Luke Johnson is the tenth interview at The Fine Delight. This interview was conducted through e-mail. A bio note, as well as relevant links, follow the interview. Thanks for your great responses, Luke!
1. “The Heart, Like a Bocce Ball” is such a tight poem that does justice to the tradition of sonnets. Why did you choose this particular form for the content? Do you often write in fixed forms?
Thanks for your words on the poem, Nick. Form is my most efficient starting point. More often than not, I draft with form in place, whether it’s received or arbitrary. I have a tendency to overstate the narrative in my early drafts. By working in form, I reassert language and music as my central priorities and allow the images to arrive a bit more organically. Even when the form doesn’t persist through revisions, boundaries push me towards leaps and images I might not be able to access otherwise.
When I wrote this poem, I’d just read Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle and Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets and was fixated on the sonnet: this limitless, yet rigid, road-map. I was in the thick of writing a sonnet sequence entitled Aerials, a ten-poem experiment with rhyme and point of view that eventually became the second-section of my book. I had a heroic couplet in my head, so the first drafts were simply trying to find a way to arrive at those last two lines in a way that allowed them to turn the poem while also giving it finality (or, at least, as much finality as one wants to find in a poem). It’s a reversal of the way I usually write. Generally, I’m writing toward a discovery of the ending. In the case of this poem, I was starting there and hoping to find my way back.
2. The final two lines of the poem are so wonderful, and remain with me. How did you manage to use the word/concept of “heart” in such a successful manner in the poem (when it so often can lead to sentimentality)?
I think the lines avoid sentimentality because of the narrative circumstances: the fact that the death in the poem is never directly iterated, only intimated. I was definitely conscious of the riskiness of featuring the ‘heart’ simile so prominently, but I hoped the sadness of the situation and the strangeness of the narrative action would cast a tired piece of language/imagery in a new-enough light. Plus, I really wanted to use that couplet. I’ll do most anything for a solid rhyming couplet.
3. Please talk about your debut collection After the Ark, just released by New York Quarterly Press. How did you select/collect/order these poems? Do connections or themes arise when looking at the poems as a whole?
After the Ark is, more or less, my MFA thesis from Hollins University. There are a few poems from the years before, and one or two from the year after. I think it came together in the relatively common way: poems strewn across the floor of my living room. I spent a few weeks walking among the poems I’d written during that three year period, moving them around, searching for connections in image and some sort of coherent narrative. Most of the poems deal heavily with my mother’s death and my own childhood, so it wasn’t difficult to find a narrative, but I struggled with putting it all together. After Hollins, I went through three or four overhauls before the book arrived at its current shape. There were about ten poems that I dropped from the manuscript as the work evolved from a thesis (a representative sample of a definitive time-frame) to something that may or may not resemble a collection of poetry.
The book, as it ended up, is organized seasonally, moving from winter to spring to summer. Previous versions of the book weren’t deliberate enough in their organization. I was afraid that to structure the book chronologically would be too simplistic. My experience with grief was never chronological. The book’s more circular than anything else, constantly returning to the same fixations and scenes, so the seasonal arrangement made sense to me. We’re bound to return to winter, to grief.
4. You’ve written about being the son of ministers. How did that experience impact your conceptions of faith and the church, both in practical and metaphorical ways?
To me, the church was an omnipresent and impenetrable thing. I understood it in the way that most children understand their parents’ occupations: vaguely. Faith paid the bills. My father was the chaplain at Cornell University and my mother at nearby Wells College. They both were fierce readers, and in their sermons borrowed just as heavily from William Faulkner and Annie Dillard as they did the Gospels. Good writing was good writing, and the best became scripture.
It wasn’t until recently that I began to understand the ways in which this upbringing molded my perception. The way in which I experience language is almost entirely grounded in the liturgy. The rhythms and music that are most organic in my writing echo the cadences of my parents’ pulpits. I think it was Flannery O’Connor who said that the cadence of Southern Literature is the cadence of the King James Bible. Despite being a Yankee by birth, I consider my literary heritage to be distinctly Southern.
I’m simply writing poems about my family—the religious background is just as circumstantial as the landscapes. That said, I’m aware of the larger metaphorical implications this background lends, and I like to explore that in the writing. The religious backdrop certainly widens the scope of many of my poems. Whenever I write, I wonder how the words would sound if delivered from one of my parents' pulpits. It’s a tad grandiose, for certain, but it allows me the necessary reverence, the sense of being at once elsewhere and at home. I am addicted to the space a poem creates. For me, it’s the same space a church provides: sanctuary and mystery, a place in which attentiveness and clarity mix with memory and belief. I don’t attend service very frequently, but when I write poems I’m searching for the same sort of faith, the same sort of silence.
5. As a high school teacher, I’m always fascinated to hear of other writers who have taught at the pre-college level. Any memorable experiences as a teacher? How did the act of teaching/mentoring inform or affect your writing?
I was fortunate to teach 10th and 12th grade at Oak Hill Academy, a Baptist boarding school in the rural Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The teaching, and the inherent first year workload, was rigorous and unfortunately didn’t leave much time for new writing. I love teaching—I could spend the rest of my life trying to convince young people to love books (not Kindles or Nooks or iPads, but books) and the way we experience them. The folks at Oak Hill were great because they allowed me to teach contemporary writing alongside the old guard—everything from White Teeth to Slaughterhouse Five to Beowulf. While I was returning to these books as a teacher, I was also toying with my own manuscript, chiseling poems and shifting their order. I think the confluence of these activities, close reading and fine-tuning, was important, if only because it reaffirmed my commitment to the book (not my book, but the institution of the book).
In the end, I left full-time teaching and those gorgeous old mountains in search of new poems. It bothered me that I wasn’t writing. But time spent in the classroom was just as important for my writing as time spent at my desk.
6. What are some of your main poetic and literary influences?
The first book I ever loved was To Kill A Mockingbird. I had a teacher, Mr. Bedore, who taught the hell out of that book. We read virtually the whole thing out-loud in class. It was the first time that I connected to the music of the language, rather than just reading to get to the end. After that, I was on a slippery slope: Whitman—and then Fred Chappell—and then Seamus Heaney—and then Elizabeth Bishop. More recent additions to my personal literary pantheon: A.R. Ammons, Junot Diaz, Adrienne Rich, and Anthony Doerr. Right now, I’m reading C.K. Williams’ Collected Poems and Patti Smith’s Just Kids.
7. What project(s) are you working on now?
This past summer, I moved from Virginia to Seattle, Washington. With a kayak strapped to my roof-rack, a u-haul hitched behind me, and my Redbone Coonhound in the backseat, I drove across the country to a place where I had no apartment, no job, and no discernable plan. After I figured those (important) things out, I spent the summer working on poems. Something about moving is generative, and I’ve been enjoying the new bits of language and landscape that are working their ways into my work. I’m currently trapped in rhyming couplets, and am doing my best to allow this impulse to run its course. I’ve never been one to work on a ‘project,’ as they scare me with their bigness. I’m just living from poem-to-poem as best I can, hoping eventually they coalesce into something larger.
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Luke Johnson is the author of After the Ark (NYQ Books, 2011). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Epoch, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. His work has twice appeared in the Best New Poets anthology and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Atlantic Monthly. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where he is working on a second collection of poems. He blogs at http://proofofblog.blogspot.com
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