, Nicaragua: all places that have
held/hold John Berger's interest.
Much as I admire and respect John Berger's work, Kent Johnson comes
across as a much different writer, one who relishes celebrating his own
failures and frailties, one who comes over as exemplifying the Dharmic
beliefs of the illusionary
nature and the impermanence of the self, and who does so - ironically enough
- in a book of his own meetings with a vast array of poets from across the
world. Is there another writer
who could have composed such a comedy of manners? A book that indeed holds everything - and therefore every
meeting - to be dear, in the same moment as it recognizes nothing and no-one
is there to be held dear, or not for long.
Love, John
© John Phillips 2015
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