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kent johnson / john tipton
Friday April 9 at 3030
A Discrete Series event
Jesse Seldess, in introducing Kent Johnson, remarks obliquely on the controversy surrounding Doubled Flowering; his take involves comparing it to Anna Deavre Smith's Fires In The Mirror, he describes the way that performance/project uses personae as a device to enhance "empathic capacity"
Johnson's first two poems are anti-war poems, one ("Baghdad") which appeared in Poets Against the War, and one ("Falluja Exceeds Its Object") which appears (with a slightly different title) in Brian Kim Stefans' Circulars ("Poets, Artists, and Critics Respond to U.S. Global Policy"). Both strike me as sincere expressions of anger and feelings of helplessness. I'm reminded that Johnson has written a defense of didactic anti-war poetry. No sign in Johnson's delivery of any sort of postmodern game-playing; this makes me think that the "Hiroshima survivor" element in the Yasusada story is indeed a sincere attempt to imagine oneself as victim.
His pronunciation of the Middle Eastern names in "Falluja" and the Middle English terms in a later poem is, to my ear, impeccable, which again bespeaks a level of sincerity—he does not strike me, in person, as someone who is making fun of "translation culture."
He cites a chance discovery of David Shapiro's Poems For Deal (in Poetry) as being the experience which "turned him on to poetry"
His final poem is a self-described "School of Quietude" poem about going out with his two sons to watch a meteor shower; again its overall tone is one of great sincerity. Perhaps this is all a postmodern pose but if so he is a phenomenal actor: although his intro to the poem is somewhat self-effacing his reading of it contains no hint of irony
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John Tipton's poems are grounded in syntactical play
"it waking wounds the eye blue"
"the mirror shaving loses hold this man"
mathematicians, scientists, and linguists are figures that pass through these poems: I caught references to Markov, Claude Shannon, Whorf ("and his fictive Eskimo")
a section of the reading is dedicated to his translations of Sophocles' Axis
"I've taken liberties with these choral passages ... it's good if they sound a little crazy."
He's been working on sonnets for the past 18 mos. / 2 years
His final poem, in five parts, deals with patterns: "trees, rings, arrows, strings and a coda"—reminiscent of Tyler Volk's Metapatterns
this poem seems to be digesting the language of fractals, grammar, formal logic, and music |
