[Part one of this con­ver­sa­tion is here.]

John Bradley: Now, I wonder if you could talk more about my pre­vi­ous point, if you don’t mind going back to it: that polit­i­cal fig­ures are more deserv­ing of satire. They run for public office and know­ingly enter the tor­nado zone of public wrath. Writ­ers, how­ever, don’t deserve such scorn as they are not really public fig­ures. And their book photos should be off limits. Crit­i­cize the writ­ing or lit­er­ary move­ments, but not how a writer appears. That’s too easy and per­haps cruel. And don’t epi­grams about poets, epi­grams that name par­tic­u­lar poets, rein­force in some way the figure of Authorship?

Kent John­son: Only in the sense, I’d say, that words like “queer” or “nigger” rein­force big­otry when retaken and wielded openly in the faces of the bigoted… As Bakhtin argues (rather con­trary, actu­ally, to Adorno’s deifi­ca­tion of the demand­ing, inno­v­a­tive Mod­ernist artist), the myth of the heroic indi­vid­ual author is fos­tered by the dom­i­nant cul­ture as part of its sys­temic drive to manip­u­late, con­trol, and appro­pri­ate sub­ject posi­tions. We have to rec­og­nize the dynamic and throw it back with a smirk if we’re going to find a way out of the morass. Honest satire of our sit­u­a­tion is one of the Sta­tions of the Cross on the way, I’d say. But it needs to go beyond indi­vid­ual self-​flagellation and become a col­lec­tive activ­ity: a well-​wrought col­lec­tive pen­i­tence. Of course, this is the last thing uphold­ers of the Author Func­tion (Main­stream and Avant-​garde alike) wish to countenance.

But on the ear­lier point: Actu­ally, I do think that polit­i­cal fig­ures are more deserv­ing of satire. They are, after all, much more sig­nif­i­cant to the social order than poets are. Poets are noth­ing, rel­a­tively speak­ing, so it’s per­fectly nat­ural there would be an imbal­ance in the amount of atten­tion the two pro­fes­sions receive. But look­ing at things from the per­spec­tive of the tiny poetic sub­cul­ture, yes, Author­ship is some­thing not to be touched. The sacred cow. It’s the one fancy suit we’re given by the Cul­ture Indus­try and its ide­ol­ogy–and Authors, like those old Vet­er­ans of For­eign Wars, do every­thing they can to weigh it down with medals. We need to shed the suit, I’ve been saying for some time; we need to start exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent kinds of anti-​gravity rai­ment. You’ve done this in enig­matic ways in War on Words: The John Bradley/Tomaz Sala­mun Con­fuse­ment (BlazeVOX), prob­a­bly the most orig­i­nal book of poetry, I’d argue, since George Bush took office.

JB: Maybe George Bush is a secret lit­er­ary influ­ence on me? But you had men­tioned Flarf. I’ve heard a little bit about it. It’s a kind of satire? Don’t they ques­tion the con­cept of lit­er­ary ownership?

KJ: Well, def­i­n­i­tions of Flarf are con­tested. Here’s my some­what unpop­u­lar one: Flarf is a fash­ion­able, cliquish group­ing of very smart, very gifted younger writ­ers who use Google search hits to gen­er­ate var­i­ous mod­u­la­tions of appro­pria­tive col­lage. Their most common prac­tice is to poach “une­d­u­cated” dis­course from chat rooms, per­sonal web pages, and such (with­out the orig­i­nal writ­ers’ knowl­edge, of course) and patch together what some take to be “funny” poems and plays. It’s all a bit sopho­moric, a kind of urbane put-​down of (as they say in grad school) the sub­al­tern. And all of it, it bears empha­siz­ing, ends up in ser­vice of per­fectly con­ser­v­a­tive dress codes of Autho­r­ial custom.

These poets rather grandiosely see their aes­thetic as–it’s their pre­ferred Descrip­tion–a Neo-​Dada expression… as if such expres­sion had any useful func­tion in a cul­ture where a “Neo-​Dada” sim­u­lacral fog has become the greater part of the ideational air we breathe.

Well, there is satire and then there is satire. As Peter Schjel­dahl recently put it, in a review of the big Dada exhibit at the MOMA, “What young self-​styled bohemian of the past ninety years hasn’t got at least briefly high on Dada?” The sad thing is that most of these Flarf hip­sters who are high on it are now in, or approach­ing, middle age… What was that SNL sketch of the pop singer who would shake his rear end and yell, “Look at my butt!”? Well, Flarf is more or less like that: a “Look at my icon­o­clas­tic hip­ness!” shak­ing of the Author booty. Well, a glow­ing arti­cle in The Believer mag­a­zine no doubt awaits.*

But maybe they’ll find a way of turn­ing things around–becom­ing “inap­pro­pri­ate,” as they like to put it, in more inter­est­ing and orig­i­nal ways.

