Doggerel for the Masses: A Post-Scandal BlazeVOX Booke

Doggerel for the Masses: A Post-Scandal BlazeVOX Booke Being an Experiment in Authorship made of forty-eight Sestets of Love in perfect iambic tetrameter somewhat satirical (accompanied by fifty-six footnotes) and an Ode of Despair, plus three Letter-Essays on Strange South American Poets, including an E-mail Essay on Poetic Economies of Scale These various pieces, initially published in journals by Craig Dworkin under the name of “Kent Johnson” (with exception of the tour de force Afterword, presented here for the first time), follow from his call, in the Introductory essay to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern UP, 2010): Signing a text that one hasn’t written will surely become less remarkable, and the next frontier of propriety will materialize when conceptual writing antagonizes the institutions of poetry by signing for others under texts that they have not written. As such this book represents both the latest, most advanced gesture of Conceptual authorial experiment, and a fatal send-up of the actual Mr. Johnson, perhaps the most contemptible figure in contemporary American letters. If poetry has, until now, been fifty years behind Art, it is now at least fifteen minutes ahead. —Vanessa Place Helen Vendler recently referred (letting off not a little pent-up steam) to the “Mickey-Mouse-Ears avant-gardism of U.S. Conceptual Poetry.” Well, here’s a riposte to that, Dame Helen: Because Craig Dworkin’s Doggerel for the Masses (“by” Kent Johnson!) wears the golden helmet of Achilles, whose antennae listening-mechanisms shoot into the heavens beyond Pluto. Hold onto your Hats, Boys and Girls; it’s going to be a wild ride! —Kenneth Goldsmith