Kent Johnson is editor, with Craig Paulenich, of Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala, 1991) and of Third Wave: the New Russian Poetry (U of Michigan, 1992). In 1980 and 1983, during the Sandinista revolution, he worked in the Nicaraguan countryside for many months teaching basic literacy and adult education. From this experience he translated A Nation of Poets (West End Press, 1985), the most representative translation in English from the famous working class Talleres de Poesia of Nicaragua. He 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, (Combo Books, 2005). He has also translated (with Alexandra Papaditsas) The Miseries of Poetry: Traductions from the Greek (Skanky Possum, 2003; rept. Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry, UK, 2005) 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 from Princeton UP. Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets (BlazeVox Books) was published in 2006. Recipient of a 2004 NEA Literature Fellowship, 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.
Jacket 2 - the Yasusada letters
Jacket 4 - Forrest Gander reviews Yasusada
‘No one has yet claimed to have written the book, despite suspicions that the Yasusada materials were generated by Kent Johnson — a professor at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois, and the self-proclaimed literary executor of Yasusada's main "translator" (whose reality is also dubious)’.
Jacket 5 - On Robert M. Larsen, Araki Yasusada, and The Will to Power
Jacket 5 - Kent Johnson - letter to American Book Review
Jacket 5 - Eliot Weinberger - Can I Get a Witness?
Jacket 8 - Jaime Saenz - from Immanent Visitor - translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander
Jacket 9 - seven early letters of Araki Yasusada by Tosa Motokiyu
Jacket 10 - Henry Gould in conversation with Kent Johnson
Jacket 15 - C.D.Wright in conversation with Kent Johnson
Jacket 15 - Dale Smith in conversation with Kent Johnson
Jacket 15 - Jack Kimball and Kent Johnson - from: Postcards from the Vichy
Jacket 16 - Kent Johnson - Photograph of Emily Dickinson - for John Wieners
Jacket 16 - Eliot Weinberger in conversation with Kent Johnson
Jacket 21 - Rachel Loden in conversation with Kent Johnson
Jacket 22 - Stephen Burt: Without Evidence (remarks on reading contemporary poetry and on reading about it)
Paratext as poetic material (Kent Johnson). Not ‘How do we get beyond the name of the poet, the name of the press, the context of discovery, to the actual poem?’ but ‘How can we know if and when we have ever done so?’
Jacket 23 - Kent Johnson - Poem Upon a Typo Found in an Interview of Kenneth Koch, Conducted by David Shapiro
Jacket 25 - Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson - Jaime Saenz - Some Days in the Life of The Night: Notes from Bolivia, June 20-30, 2004
Jacket 25 - Kent Johnson: Prosody and the Outside: Some Notes on Rakosi and Stevens
Jacket 25 - Tony Tost reviews The Miseries of Poetry by Papaditsas and Johnson
Jacket 26 - poem: ‘Even though he’s known as a Language poet, I want to write like Norman Fischer’
Jacket 26 - interviews poet Ben Lerner
Jacket 28 - poem: I Remember Once, Years Ago
The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/bio/kent.html