JB: Of course, the Flarfi­ans might respond that Epi­grami­ti­tis is also a “shak­ing of Author booty.” And there is the name “Kent John­son” on the cover.

KJ: Indeed. But per­haps I’ve in part earned, as you have in War on Words, the right to claim—especially on the cover of a book like this—my “own name” as a some­what iron­i­cally charged sign? I mean, I think I’m jus­ti­fied in saying that I do, in a great por­tion of my work, sat­i­rize myself in rather imme­di­ate, self-​deflating ways—my own hypocrisies and com­plic­i­ties get laid on the table. So any moral­is­tic pre­sump­tion that might slip through does get qual­i­fied and under­cut, to say the least. I’m here, grov­el­ing and grap­pling in the mud. The middle-​aged Flarf kids, how­ever, sit there grandly, paring their fin­ger­nails, smugly smirk­ing over their little collages.

JB: Let’s talk about some of the clas­sic poet satirists. Who, in par­tic­u­lar, has caused you to laugh out loud? And per­haps made you shake your head at the nerve of that cheeky so-and-so. Could you quote us some spe­cific lines and per­haps look at a poem or two? I sus­pect Cat­ul­lus is one of those naughty boys who helped pave the way for Epi­grami­ti­tis. What’s the appeal of these satir­i­cal poems for you? Why haven’t these poems lost their sting over the centuries?

KJ: Oh, gosh. Well, yes, Cat­ul­lus is the great­est. But Hip­ponax, cen­turies ear­lier, whom the late Alexan­dra Papa­dit­sas and I tra­duce in The Mis­eries of Poetry: Tra­duc­tions from the Greek, among other witty poets of long ago, is great too. And the satires of Juve­nal and Horace, the gentle Ben Jonson, early Donne, Wilmot, and Pope. They are wickedly funny and deeply tragic, these folks, and it’s the uncom­fort­able mix­ture of the two poles, I sup­pose, that makes us laugh. That’s a big part of great satire, I think: the tragi­comic honed into a lovely lance of cleans­ing vit­riol. The lance is immor­tal. Even the young Marx had to grant it flew largely free of the forces of his­tor­i­cal materialism.

There’s some­thing impor­tant here, though, that shouldn’t be left out. Satire, when it takes epi­gram­matic form, how­ever cut­ting, is always gener­i­cally framed. As such, pre­sented at the remove of so-​called art, the sting is medi­ated by an unstated tip of the hat toward its target–a coded form of trib­ute: I mean, it’s clear–or should be–when satire takes poetic form, that the sub­ject of deri­sion or praise is in no way entirely who the epi­gram says he or she is. It’s a slice, an aes­thet­i­cal shot, chival­rously prof­fered in the put-‘em-up tra­di­tion. And in this sense, the mature, ideal recip­i­ent is the poet who smiles, even if the smile is forced, and whose response is to answer epi­gram­mat­i­cally in turn.

More of such spirit is what would be healthy for our poetry, I think, and it would likely help pull us out of our delu­sional, pompous rut…and prob­a­bly get us a few more read­ers, too: Poets prodi­giously and hap­pily roast­ing one another. Why not? What’s the fear and where does it come from? The task of poetry is to remain free, and we can’t remain free unless we have the common sense to ridicule our­selves with­out pity.

JB: Well, you’ve been a target your­self. Recently on the collectively-​authored “Main­stream Poetry” blog (curated, curi­ously, by Mike Magee, who pub­lished the second Yasu­sada col­lec­tion, Also With My Throat, I Shall Swal­low Ten Thou­sand Swords, with his Combo Books) there was a long poem enti­tled “Kent John­son Gets Life in Prison,” and it’s full of mock­ery and con­tempt for your per­sona. What did you think of that? What does it feel like to be the sub­ject of satire?

KJ: Actu­ally, yes, I’d for­got­ten about that piece. There have been a few other ones, too. I was hon­ored by it, to tell the truth. It’s pretty good and quite funny. By utter coin­ci­dence, I was just arrested for tres­pass­ing while hunt­ing for morels. This vio­lates my pro­ba­tion for the same offense last spring. Totally unin­ten­tional, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a min­i­mum, auto­matic one-​month jail term, unless the charges get dropped. So soon I may be writ­ing The Prison Epi­grams. What poet can claim this honor?

JB: Seriously?

KJ: Yep. All for mushrooms.

[Click here for the rest of this con­ver­sa­tion.]

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*Note: In fact, some months after this con­ver­sa­tion was sub­mit­ted to Plantarchy, a glow­ing arti­cle about Flarf did appear in The Believer