K E N T J O H N S O N
___________________________________________________________________________PRAEFATIO TO
EPIGRAMITITIS: 118 LIVING AMERICAN POETS*(A 260-page book of poems and images
forthcoming from BlazeVox Books, February, 2006.)
From the start, it should be kept in mind that these are only poems. Death rushes towards us; the skin sags and flaps; the hair pales and flies off in an onrushing wind. Very soon, indeed, we shall die.
A long time ago, when poets anointed their privates with olive oil, the epigram was held in highest esteem. A poet of respectable standing could say vile, wicked, and funny things to another poet, telling him, for example, exactly what he was going to do with what he had just anointed with olive oil. (What he was going to do with it, that is, to the other poet, or to the other poet's significant other, if not to both.)
I'm not trying to sound outrageous; I'm just stating the facts. The epigram was an honored vehicle of vigorous, uncompromised speech, and its common practice undermined, in very healthy ways, the genetic tendency of literati toward conformity and sycophancy. Of course, now and then things would get out of hand, and the poets might end up bruising one another in a brawl. But more often than not, it was all quite chivalrous and entertaining to the polis. No less than theater (ah, Euripides, ritual foil of Aristophanes! [see Cauda at book's end] ), the epigram was a public, competitive pitch upon which players made their histrionic bobs and feints, much for the end of injecting some virtue into the body politic. Thus, by and by, in the afterglow of invective's catharsis, poets more often than not would meet in the commons to drink and laugh and argue intricate questions of prosody and other ultimately pointless things.
(Panting dogs lie near them in the sun. A boy, high up in an orange tree, pokes with a stick at a papyrus kite. Workmen, hoisted from hemp belts by pulleys and ropes from a columned roof, give Jupiter's hair a fresh coat of golden paint. The pointy, red penis of a dog emerges from its sheath, and the dog licks at it for a little while and then goes back to sleep. They look like seabirds, one of the poets mutters, remarking on the workmen dangling horizontally in the dusty air, tapping his fingers on the table and yawning, baring his rotting teeth. And another lifts his bull-like buttock to fart in rapid, high-pitched reports, like a toy train crossing a scale-model bridge [though such comparison would obviously not occur to them, actual trains not appearing until the 18 th century]. And then everyone laughs affably and long, and a dog senselessly barks, and another lifts its leg to pee, and a bumblebee buzzes and gets caught in the stickiness of the god's new hair, and the boy, covered in moist blossoms, comes down, triumphantly, from the tree. And then the poets go back to arguing about poetry some more: the latest explorations of the 2 nd Aslepeadean by The Younger Martians, the teenage bards of far Antiparos; the latest selling out to Caesar of this or that once-experimental playwright of Sparta, etc. etc.)
But those times of combative collegiality are long gone, and the epigram is a mostly forgotten thing. Poetry is a kind of business now, with health insurance, including dental, and paid travel aboard huge metal cylinders that fly faster than Mercury through the sky, bound for conferences in the provinces. Yes, poets these days are, for the most part, strategically polite and scriptedly protocoled toward their peers. After all, to publicly proclaim, as Catullus often did, that you are going to violently fuck another poet in the ass probably won't do much for your tenure or career.
In any case, none of the badinage here goes so far as that (this particular poet has no interest, for one, in sodomy with other males, though “not that there is anything wrong with that,” of course, 4/5 ths of male poets today being of the Brokeback Mountain kind), so these relatively tame bagatteles of amusement or affection, bemusement or contempt should cause no great upset to anyone. As I said, they are only poems. And no one listens to poetry anymore, anyway. And, as I also said, very soon, indeed, we are all going to be dead.
[nota bene: A few of the poets here died between the writing of their epigram and the publication of this book about “Living American Poets.” See what I mean? As well, it should be noted that this is only a 1st edition. The 2nd edition will be composed of 118 new epigrams.]
[ see also ]
Aaron McCollough & Kent Johnson's
O, Fundamentalist: Maxims For the Time-Being
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