September 2023
Caesura Presents…Luke Johnson
Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for The Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis Award, The Vassar Miller Prize and the Brittingham. His second book A Slow Indwelling, a call and response with the poet Megan Merchant, is forthcoming from Harbor Editions Fall 2024. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Lukesrant or through email: writerswharfmb@gmail.com.
Website: https://lukethepoet.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lukeaslight
Music is the motion in the blood
John:
Luke, before delving into your incredible poetry, I’d love to ask how how it feels, after so many years of publishing poems in a variety of journals, to finally land your debut collection? I’d also love to hear about the journey this book has taken from inception to publication.
Luke:
I love that question John. It’s both sensitive and inquisitive, two things I know you to be. I feel all sorts of things! From a simple level, I’m excited. It has been a long time in the making with so many bridesmaid finishes in various book prizes. But when I go a little deeper with it, I’m relieved, humbled and thankful specifically as it relates to the process of the book. I’ve long seen Quiver as an exorcism of sorts. A book melding lyric verve, syllabic play, spatial play with world building, to set free its speaker. Because of that underswell, the book shies away from nothing. So I’m relieved to share it and let it work independently of me now. Humbled by the work itself, the subject matter. And thankful that the process took longer than anticipated. That allowed the project to matriculate and brew and become more nuanced. The earlier versions hadn’t realized the book’s potential. It deals with large, human elements, so it was important to get it right.
John:
I totally agree that we should all let our books matriculate and brew. I’ve been in the same boat: submitting a version of a manuscript that hadn’t had time to mature and “find itself.” But it’s a valuable lesson we all have to learn sooner or later.
But I’d love to delve deeper into the ideas of being “set free” and a book being like an “exorcism.” Would you mind telling me more about this? Did writing out your demons help them find their rightful place in the past, instead of continuing to haunt you?
Luke:
Full transparency? I grew up in a spiritual home that had weekly rhythms of small groups and Sunday service. I’m thankful in so many ways for that. It gave me a language to describe the immaterial and my internal world. No I don’t espouse the idea that the poet is a bearded mystic reading from the Muse’s scroll. But I do believe the subconscious and imagination are directly tied to the unsayables, or as some might call it: God. This fusion of poetry linked with religious vocabulary, happened in two parts. Early in my MFA program I struggled, like so many do, with writing what was true. That struggle choked promising drafts and drowned them before completion. One night, at the witching hour, I remember writing an entire poem from imagination. I had gotten sick of poetry as memoir and desired to write without any hogties or chains. The draft that came from that night scared me. I texted my mentor and she responded, “ahhh now you’re doing the shit. I open the door for demons.” That exchange gave me permission to excavate and wander through my subconscious landscapes. Shortly after that permission, I did a deep dive into neuroscience and realized there’s no such thing as the truth. Simply perception and honesty borne from emotive flares. Essentially, we’re all storytellers whether we like it or not. The writing of this book was two/fold when it came to the concept of exorcism. I was set free i.e. exorcised from limitations creatively, and that freedom resulted in full scale admissions.
John:
Such a vulnerable and honest answer. Thank you, Luke.
I’d like to latch onto your statement that there’s “no such thing as the truth” only “perception and honesty.” I agree that there’s no such thing as a single truth that fits all narratives, that we kid tend to exist in that strange space between objective and subjective truths. How do you apply this to your poetry? How do you express your perceived truths in a way that might resonate with those from other backgrounds and mindsets?
Luke:
I think I should clarify a little better what I meant. I absolutely believe in truth. 5+5 is in fact 10 and the sky, as I see it, as well as so many others, is blue. I was moreso speaking to memory and to the inaccuracy of our individual testimony. Neuroscientists have proven that our brain can only store mini flash frames. These frames are like fractals of a smashed mirror. Our brain arranges them as best it can and then relies on reason to color in the rest. But I digress! I think my poems do a good job of appealing to folks from all walks of life. I’ve learned that I can sing a reader anywhere with lyric verve and syllabic foreplay. Most of us want to feel alive. And music is the motion in the blood.
John:
“Music is the motion in the blood” indeed!
Given how personal yet universal the stories within your poems are, how do you go about your composition process? Do you normally start with an image, a memory, a chosen theme? Can you take me through how you weave a poem together from inspiration to completion?
Luke:
I’m an intuit who learned the craft through doing. Sound, all my life, has aroused me. It began at an early age. I had this refined ear for rhythm, pitch, harmony and symphonic layering. I remember at 7 or 8, hearing rain hit a shed roof with the passing sleet from tires and inserting the whisk of a broom to add dimension. So for me, a poem materializes as long as I make myself available to it. It begins, typically, with a line or an image and then from there I let the lyric loose to turn and pivot and reveal/withhold. My barometer is surprise, world building, economy, syllabics and syncopated sub layers. A poem has to orchestrate all those qualities. I edit as I go. So I never truly have a first draft. I’ve seen video of Thelonius Monk in the act of composing and relate to his obsession with genuflection. To see a piece like a house I’ve constructed with trick doors, contraptions, long halls and attics for a reader to move through. There’s a cinematic experience my work projects and a lasting effect(s) I hope to leave you with.
