Paul Foster Johnson @ the Apostrophe table
The Poet Reading
The Poet Signing Books
Standing Room Only!
Below is from my introduction to Paul Foster Johnson for his reading and book launch party at Proteus Gowanus over the weekend . . . a wonderfully successful event!
In describing the work of John Asbhery, critic Paul Zweig writes the following:
“Every poem creates a mood of density and discretion, which is almost magical. And yet one never knows quite what the poems are about. His fine elaboration of images and arguments forms a concealing net, a sort of camouflage that works not much by covering over as by fascinating, so that one forgets to pursue one’s hunger for logic amid the glories of pure language” (107).
I think something similar can be said of Paul Foster Johnson’s work but with an important caveat. And that is, what Zweig describes here about Asbhery, really speaks to only one of Paul Foster Johnson’s registers. There are poems in this collection that are delightfully elusive and seduce us into believing meaning is forthcoming, but, in the end it never arrives. Like Asbhery, there is a kind of comic-tragic erosion of signification in many of Paul’s poems. It’s like having the rug pulled out from under you, but miraculously you never fall – you just float above the surface as though levitating, magically, on some supernatural syntax. But then there is another register that demands we search for a logical, perhaps even Romanticized order. These poems have an “aboutness” that demand explanation and meaning. They’re musical and lyrical, while at the same time they destabilize notions of identity and selfhood. So, these are Paul’s contrasting sensibilities—highly indeterminate language that seems to decay and then re-distribute through multiple refrains of “dislogic” versus poetic discourse that tends toward something quotidian, Romanticized, profound. These paradigms compete throughout the poems and effectively illuminate different modalities of consciousness and different possibilities of meaning by opening up the field of signification. It’s often difficult to determine—when inside of a Paul Foster Johnson poem—whether he is making sense, as uncertain as it may be, or dismantling it. In Paul’s poetry meaning exists between words, not through or in them. His words “unwork” themselves, by pulling meaning apart and by loosening the semantic surface. Referents and signifiers are not merely undefined, but they challenge definition itself, as phrases, lines and words reconfigure in varying, almost liminal permutations, thus placing the reader into new linguistic thresholds. For example, in “R13. Written Into the Bestiary.” He writes,
All larking
had been a mistake
When you were born
the wolves outside
their footfalls never neutral
abducted the plush symbols
there to greet you
Leaving you sungazing
in pine sap and ambient noise
Things in themselves
wavering in the grove
A beginning indentured you here
on the inmost beaches
surrounded by ventifacts smooth
out of the cannibals’ poems
These enjambed lines force us to disregard linearity and follow language, like the footfalls of the wolves, to some kind of neutral alterity – something outside consciousness, where we abduct our own symbols from seemingly ineffable fragments. So, yes, the poems are deeply philosophical and, as we say at Apostrophe, pataphysical. But, the poems are also beautiful and often very funny. In some poems, it’s as if clusters of words stumble upon and then trip over other clusters of words, and, then, somehow act surprised, perplexed, as if saying,“what are you doing here?! you’re language too? let’s see if we can’t undo some of this meaning, some of this convention and make everything seem otherwise.” Really, you’ll see what I mean. Take for instance this passage from the opening poem of the book, “Rhythmicon”:
Imagine the melody is a landscape you roam through,
it says—this will help you to play it better. Run
through the passage backwards—you will find
it more elastic and never exhausting itself
in a style that asphyxiates the subject. The technique
of visualization produces in this case not one apple
but bins of them, and the rain does not stop
and its pounding historizes the long march
So, this is essentially the introduction, though I did open with some passages from an essay “On Poetry” by the Russian painter, Kazimir Malevich, which I pulled from shelves of the Reanimation Library just before the reading. Some wonderful stuff about the poetic line being stuffed like a sausage! Anyway, Paul organized the event himself with the help of friends, so thanks to all for such great work, including Andrew at the Reanimation Library and Sasha at Proteus Gowanus. Stay tuned for more readings by Paul and our other writers…..
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