Photo, Kent Johnson, left, with friends Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith. (Photo by Frank, bartender.) Kent Johnson has edited Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof, 1998), as well as Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English, forthcoming from Combo Books. He has also translated (with Alexandra Papaditsas) The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum, 2003) and (with Forrest Gander) Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (California UP, 2002), which was a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation selection. A second book of Saenz's work, The Night, is forthcoming. He teaches at Highland Community College and was named the State of Illinois Teacher of the Year for 2004 by the Illinois Community College Trustees Association. Buy his books here. See some poems here, here, here and here. See some critcal work here, and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I can’t remember my “First Poem,” but there are early ones that stick out. I remember being called on in 6th grade English class, in the Uruguayan-American School, to read “The Road Not Taken” out loud. I must have done it with some panache because the teacher told everyone to pay close attention to me and had me go to the front of the class to read it again. I remember looking up at the end, right at Estela Mendy, on whom I had a huge, unrequited crush, and intoning into her eyes: “…and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference,” and getting a rush of excited feeling in my head, chest, and pubescent testicles. That experience was no doubt a formative one, as I began to read Frost and memorize some of the shorter poems. Then, some years later, when a junior at Waterville High School in Maine, I was introduced to Emily Dickinson, whose “Safe in their alabaster chambers” came as something of a shock out of the sky, and to the minor poet Stephen Crane, who my teacher clearly thought was major, and whose little “A Man Said to the Universe” seemed to say something big at the time. But my most important inspiration, I know, was stumbling upon an old, late-1960’s issue of Poetry in the Pewaukee High library my senior year. Therein I found Poems from Deal by the 18 year old David Shapiro. That poetry could be so utterly weird, well, I’d never suspected it could. And that hooked me. Now I correspond with David Shapiro. Isn’t it something how things work? 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Oh, I don’t know if there’s anything all that surprising. I’m interested in mushrooms—I’m not an expert like Cage was, but I know something about it. I enjoy reading mycology books, and I go out foraging, especially during morel season, when I log many hours in the woods. I think mushrooms are beautiful creatures and that they exist at the very core of the universe. I also follow the Chicago Cubs in the Tribune sports pages each day. And I have been an avid fly fisher for many years, and I enjoy reading the sport’s very rich literature. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Like many poets, I apply my dilettantish knowledge of philosophy to my writing whenever I think I can sound like I know what I’m talking about. Wittgenstein lends himself to this kind of poaching quite nicely, which is no doubt why he is so popular among contemporary poets, few of whom, if any, probably have the foggiest notion what he is talking about. Probably Wittgenstein himself didn’t either, if you read the biographies…which doesn’t mean he wasn’t a great philosopher, of course! I’m intrigued by phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s stuff, particularly. Buddhist philosophy has had an impact on me, also: Nagarjuna, who covered just about all the major themes of deconstruction, for example, nearly two thousand years before the case, and Dogen, one of the wildest and most thrilling writers in the history of humankind. I urge people to track down a copy of the old North Point Press Moon in a Dewdrop, the largest gathering of his writings in English translation! Again, I often have no clear idea what these writers are saying, but I don’t feel that should hold me back as a reader! 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Well, I just mentioned Dogen, the most magnificent mystical poet of all time, hands down. With Forrest Gander, I’ve been translating the great Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz, and he is certainly one of my favorites—one of the truly strange figures of 20th century poetry. I love Vallejo and Pessoa, saints of language, spelunkers of the multi-caverned self… But where does one stop? I could happily go on for quite some time, I think. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Yes, I read a lot of poetry. But I’ll confess: There is so much of it being written now, so many talented younger poets working within a similar “field of affect,” that all I find I can do, sometimes, is browse and lightly graze… With magazines, for example, you know where I often start? The Contributors’ Notes! I look for details that intrigue me, aware, always, that such details may be wholly or partly fictional, and then I might take a look at a poem by that poet. I suppose that may be in the category of “too much information,” but there you have it. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Ulysses, though I’ve read lots of excerpts and lots about it. That is probably in the category of too much information, too. Paradise Lost, as well. I’ve only read maybe half of Shakespeare, at most. I could go on. Proust… I do intend to make it all the way through Shakespeare (or The Earl of Oxford, as it were), and I plan to purchase Lydia Davis’s new translation of Proust. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Ulysses. Why? Oh, who knows. After Joyce’s letters to Nora, maybe I kind of feel like it couldn’t get any better. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I wouldn’t. I’d want your seven year old to explain the matter to me. I have no idea what a poem is. The fact that poetry keeps getting written suggests that no one else really does, either, when you think about it. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Well, in the footsteps of one of our leading Citizen-Poets, what I’d most like to do right now is move to Mexico and stop writing for something like thirty years… But really, there is nothing much grandiose by way of Roles, I’d say, much as we’d all like to think Shelley had it right. I think we all do what we can with what we’re given, if you’ll forgive the banality, and we write our consciences the best ways we’re able. Being a poet doesn’t mean in any way that one is a more important citizen with more important things to say than other kinds of citizens—it just means that one is given to say certain things at certain unusual angles of entry into the vox populi. Now yes, at particular conjunctures, the arc of such language might have some significant effects on the larger body politic, but that’s a matter over which the poet has little control—which is not to say the poet shouldn’t have her or his antennae up and ready to sense when such conjunctures come into alignment. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**kid (Patchen, hurrah!) Chiseled**Auden (face and corpus) I**Claudius (favorite TV show ever) Of**Being (was that Heidegger or Sartre?) Form**Emptiness (Buddhism, blah, blah) 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Most significantly in my writing’s constant and desperate desire to make readers imagine me as svelte, graceful, and stunningly attractive! Seriously, I suppose there never is a separation, when you think about it. Texts exist only when they have a mind, and thus a body, to inhabit. Isn’t that right?