John:
Your process is surprisingly similar to my own. I also don’t draft in the traditional sense. I revise as I go, for if the any line isn’t feeling right, I’m unable to move on to the next. How can one get the sound and flow right if what’s come before isn’t already polished?
I mean what I say, when I talk
of permanence like permafrost
These lines from “This is what it looks like, son,” speak to an element permeating much of your work. Nothing ever seems particularly durable or long-lasting. Be it the heaviest of familial issues or the little bright spark that keeps one going, your poetry always seem to lean toward a kind of philosophical temporariness. How do you feel permanence, or lackthereof, weaves itself through your poetry and your outlook?
Luke:
I’m a deeply nostalgic man. My constant battle is not falling prey to myopia. I can walk through my childhood town and see/feel/hear refractions of the past. They’re so alive sometimes they feel like a waking vision. I suppose, because of that, I both revere and resent time. How a moment can pause like an endless photograph and then blur into the years. That bothers me. I noticed when I became a father these feelings were amplified. Now I was clinging to someone I love and still not able to stop or manipulate time. In fact it goes quicker now. Which is cruel and utterly barbaric. But perhaps it is these feelings of continual loss that make life’s temporariness my greatest teacher. Who knows. What I do know is that you’re absolutely right about my work. The speaker feels as if they’re constantly clawing after that which can’t be kept. Like moving water or a really good hit.
John:
I’m sure many poets, myself very much included, have this general, often undefined sense of loss perpetually haunting us. It’s just woven into the fabric of who were are. I’d love to know how you approach your ghosts in your work. How do you turn that “clawing” into “song”?
Luke:
Well the perk of being, often times, driven by the lyric, means my poems exist because of sonic obsessions. So even if my speaker is clawing, they’re simultaneously singing. I suppose I see my work a bit like a siren. I can entrance and woo you anywhere with song. The clawing is the result of life’s temporality, a slipping of sorts. Like collecting bugs or pinning butterflies to glossy pages. To sing it means to honor its existence, though short. To invoke the ghosts by acknowledging they lived, and live, will live.
John:
And that takes a great deal of balance and perspective. As does your approach to family. Violence (real and potential) permeates the interpersonal relationships in Quiver yet the collection never feels despondent. In all the darknesses you expose, there’s always a sense of light and hope. How do you strike that balance, especially as it pertains to the poems about your son and daughter? Even in poems not directly addressing them, there’s this sense that each poem could be read as advice for the next generation. If you could pull one or two lines from your collection that you consider the most essential advice to them, what would they be?
Luke:
I’m terrible at answering that question. Truly. And not because of the whole children metaphor poets commonly use for their poems. In fact, that metaphor has never struck me and always felt a little corny. My poems are bodily. Their music moves me like a puppeteer. Because of that effect I believe they create inside a reader, these lines from the poem “Dark” feel most accurate:
the body is a busy
depot where people
stop to share a secret
or write a letter
or weep for a lover
who’s no longer near
to kiss their eyelids
closed.
On top of how accurately they explain my goal as a poet, I think they also do a good job of encapsulating the ghosts we’ve discussed. How they move in us and through us, and how the act of living becomes this beacon or causeway for time’s malleability.
John:
A beautiful selection.
On the same subject, how has parenthood changed you as a poet, be it your overall perspective or the nitty gritty of finding the time and mental energy to write? And how do you see it shifting the themes and emotions in your work?
Luke:
Becoming a parent de-centered me. I was firmly aware that I wasn’t the center of the universe before, but that became a deeper reality entrenched in my mind and being once my daughter was born. What came with that new-normal, was an entire shift in what’s important to me. And with that shift came a renewed revelation of life’s fragility, its dangers and the vulnerability of loving a life more than my own. How has that related to the work? Ten fold. Before I had kids, and even for a season after, I battled this obsessive Whitman-like gaze. I was more inclined to purvey the outliers of living than actually live. I had yet to detest poetry’s virus so to speak, that never ending whisper to write the great poem, the lyric. It took me away from very real moments. And now that I’m a father I’m grieving time’s slippage. Don’t be so vain to interpret obsessiveness with drive or discipline. I fell prey to that for a long while and was on the fast track to burn out and isolation. In 2018, as I lay in bed struggling with a rapid heart rate and the effects of exhaustion, I finally grew sick of poetry as virus and prayed (am I allowed to say that here?) to be brought back to a life lived in real time. I’m thankful for that moment. It made me disgust poetry enough to kick it in the gut and ignore its itch when necessary. To choose life first and not idolize poetry. That is where the greatest discipline is found. I still write and publish and talk to amazing poets like yourself. I’ve never stopped working hard.
John:
Thank you so much for your open-hearted answer.
Finally, to wrap things up, I’d like to ask you two quick questions:
· Can you tell us one thing about yourself that many readers might find surprising?
· What are you currently working on and what are your next goals and your plans to meet those goals?
Luke:
I have a serious love of sports, specifically baseball. Because of that I have a freakish ability to recall stats.
I’m currently working on my second full length book Distributary. I just had a collaborative project with the poet Megan Merchant picked up by Harbor Editions. It’s titled A Slow Indwelling and due out Fall 2024. Shortly, I’ll begin a Horror script with my friend, the brilliant director David McAbee.