Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets

by Kent Johnson

118 Living American Poets by Kent Johnson

268 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2007

About the author

Kent Johnson (born 1955) is an American poet, translator, critic, and anthologist. His work, much of it meta-fictional and/or satirical in approach, has provoked a notable measure of controversy and debate within English-language poetry circles.

Reviews

[Daniel f Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extreme poetry has always been all about overwhelming the senses, either through a chaotic, frenzied style such as flarf, the more spacious sonic assaults by artier poets like Silliman and Bernstein, of in Johnson 's case, creating waves of drone and feedback in a face-melting display of the slowest, scariest poetry you'll ever read. For the last decade, Kent Johnson has been taking the doom side of poetry so far from those three legendary chords from Walt Whitman’s immortal "Leaves of Grass", it feels like a completely separate dimension, as if you expect to slip into a black hole for eternity. The blackest of the black, the bleakest of the bleak, Johnson combine high art with brutal power like no other, composing poems that dares readers to sit through it all, locking them into sludgy grooves so slow, so hypnotic, it will either have them repulsed, enthralled, or better yet, both. It's easy to shrug off Kent Johnson as nothing but pure, arbitrary noise, but the more you delve into his work, the more you begin to sense a structure to the poems that's as lethargic as it is dreary. It's mood music for the worst of moods.