[Ed. Note: A ver­sion of this exchange between Kent John­son and John Bradley appeared in Plantarchy #5, 2008. Thanks to Justin Katko for per­mis­sion to reprint. John Bradley is the author of Ter­res­trial Music (Curb­stone), War on Words (BlazeVOX), and You Don't Know What You Don't Know (Cleve­land St. Univ. Poetry Center, forthcoming).]

“Only those deserv­ing of scorn are appre­hen­sive of it.”
– La Rochefou­cauld

John Bradley: You’ve recently pub­lished a book titled Epi­grami­ti­tis: 118 Living Amer­i­can Poets (BlazeVOX, 2006), a large gath­er­ing of epi­grams and accom­pa­ny­ing pic­tures ded­i­cated to indi­vid­ual con­tem­po­rary poets. You’re now expand­ing it to fifty or so more. I think it’s safe to say there hasn’t been any­thing like this in poetry for a long time.

I’ve been think­ing about the grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of social and polit­i­cal satire with news­pa­per, online, and book ver­sions of The Onion. On TV, there’s South Park, The Daily Show, The Col­bert Report, and a BBCA show called The Thick of It. In film, there’s Bull­worth, Wag the Tail, Thank You for Smok­ing, and Borat. Amer­i­cans seem fairly com­fort­able with social and polit­i­cal satire, but not with lit­er­ary satire, specif­i­cally satire that goofs on writ­ers. What do you make of this curi­ous dichotomy? Is the poet seen as off limits? What con­tem­po­rary poets have been effec­tively employ­ing satire? Is it pos­si­ble that poetic satire is more accepted when it mocks social trends or celebri­ties as opposed to par­tic­u­lar writ­ers, lit­er­ary move­ments, and poetry politics?

Kent John­son: Yes, it’s an inter­est­ing thing. I’m not so sure that Amer­i­cans in gen­eral see “the poet” as off-​limits to satire. Poetry is, after all, of little con­cern to the great bulk of the Amer­i­can population—not exactly an issue many people worry about: prob­a­bly a good thing, in the long view, for them and for poetry both. But it’s cer­tainly the case that satire aimed at poets by other poets is con­sid­ered an off-​limits activ­ity within the con­tem­po­rary poetry com­mu­nity at large. Pointed satire directed at writ­ers by writ­ers is very rare today, and when it occurs it’s usu­ally greeted with indig­na­tion or con­temp­tu­ous silence–or fas­ci­nat­ing sym­bi­otic inter­ac­tions of these. And this is a curi­ous thing, soci­o­log­i­cally speak­ing, given that poetic con­test is a ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion, one that’s been a cen­tral prac­tice in numer­ous cul­tures and eras. And of course some great, even canon­i­cal writ­ing has come down to us from the epi­gram­matic and insult tra­di­tion: the Greeks and Romans, Vedic poetry, the trou­ba­dours, the Eng­lish Renais­sance, Restora­tion, and Augus­tan peri­ods, Per­sian and Arabic poet­ries, African tra­di­tions and their Amer­i­can exten­sions in “the dozens,” obvi­ous sources to men­tion a few…

But here in early 21st cen­tury Amer­ica we inhabit a poetic sub­cul­ture where, yes, there is great ner­vous­ness, touch­i­ness, and bad humor when it comes to roast­ing the Poet’s legal iden­tity. I’m not sure I have a devel­oped answer as to why; some­one will no doubt write a book on the matter some day. But I sus­pect it has some­thing to do with the deep­en­ing mar­ginal status of poetry within a hyper-​commercialized sur­round that’s increas­ingly driven by celebrity wor­ship and media spec­ta­cle, from talk shows, to pol­i­tics, to art, to jour­nal­ism, to war.

