Learning of Johnson’s death as I picked up this book shocked me.
I don’t know why it hit me so profoundly. Perhaps because the words he used convey accurately and profoundly life’s necessities, with its glorious hardships and its serenely beautiful miracles.
Life encapsulates all of these experiences from birth to the grave.
It’s the cyclical nature of being.
Ignoring the brevity of everyone’s lives is to miss the point of life.

I’m grateful he took pen to paper. His thoughts, ideas and his visions about beauty/about life, regardless of its inevitable pain, unfairness, and cruelty will be succeeded by future generations.
I derive a great deal of comfort from that.... after all.... “I’ll tell you the story of my life. You’ll make a million.”.

jury's still out. way out.

This is too damn good to even talk about. Just imagine the creepy vibe inherent to his short stories from "Jesus' Son" and apply it to poetry. I'm still bothered by the idea of people walking around with their eyes closed and eyeballs painted on their eyelids. There's also a pretty nifty story regarding the title and picture on the cover.

This collection started out really well, climaxed with the poems from The Incognito Lounge, then went downhill from there (pretty far downhill with those collected under New Poems). It was as though Denis Johnson got cocky and fired whatever internal editor had kept him focused all the while before. Either way, this is definitely worth a read.

I'm not sure you you can read into this, but my copy was signed and dedicated by Denis Johnson to a woman named Susan. That I have this book can only mean Susan wasn't very moved.

Worth the reread.

It was interesting to see his arc as a poet, and there are some stunners in his collected works, but in the first book it was evident he was still finding his way. His style changed a bit toward the end, but had some stellar moments. And the last of his new poems was a mind explosion.

Denis Johnson is life.

I am a poor arbiter for poetry. I am still young in my journey and can only think about it in the same way I think about paintings. All I have is the feeling most of the time, what it inspires in me.

When I read Johnson's poetry, I feel something more honest and substantive in the sleezy despair that Charles Bukowski made a home in, and I feel those familiar rhythms of the beat poets. I feel repeated religious epiphanies in Johnson's descriptions of falling snow, step children and alcoholics.

So again, not an expert here-- but this feels like an especially unorthodox style. Far be it for me to use "enjambment" without consulting three google searches and a youtube video before I feel like I have a good grip on it-- but the way Johnson breaks up his lines feels incomprehensible and yet laden with meaning. This is one of those things that I just don't have the current facilities to really say much enlightening about it.

All I know is that I love it.

I liked this one though some poems are of course stronger than others. The good ones are really excellent. The less good ones are just nothing in a way worse than a lot of poets, because part of Johnson's appeal is the closeness of his style to ordinary speech (some of the time). I will be coming back to some of these. They have something to say about our shared pains and this is of value.

“As drink gave way to drink, the slow / unfathomable voices of luncheon made / a window of ultraviolet light in the mind, / through which one at last saw the skeleton/ of everything, stripped of any sense or consequence, / freed of geography and absolutely devoid / of charm; and in this originating / brightness you might see / somebody putting a napkin against his lips / or placing a blazing credit card on a plastic tray / and you’d know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say.”

- from The Veil

“If I am alive now, / it is only // to be in all this / making all possible. / I am glad to be / finally a part / of such machinery. I was / after all not so fond / of living, and there comes / into me, when I see / how little I liked / being a man, a great joy. // Look out our astounding / clear windows before evening. / It is almost as if / the world were blue / with some lubricant, / it shines so.”

- from Looking Out the Window Poem

One of my top ten all-time favorite books of poetry.

I listened to all of the New Yorker fiction podcasts featuring Denis Johnson stories over the past few months. It adds up to a pretty eclectic group of authors reading four of five (I think only four) stories of Johnson's collected in Jesus' Son. I bought a used copy of that collection sight unseen at Downtown Books and News in Asheville,NC in maybe 2006 or 2007. It has since become a touchstone of sorts. Most of Johnson's catalogue rises to the quality of these stories, but none of his other books have had quite the emotional impact as those, unbeknownst to me, influential, respected, and highly popular stories. But the New Yorker fiction podcast. Many of the authors reading Johnson's stories related their initial encounters with Johnson's writing through his three early collections of poems. As far as I can tell, his first published works.

I had this collection buried on an amazon wishlist for a couple of years, always a bit wary of it. A lot of the poetry I read I view as instructive, it fills in the gaps between schools, decades, continents. All footnotes to a constantly evolving mental history of poetry I have in the back of my mind. I should have never bought the David Perkin's history of modern poetry, but that's how my brain organizes the whole genre now. I like context. Especially in poems. Denis Johnson doesn't get a mention in the late eighties chapter, to my knowledge at least. I'm confident I haven't read that far, anyway.

The poems are great, there are many that just sort of wash by, but that is inevitable, i believe, in any omnibus. The compression that is such striking feature of Johnson's short stories is on full display in his poems. There are recurring themes, rain, waitresses, the shouts of disgruntled wives that socket into Johnson's Pacific Northwest loser, outsider context easily. The line breaks are tight in the first few collections, often just three or four words, short stanzas or a single column of ten to fifteen lines. Lines begin to meander as the collections collect. Eventually with multi-sectioned poems dealing with specific topics, usually works of art. This progression and growth felt natural, especially due to my relative quick reading of the collection from start to finish. The poems stand on there own, but viewed as a progression towards the style and substance of the stories in Jesus Son, the offer a unique portrait of an extremely gifted author finding his voice. I would recommend this to anyone, but would say it's near required reading for longtime fans of Denis Johnson.