Luke Johnson's Blog

A recording of today's draft, Tom Gets Diagnosed.

Been wrestling with this poem for two days and it's still broken. But, I need to move on. So here's Tom in Copenhagen, for a day.

*plish*

Another Oklahoma/Tom Finney draft for December. This one, probably a little too heavy on voice, but it gave me reason to stick with the post a draft/record a draft pattern. Here's a link to the recording, for a day-or-so. You can even hear the coonhound vocalizing distress in the background, because the world and snow.

Naming Idabel

Not quite sure about today's draft, but here it is, for a day or so. Another Tom Finney poem.

*plish*

My middle name is Thomas, after my grandfather Tom Finney (mother's father), who I never met as he died from ALS in '78. This is the recording of a conversation between him, LBJ, and Bobby Kennedy, in which LBJ asks my grandfather to go to Mississippi after the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. It's the first time I've ever heard Tom Finney's voice.

The internet is remarkable sometimes.

In the spirit of the recording, and of the unfinished-ness of today's poem, I thought I'd just post a recording, to disappear in the not-too-distant future. Embedding audio has proved too difficult, can listen to the poem here.

Tom Talks to the President

Hangman


Snow falls so hard the neighbors’ windows seem
To stare at me through viscid cataracts,
And so I feel like I’m watched but unseen.
She’s gone. The strokes took her away piecemeal:
Her reasoning failed, her left side lost all feeling,
But on the good days she’d ask where I was.
“Right here,” I’d say. That answer didn't suit her,
So I’d ask her where I was: “Hunting quail,”
She’d say, or “playing poker,” things I did
Before we married. Sometimes she’d mistake me
For suitors I’d contended with in school,
Or she’d hallucinate events from childhood:
A grassfire down the street, the shell-shocked soldier
Who swept the floor each night in Dunstan’s Drugs,
Leeches she scraped barehanded from her shins
After she’d skinny-dipped in Francis Branch.
So quickly she regressed I thought of dolls
One twists apart to find another doll,
Another, and another, until what’s left
Is nothing, the last piece lost some years ago.
Each day, though, I remain at my routine:
The morning paper’s crossword, cups of coffee,
Then errands, supper, reading, and to bed.
But with this snow, the streets have disappeared.
It seems too soon for snow. I set out bowls
Of candy last night, like she always did,
But was disturbed when children rang the bell.
Swaddled in sheets, baring plastic fangs,
Laden with besoms, they cried trick or treat
As if the night were some uproarious joke.
It started snowing harder, and they vanished.
My neighbors turned their porch lights out, but still,
Teenagers from the run-down neighborhood
Just blocks from here kept knocking at the doors.
They wore jeans, hooded sweatshirts, and they stared
Through me unless I asked, “Where are your costumes?”
One of them always said: “These are our costumes.”
This morning, thumbing to the crossword puzzle,
I read that in that neighborhood, a man
Fashioned a noose from an extension cord
Then climbed up in a tree in his front yard
And hanged himself. The corpse remained for days.
The neighbors thought it was a decoration,
Bound straw or newsprint dressed to scare the kids.
Without her, I've not finished many crosswords.
She’d putter in the kitchen while I called
For answers to the clues I couldn't get:
Eight letters, for example, river islands;
Or seven letters, pardon; or nine letters,
ends with an n, a system of ID.
And thus, in turn, we’d fill the empty spaces,
Which is what pleased me, grids laid down like maps,
Lone letters as mysterious as runes,
Until each word or phrase we had to link
With ordinary human life was formed:
Sandbars or amnesty or Bertillon.
But I've been thinking of that children’s game
Which takes two players. One knows the solution,
Draws lines for every letter of the phrase,
And then a bare-boned scaffold and a rope.
The other chooses letters that might fill
The blanks; however, with the first wrong choice
A circle’s drawn below the rope, the next
Wrong choice, a line, and then some more lines until
A human figure hangs, just as some nights
Like this, while snow erases all the streets,
A spindling dark form dangles from a branch—
A lower case  l  scratched inside a square,
Hinting at words like life or loan or loss.
No. It’s an effigy in casual clothes
And at each gust, it kicks. What’s it made of?
Old straw bound up with twine, the Times, the wind?





-from Philip Stephens’ “The Determined Days” (Sewanee Wrtiers’ Series / Overlook Press, 2000) 

See that worried look on Boone's face? It's because I'm moving, having recently accepted a teaching job at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia (!), and while we're both excited about this cross-country adventure, he's nervous there won't be room for him in the backseat with all these burdensome poetry books of mine; so I'm going to try and get some off my hands. If you don't have a copy of my collection After the Ark , now's your chance as they'll be only $12 bucks with no shipping. Say the word and I'll scribble my name on there, too. Give Boone some extra room in the backseat.
Thanks for the indulgence, folks. We now return to our regular scheduled programming.

