"If, as it has been claimed, the satirist is a left-handed writer,
the analogy seems made for Kent Johnson's inimitable, fearless and
much needed contribution - the one-in-ten, or more like
one-in-a-thousand corrective, antidote, ballast, counterpoint, to
the worst excesses and insincerities of western poetry's decadence
and pomposity. In Nuper Verba - the Latin title is apposite - he
takes aim at poetry's postures of antagonism, even as it drains the
last best wine and lounges on a mouldering couch of bursaries.
Truth-sayer or holy fool, insider's outsider or witnessing spirit,
the moral force of Johnson's project, as well as its sublime
humour, shines like so many corroding rays, here reaching moments
of unanticipated lyrical brightness. He's never been funnier or
more strangely moving. Refusing consensus and mentioning the
unmentionable remains the true poet's calling, and Johnson's poetry
reminds us of this, with the beautiful sobering chill of genuine
veracity." -Sam Riviere "The writings of Kent Johnson over the
years have given us an outsized sense of disquiet and mockery, as
he revives and transforms the ancient art of satire, bringing it
laughing and raging into a new century and millennium. The great
pleasure in Nuper Verba is, then, the comic fury he gives to poems
that aim at the literary present, while aware of a range of poets
and literary pretenders from ancient Rome to contemporary USAmerica
and elsewhere. The words and thoughts that Johnson gives to Horace
in "translation" are directed simultaneously and sometimes
outrageously to the poets and poetry wars of our time. An
adjustment well worth making." -Jerome Rothenberg "Read super-duper
Kent Johnson's Nuper Verba for its heroic troubles and foibles, its
fabulist fables. Or for the pleasure of its deft ear. Or because
it's hard to tell its lies from truths, which is unnerving - poetry
doing its job. Read Nuper Verba for its fury tempered by love, its
gloom by wit, its grief by mirth, its erudite suavity by a
vulnerability both shy and sly. Read it for its crudeness tempered
by the delicacy of a seven-foot moose outside Perry's Nut House,
and for its wickedness, tenderness, beauty without warning." -
Billie Chernicoff "Read super-duper Kent Johnson's Nuper Verba for
its heroic troubles and foibles, its fabulist fables. Or for the
pleasure of its deft ear. Or because it's hard to tell its lies
from truths, which is unnerving - poetry doing its job. Read Nuper
Verba for its fury tempered by love, its gloom by wit, its grief by
mirth, its erudite suavity by a vulnerability both shy and sly.
Read it for its crudeness tempered by the delicacy of a seven-foot
moose outside Perry's Nut House, and for its wickedness,
tenderness, beauty without warning." -Billie Chernicoff "Using
in-jokes, old arguments and absurdities, Kent Johnson satirizes the
'ruthless kid-poets with their little cymbals and bells.' Yet
satire's bleak irreverence is also a kind of intimacy: we can't
mock what we don't know well. More earnestly, Nuper Verba urges us
to 'make lasting song of our loss, /That it may rise above the
shallow attentions of our clan.' Pay attention, then, to these
poems. Say poetry is a haunted mansion or a freakish funhouse.
There, a hall of mirrors ceases to reflect the tiresome egoism of
poetry culture and instead offers 'endless selves receding, tinier
and tinier, until' one can no longer see oneself. We knew we were
there, far back, but we were also gone. That, Johnson shows us, is
where poetry truly has the last word." -Elizabeth Robinson "Kent
Johnson is notorious for his mordant wit and tenacious satire,
turned, more often than not, on the contemporary poetry scene. In
the past, his ironic stance has been a massive, defensive engine
against the crass, the venal, the insufferably narcissistic. Now,
in Nuper Verba, wit and satire are subsumed, having become a given,
and a new horizon opens before us. What Yeats, translating Swift's
epitaph, calls 'savage indignation' is still there, but, especially
in the magnificent Horatian Odes, a passionate honesty and
vulnerability emerge to complement the intelligence of Johnson's
provocations. There has been nothing like them since Pound's
'Homage to Sextus Propertius'. This is a gorgeous, heartbreaking
book." -Norman Finkelstein "As a poet, I do and do not know why
anyone would take up the vocation today, especially when just being
human is considered by many to be despicable in itself. But I don't
know. When I read Kent's work, I want to believe in the authority
of poetry again. I know that it still exists, right here, with me
and others, outside of the bullshit, outside of the Poetry
Foundation, out of reach of all those so-called poet laureates out
there, outside of the institutions vying for power, outside of the
popular poets dying for even more attention, leaving their cheap
verses all over the internet like trending memes. The thought that
poetry might not exist without all of these contentions and
contradictions, though, really troubles my sleep. But then this
makes me think I know what it is that Kent's work does; it
acknowledges a mystery. Maybe the only mystery: that Poetry could
be writing all of us into existence, orchestrating this whole realm
with authority built on ephemerality and balance, like some
invisible but compassionate network of Chaos. Again, I don't know.
Read Nuper Verba because you don't really have a choice." -Carlos
Lara "In the central sequence of Nuper Verba, fifteen 'Horatian
Odes,' satirist, analyst, and sometimes starter of poetry wars Kent
Johnson returns to one of the origins of Western lyric in lines by
turn barbed, laugh-out-loud, and delicately touching. Transformed
('transcreated' or 'translucinated' in Johnson's own terms) from
their Latin originals and prior English translations, these poems
often express 'in my last days' the opposite of the satirist's
desire: 'I want to be dulcis and not acidus, believe me.' For all
their self-reflexive layering, their comic allusiveness, their
unremitting takedowns of poetic careerism meeting Horace's own
self-ironizing aspirations to poetic immortality, these are also
autobiographical poems about Johnson's own life, career, and
political and intellectual commitments. Tutelary spirits like
Edward Dorn-perhaps the chemo-ridden satirist of Chemo Sabe-appear
in Johnson's ode to satyr-ists, as irony and energetic vitriol is
clamped and silenced in the Scold's Bridle: 'stammer, satire, your
pitiful last...' And yet the familiar impulse remains: 'Yes, tell
me I am among the / Poets'-that itch, somewhere between impulse and
deep conviction against all the odds, that runs from Horace to the
Williams of 'The Desert Music' to 'Kentuvius Maximus in his / Big
house.' Here 'my heart belongs to ... a torn, Janus-faced god' both
of scorching satire and lyric poignancy, of public vituperation and
private loss in 'this arbor's darkening shade'." -Alan Golding
"Detained in his wound, everything becomes observable. The aching
cave forever open. He blesses us in the evenings and frightens us
in the mornings. No bridges to burn. He is the warning that is
spoken of." -MTC Cronin
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