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Poems Two
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Hardcover
First published March 27, 1972
19 people want to read
About the author
B.S. Johnson
40 books130 followersB. S. Johnson (Bryan Stanley Johnson) was an English experimental novelist, poet, literary critic and film-maker.
Johnson was born into a working class family, was evacuated from London during World War II and left school at sixteen to work variously as an accounting clerk, bank junior and clerk at Standard Oil Company. However, he taught himself Latin in the evenings, attended a year's pre-university course at Birkbeck College, and with this preparation, managed to pass the university exam for King's College London.
After he graduated with a 2:2, Johnson wrote a series of increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels. Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo (1964) were relatively conventional (though the latter became famous for the cut-through pages to enable the reader to skip forward), but The Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked) and House Mother Normal (1971) was written in purely chronological order such that the various characters' thoughts and experiences would cross each other and become intertwined, not just page by page, but sentence by sentence. Johnson also made numerous experimental films, published poetry, and wrote reviews, short stories and plays.
A critically acclaimed film adaptation of the last of the novels published while he was alive, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) was released in 2000.
At the age of 40, increasingly depressed by his failure to succeed commercially, and beset by family problems, Johnson committed suicide. Johnson was largely unknown to the wider reading public at the time of his death, but has a growing cult following. Jonathan Coe's 2004 biography Like a Fiery Elephant (winner of the 2005 Samuel Johnson prize) has already led to a renewal of interest in Johnson's work.
Johnson was born into a working class family, was evacuated from London during World War II and left school at sixteen to work variously as an accounting clerk, bank junior and clerk at Standard Oil Company. However, he taught himself Latin in the evenings, attended a year's pre-university course at Birkbeck College, and with this preparation, managed to pass the university exam for King's College London.
After he graduated with a 2:2, Johnson wrote a series of increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels. Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo (1964) were relatively conventional (though the latter became famous for the cut-through pages to enable the reader to skip forward), but The Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked) and House Mother Normal (1971) was written in purely chronological order such that the various characters' thoughts and experiences would cross each other and become intertwined, not just page by page, but sentence by sentence. Johnson also made numerous experimental films, published poetry, and wrote reviews, short stories and plays.
A critically acclaimed film adaptation of the last of the novels published while he was alive, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) was released in 2000.
At the age of 40, increasingly depressed by his failure to succeed commercially, and beset by family problems, Johnson committed suicide. Johnson was largely unknown to the wider reading public at the time of his death, but has a growing cult following. Jonathan Coe's 2004 biography Like a Fiery Elephant (winner of the 2005 Samuel Johnson prize) has already led to a renewal of interest in Johnson's work.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 21, 2013
RIP, Bryan Stanley Johnson: pioneering experimental novelist, thought-provoking filmmaker, and mediocre poet.
DISTANT PIECE
I may reach a point
one reaches a point
When all I might have to say
where all that one has to say
would be that life is bloody awful
is that the human condition is intolerable
but that I would not end it
but one resolves to go on
despite everything
despite everything
THE SHORT FEAR
My awkward grossness grows: I go down, though
I maintain my self in the conviction
that I may have as much to say as others
and more apposite ways of saying it.
Certainly I feel it has all been said
The short fear is that even saying it
in my own way is equally worthless
DISTANT PIECE
I may reach a point
one reaches a point
When all I might have to say
where all that one has to say
would be that life is bloody awful
is that the human condition is intolerable
but that I would not end it
but one resolves to go on
despite everything
despite everything
THE SHORT FEAR
My awkward grossness grows: I go down, though
I maintain my self in the conviction
that I may have as much to say as others
and more apposite ways of saying it.
Certainly I feel it has all been said
The short fear is that even saying it
in my own way is equally worthless
January 24, 2022
Overall, Poems Two is a reminder that Johnson was first and foremost a novelist. As a novelist, Johnson pursued new forms, experimenting with various techniques to expand literary horizons. Endeavoring toward uncharted territory. But the same cannot be said of his poetry.
At its best, Poems Two is a testament to Johnson's wit and humour...
The cover is odd. Johnson hardly makes references to the mammary gland. I could find only one poem. Admittedly I found this poems to be in bad taste - not out of any prudishness, but because it is unpoetic. These words, in prose form, would not have evoked as strong a reaction. I wouldn't have batted an eye; I would have read them and then dismissed them as a mild exercise in misogyny. But here, masquerading as poetry, they are in bad taste...