Well, that’s a banal state­ment. I mean, Adorno had no idea how pre­scient he was when he began to the­o­rize the notion of the “Cul­ture Indus­try” back when, how its power would con­sume nearly every­thing, like some giant blob that sub­sists and expands by eating, expelling, and then again eating, with gusto, its own shit. The situation’s become so depress­ing it’s comedic. I mean, even most satire gets con­sumed. Watch Viacom’s Comedy Chan­nel. Though I should say The Col­bert Report is still quite alive…

Now, within that broad zeit­geist of ide­o­log­i­cal diges­tion and expul­sion, one within which the poetry-​biz indus­try is some­thing like part of a bowel move­ment going down the blob’s intesti­nal tract for the fourth time or so since the fall of Saigon, Autho­r­ial iden­tity comes squeezed out very teeny, very frail, at the other end, more and more pathetic and loath­some all the time. And it’s a truism, I sup­pose, that the more insignif­i­cant one feels within the bigger dump­ing ground, the more anx­ious one becomes about defend­ing the little one still can defend– the smaller the turd-​stakes, the more pre­cious the turf gets, and all that. Well, I guess this is what they call start­ing to overly extend one’s metaphors, and I’m losing the point…

Anyway, so Author­ship for poets has become some­thing of a sacro­sanct thing, some­thing not to be mocked, and this is the case across the aes­thetic spec­trum, not least amongst the so-​called “avant-​garde.” The state of affairs that accom­pa­nies this is increas­ingly pro­nounced and rou­tine: a poetic field rotted through by aca­d­e­mic careerism and com­pro­mise, elit­ism and cul­ti­vated insu­lar­ity, hypocrisy and obse­quious­ness, cor­rup­tion and betrayal, all under the cover of pro­to­cols that pro­claim pro­fes­sional and com­mu­ni­tar­ian best behav­iors, of course.

In short, if we ever had a poetic era both more afraid of and in need of satire, this is it, I’d say. And you? What do you think of the situation?

JB: I think the lit­er­ary scene, as well as the aca­d­e­mic scene in gen­eral, which poetry has more or less become sub­servient to, is ripe for the pluck­ing. It reeks of self-​importance, pom­pos­ity, and inse­cu­rity. If anyone dare use humor to expose this, then that person risks bitter per­sonal attack, destroy­ing his or her career, losing oppor­tu­ni­ties for read­ings, grants, pub­li­ca­tion, etc. It’s much easier—and safer—to make fun of George Bush, or Brit­ney Spears, or even Mother Teresa, than, say, Dana Gioia. (By the way, I didn’t see him in Epi­grami­ti­tis.) And so the status quo is main­tained by the very weight and priv­i­leges–though they are meager–of the status quo. But tell me, who are some writ­ers who do use humor in poetry in what you con­sider sub­ver­sive ways? The poem “Glim­mer of Gold,” by Alek­san­dar Ris­tovic, trans­lated by Charles Simic, comes to mind. I love the way he goofs on poetry and kicks the reader in the head: “Nobody reads poetry any­more,/ so who the hell are you/ I see bent over this book?”

KJ: That’s the whole poem, I hope? I love it. Another loser bent over poetry! But no, I guess we’re of like minds on some of these insti­tu­tional fac­tors. Though maybe I’m not as pes­simistic on the chances for a satirist’s suc­cess–I’m still hoping my epi­grams might get me a Pulitzer, a Gertrude Stein Inno­v­a­tive Poetry Award, and a read­ing at Iowa before I retire to my house­boat to write haiku until the painful, bitter end.

JB: OK, great. But are you avoid­ing my ques­tion about what poets today are effec­tively employ­ing satire? Satire broadly con­ceived, let’s say.

KJ: Sorry… Yes, among recent or cur­rent US poets, I can think of quite a few, though almost always in the sense of satire more broadly con­ceived, as you say: satire, that is, that tends toward the more sus­tained and dif­fuse Menip­pean mode– more gen­er­ally directed at cul­tural mores, more civi­cally didac­tic, so to speak, in its impulses. That’s to say, there are lots of poets employ­ing satire for “polit­i­cal” aims, making great fun of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, for exam­ple, or the lower realms of mass, pop­u­lar cul­ture. The recent phe­nom­e­non of Flarf would be one exam­ple of the latter… Fred­er­ick Seidel, of course, likely our great­est civic satirist.