On writing: “we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented. . . . i feel i am blundering in concepts too fine for me.”

"The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson" in The New York Times

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In Ammons’s humanist revision, we must provide our own robes and crowns, conferring sanctity on ourselves without the help of divine grace.   The hymn’s shining river becomes the momentarily cooled glass within whose chinks and bubbles we conduct our lives.  In a typescript of the poem, Ammons crossed out the word “robe” and substituted “tam,” a playfully eccentric touch that tempers the Biblical solemnity of the original line.  As much as he loved the dignity and eloquence of the old hymns, Ammons often felt the need to set their language against other tones, some of them downright irreverent.  At times a jaunty tam suited him better than a pious crown. 

"Archie Ammons and the Poetry of Hymns" at the Best American Poetry Blog

**********

Samuel Johnson said, “It is certain that any wild wish or vain imagination never takes such firm possession of the mind, as when it is found empty and unoccupied.” He was speaking of melancholy, and how idleness and solitude feed it, undeniably and uncontrollably feed it. We all know this is true, and yet it is equally true that such a state will fund creativity; as artists we understand the vital necessity of wasting time, of loafing and doing nothing, and I was wondering what it is that causes the free and idle mind to go one way or the other—into obsessive melancholy or into creative fervor. What tips the scales, so to speak?

-Mary Ruefle's "Lectures I Will Never Give" at The Rumpus


**********

It was a sign, almost one hundred years ago, of the book beginning to achieve what most technology will never accomplish—the ability to disappear. Walk into the reading room of the New York Public Library and what do you see? Laptops. Books, like the tables and chairs, have receded into the backdrop of human life. This has nothing to do with the assertion that the book is counter-technology, but that the book is a technology so pervasive, so frequently iterated and innovated upon, so worn and polished by centuries of human contact, that it reaches the status of Nature.

"On the Business of Literature" from VQR

**********

“The Next Big Thing” is a blog hop in which authors around the world share what they’re working on by responding to ten questions. I've been invited by my friend and former professor Thorpe Moeckel, whose Next Big Thing post can be found here. Aside from being an excellent writer, Thorpe lives and works a beautiful homestead in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia: Arcadia Farm. I dare you to watch that slideshow and not want to be best friends with the Moeckels.

What is your working title of your book?

My manuscript-in-progress is called Sanctuary, Sanctuary, which comes from the book's epigraph, the final stanza of A.R. Ammons' poem "Triphammer Bridge":
sanctuary, sanctuary, I say it over and over and the
word’s sound is the one place to dwell: that’s it, just
the sound, and the imagination of the sound—a place.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
For the past two years, I've been living poem-to-poem: writing mostly about the places in which individuals look for peace. I grew up in churches, and imagine that most folks tasked with describing "sanctuary" would immediately call forth the cathedral. The natural equivalent of the church seems to me the forest. You trade stained-glass for the canopy: it's  all about light and darkness and the way our lives move through each. Both environments lend themselves to grand metaphors. It is my hope that these poems explore the distance between the reverent spaces, between the wild and the holy.
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I think those MotionPoems are incredible. I would choose MotionPoems to play all of the characters in a movie rendition of the collection. Except for Mark Strand. Clint Eastwood would play Mark Strand.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

It starts with the line "God isn't what I'm looking for" and ends with the line "these wings could be alive." (Hat-tip to Keith Montesano for this method of manuscript-measuring)
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

This might be putting the cart before the horse. I'm very proud of the places these individual poems have been published, but have only just started sending out the manuscript as a whole. Currently, it's been exclusively published by the fine folks at the FedEx Office in Ballard. 
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

More or less, these are the poems I've written since moving to Seattle in June of 2010. The manuscript came together as a larger entity/Word document in December 2012. 
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

The last book that really destroyed me was David Ferry's Bewilderment. If my book is a tenth as good as that book, I'd want it mentioned in my Wikipedia. There's a whole mess of young poets writing things that inspire me to work harder, that have me eager to see more of their poems. Some folks I've never met who are writing beautiful things: Tarfia Faizullah, Marcus Wicker, Richie Hofmann, Keetje Kuipers, Joshua Robbins, Chloe Honum, and on and on and on. To live in the Internet Age is to be overwhelmed by the extant talent.

I'm eager for my friends' books, and looking forward to those soon forthcoming, like Will Schutt's Westerly  and Ed Skoog's Rough Day, and those manuscripts that will surely soon be books, like Lisa Fay Coutley's Errata and Matthew Nienow's The Making Bone . 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I'd say it's the bastard love-child of the King James Bible and the movie Cool Hand Luke.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

There are at least three poems involving baseball. In one of them, I fabricate a Yogi Berra quote. Also present: a Puerto Rican wrecking ball, gunshots, bears, St. Paul's Cathedral, an elk skeleton,  the New River Gorge, a grope at the Safeway, break-ups-to-make-ups, row boats, and cold, delicious sweet tea.