On of my favourite poems in the collection...
At its best, Poems Two is a testament to Johnson's wit and humour...
one
I'm fond of women
Naked
But I like my salad
Dressed
two
He spoke of his longings and yearnings
The lives off her immoral earnings
three
Coleridge hated
Cologne;
I have been to
Cologne,
and I hate
Coleridge
- Three Irrelevant Thoughts (pg. 40)
The cover is odd. Johnson hardly makes references to the mammary gland. I could find only one poem. Admittedly I found this poems to be in bad taste - not out of any prudishness, but because it is unpoetic. These words, in prose form, would not have evoked as strong a reaction. I wouldn't have batted an eye; I would have read them and then dismissed them as a mild exercise in misogyny. But here, masquerading as poetry, they are in bad taste...
No, I've not
Those breasts you
loved to weigh
by handful,
dint, pucker,
have fallen
now: I think
- with something
like the old
vanity -
as far as
they will fall.
Those nipples
which once stood
pleasured to
the lightest
running of
your fingers
are gross, brown
brindled now,
unsightly.
Those other
labia
your wet tongue
at first so
shockingly
found, researched,
are dry now,
admit to
emptiness,
a disused
worked-out mine.
Their answer:
No, I've not
remarried.
- Untitled (pg. 25)
On of my favourite poems in the collection...
Nothing more
fill out her character more
they said
rightly
so I worked hard remembering
and the sad thing perhaps was
all had
been said
there was really nothing more
- Nothing More (pg. 14)
June 28, 2022
I'll echo the chorus of reviewers here by stating that Johnson was an immensely more engaging novelist than he was a poet, on almost every level. However, I think it's less easy to entangle the point-of-view of many of these poems from his other work (both in written and visual formats). Johnson, or his "narrator" (telling stories is telling lies, remember) is almost unrelentingly cruel in, by and large, recounting past, failed love affairs:
After a while Poems Two begins to resemble the refrain of Alan Partridge's memoir Bouncing Back: "Needless to say, I had the last laugh." What offers a measure of balance in Johnson's longer-form narrative work is that he was capable of an equal, if not greater, cruelty directed towards himself. The loathing he had for the world was not limited to those outside of his skull, and it's certainly easier to sympathise with his depressed "characters" in Trawl and Albert Angelo, their misanthropy complete, than the misogynistic score-settling of his verse.
Unless you're a Los Campesinos! fan searching for direct lifts (guilty), there's little to recommend the language itself, besides some choice phrases already since pilfered for better use. That the form is so strikingly dull is perhaps all the more surprising than the objectionable content, which at least is coming from a recognisable place in Johnson the novelist. The dead form of the Victorian novel was something to rage against, an animating principal as much for his experimentation in the delivery format of a story as the narrative itself. Who could believe the man who conceived of The Unfortunates was also capable of such turgid, torpid verse?
It is sort of funny when he compares almost accidentally pissing on his son's head as risking "some sort of baptism," mind.
"fill out her character more
they said
rightly
so I worked hard remembering
and the sad thing perhaps was
all had
been said
there was really nothing more"
After a while Poems Two begins to resemble the refrain of Alan Partridge's memoir Bouncing Back: "Needless to say, I had the last laugh." What offers a measure of balance in Johnson's longer-form narrative work is that he was capable of an equal, if not greater, cruelty directed towards himself. The loathing he had for the world was not limited to those outside of his skull, and it's certainly easier to sympathise with his depressed "characters" in Trawl and Albert Angelo, their misanthropy complete, than the misogynistic score-settling of his verse.
Unless you're a Los Campesinos! fan searching for direct lifts (guilty), there's little to recommend the language itself, besides some choice phrases already since pilfered for better use. That the form is so strikingly dull is perhaps all the more surprising than the objectionable content, which at least is coming from a recognisable place in Johnson the novelist. The dead form of the Victorian novel was something to rage against, an animating principal as much for his experimentation in the delivery format of a story as the narrative itself. Who could believe the man who conceived of The Unfortunates was also capable of such turgid, torpid verse?
It is sort of funny when he compares almost accidentally pissing on his son's head as risking "some sort of baptism," mind.
February 12, 2017
4.5/5.
Loved this one. Ironically (or not), many lines involving veins.
Loved this one. Ironically (or not), many lines involving veins.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews