Random how not random this author is.
One of my professors introduced me to the concept of "echolocution" (like echolocation), wherein you hear or become aware of a concept and subsequently it becomes incredibly salient (i.e. you see/hear it everywhere). This is what happened to me with Denis Johnson.
I had never heard of this very prominent American author (shame on me) until I read Train Dreams for a narrative course. Just in case you're interested, it's amazing (and also very short, if that tempts you). Immediately after I finished the novel, he started popping up everywhere. Booklists, book podcasts, booktube. Apparently Jesus' Son is one of the most influential short story collections of the second half of the 20th century. Good to know.
And then he popped up in my poetry course with this amazing sonnet:
As I mentioned in a previous entry, I have come to understand how important images are to me in poetry (and fiction in general), and I love the heat-difuminated picture painted here. The "electric dusk" is easy to imagine: the persistent reddish orange, the light falling over "your naked lover". There is something nostalgic about the image of the records and the music, about the idea of this being an "erotic hallucination", it's dirty and decadent, yes, but in a glorified-by-cult-classics way. The words establish a good rhythm, almost lazy, with a an actual rhyme scheme (abcabcdd-efgefg) to get you in the groove. I love the break with "August", calling you to the moment, both breaking the spell of the sonnet form and reinforcing it, because what is this line if not a turn, switching from the concreteness of the images to the diffuseness of feelings (intense but ultimately unsatisfying, possibly drug-induced).
We discussed this poem during class and it was mentioned that it was obscure, perhaps due to phrases like "full of spheres and zones", "oven impersonating night", and "bogus moon of tenderness and magic", but to me it is not hard to craft a whole situation out of these, feelings included. To me this is a (rather contemporary, though perhaps pre-social media) disenfranchised vision of existence wherein all sensations are mirages, a form of escapism that is both inevitable and ineffective, like the "bogus moon of tenderness and magic" that "each prisoner" receives "like a cup of light".
Perhaps I'm too literal in many ways. I like surface and it takes me a while o get to the bottom, if I do at all. Extended metaphors often surpass me unless I have previous knowledge of them or the author. I guess this is the way my mind works. But in this case, this poem seems very straightforward. Perhaps this is why I loved it so much: I feel is precise yet artful, it sounds good, but it also feels accurate in its attempt.
Anyways, to expand a bit more on what we've seen in class, I though I'd check out some more poetry by Johnson. I found this frantic little piece, "Surreptitious Kissing", which captures the whirlwind that is love, both in its excitement (and the enjambment that runs throughout establishes the franticness), and its terribleness. The fact that is broken into couplets seems a bit cheeky (get it?) but it also reinforces the pace. I think these three are especially eloquent:
The "blunder deeper" in particular, this idea of making mistakes that don't extricate them from a situation but rather push them into it even more feels apt and precise.
Johnson had the power of being very "on point", I've discovered, and so I will be reading more by him in the future.
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