This fairly ubiq­ui­tous Menip­pean mode, then, would be dis­tin­guished (though the dis­tinc­tions can be tricky some­times) from the more barbed, focused, self-​deprecating, and per­son­ally caus­tic tra­di­tion, exem­pli­fied most famously by Mar­tial and Cat­ul­lus, and which is gen­er­ally aimed at spe­cific char­ac­ters and often con­veyed via the ven­er­a­ble, com­pact char­iot of the epi­gram–an address, as I’d said, held in high esteem in nearly all the great ages of lit­er­a­ture, where writ­ers have avidly exposed the foibles and cor­rup­tions of the lit­er­ary field–clar­i­fy­ing, in so doing, the man­i­fold ways the ide­ol­ogy of the broader status quo often struc­tures and fuels Lit­er­ary Cul­ture proper. But the satiric impulse in its unmedi­ated, tra­di­tional, Cat­ul­lian spirit–deri­sion, praise, or rebuke pro­jected directly upon the cul­tural arena itself–is rare to non-​existent in our period, and for rea­sons you inci­sively outlined.

Anyway, as far as recent poets who have taken the poetic sphere as target, three promi­nent ones stand out for me, very dif­fer­ent as they are: Ed Dorn (numer­ous pieces in Abhor­rences, for instance) and Ken­neth Koch (“Fresh Air,” among other works) would be two of them. Stephen Rode­fer, too, more recently…

But per­haps the august exam­ple is the often-​maligned Robert Bly, who in his Fifties, Six­ties, and Sev­en­ties jour­nals pulled no punches and bat­tered the feath­ers off puffed up poetry birds who deserved it. Bly’s mag­a­zine is prob­a­bly most remem­bered for bring­ing over poets from afar–and for good reason, since it changed every­thing, how­ever clunky many of the trans­la­tions may have been. Yet, that project’s most impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion may have been the prof­fer­ing of satire as healthy tonic for the smug poetic scene. Recently, Poetry mag­a­zine, of all places, had a pretty good sec­tion in its “Humor” issue, clearly inspired by Bly’s old roasts. This is encour­ag­ing. At least a few hun­dred bucks of the billion-​dollar wind­fall is get­ting well spent… Anyone else you are think­ing of?

JB: Here’s a state­ment of Bly’s that reflects his lit­er­ary fear­less­ness (iron­i­cally from an arti­cle decry­ing Bly’s “attack” men­tal­ity, in Martin Lammon’s “The End of the Age of Arrogance”):

. . . in the fifties the shade from Eliot and Pound and Tate and William Carlos Williams was a heavy shade. It was nec­es­sary to clear some ground, so there’d be a place for new pine trees to grow. That clear­ing is not being done now. The younger poets are not attack­ing Galway enough, or Merwin, or Wright, or Cree­ley, or Gins­berg. They’re a little slow in attack­ing me too. The women don’t attack Lev­er­tov or Rich. The younger poets are being nice boys and girls.

But I think we’ll see more satire as writ­ers feel a need to defend them­selves from the almost-​suffocating cli­mate of spam, pop-​up ads, blog blovi­a­tion, pod­casts, vid­casts, cell phones, and TVs talk­ing at you in the gro­cery store over the egg­plants and arti­chokes. Not to men­tion the ever expand­ing spread of proper pro­fes­sional man­ners, which suf­fuse the spec­trum now, of aes­thetic ten­den­cies. Or the ever-​creeping silent ten­ta­cles of the NSA, even… To para­phrase Orwell, walk qui­etly but carry a scathing sense of humor.

[Click here for part two of this interview.]