Just a note to say that I have four poems in the new issue of Fence (printed at the editor’s behest under one title as a single poem in four sec­tions, although they’re four sep­a­rate poems in my man­u­script & in my mind). Fence doesn’t post its con­tents online, so I hope you will track down a copy & sit back with a root beer float or a tor­tilla or some oxy­con­tin & give your­self over to reams of good poems & stuff—other con­trib­u­tors include Carl Phillips, Anselm Berri­gan, Loren Good­man, Rodrigo Toscano, Alyssa Wolf, Tomaz Sala­mun, & Tim­o­thy Donnelly.

The only poem here that isn’t out­right gawd-awful is Tomaž Šalamun’s, largely because it begins, “Yep. There was a wall.” The others trip over one another en route to piety.

[Part one of this con­ver­sa­tion is here; part two is here.]

John Bradley: Robert Pinsky’s “Dissed in Verse: The Art of the Poetic Insult,” recently pub­lished in Slate, offers a short but infor­ma­tive his­tory of the “insult” poem. He includes this mar­velous exam­ple, from Poems from the Greek Anthol­ogy, trans­lated by Dudley Fitts, sup­pos­edly writ­ten by the Emperor Trajan:

Lift sun­ward your con­sid­er­able nose,
Fling wide the’abyss of your mouth,
And you’ll make a pre­sentable sun-​dial for all who pass by.

I was sur­prised to find Edward Lear, of all people, boldly mock­ing him­self, and how T.S. Eliot, trying to pay homage to Lear by mock­ing Eliot, utterly lacks the verve and nerve of Lear. But I wonder why Pinsky doesn’t include any con­tem­po­rary “diss­ing.” He must not have read Epigramititis.

Kent John­son: I was glad to see the essay. He did give some good war-​horse exam­ples. But my ques­tion to Pinsky is, “So what’s hap­pened to in-your-face, poet to poet satire?” He never men­tions that it’s vir­tu­ally non-​existent on the scene today.

[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…