I'm learning that everything this man writes is lonely. There is some crazy corniness in here, but there's also some great movement. Being stoned makes this feel a lot less melancholy. Try that, late at night. It's perfect then.

Pretty good stuff. I trust his prose more. But he's no slouch of a poet.

Only a few words for this one: intimacy experimented, using different forms.

great collection of poetry

A 1995 gathering of Denis Johnson’s four published books of poetry, from 1969 to 1987, plus about 20 pages of then new poems.

A little back story: My wife and I have very different literary tastes. When we moved in together and intermingled our books there was hardly any overlap; a Faulkner or two, maybe a Henry James, an anomalous Italo Calvino. She also had a small collection of poetry (Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, Anne Sexton), as opposed to my quite large collection of more experimental stuff, and these books of hers I was particular reluctant to merge with mine. Some I actually consigned to the basement, others I put in stacks down on the floor beside my poetry shelf, to collect dust and fur balls. This Denis Johnson collection was one of those. I would occasionally dip into it, because I liked some of his novels so much, but every time I would come away actually kind of angry; the poems just seemed so slipshod and random in their construction, prose chopped up into “poetry” nuggets. This book actually filled me with a mild disgust. I have a benign mania about covering all my hardcovers with protective plastic, but I refused to give to this that TLC, even if it was a first edition. Screw it!

Then a little while ago Mike Emmons here on GR rated DJ's poetry, which inspired me to pick this book up off the floor, and with a clear unprejudiced mind I began to read. I found my old cringes and spleen spurts surface immediately while reading The Man Among the Seals, his first collection, but I soldiered on, partly because they were so easy to read that they allowed me to think of other things. One or two struck me as effective in a Naked Poetry workshoppy way, but blah and tepid cringe for the most part. Inner Weather raised the stakes slightly. At least he did away with the lower case “i” deployed in his first book, but still kind of not too interesting; good stories but slack language. So I skipped quite a few poems to get to The Incognito Lounge…

Denis Johnson must have been visited by a Poetry Angel while writing this. It is almost eerie how much better this book is than those that preceded it. There is a new world dawning in the verbal risks he takes, straining sense to find pure poetry. I know very little about his life, but maybe he was doing just enough drugs at this point, and had developed just enough literary chops, that he was able to merge the wild man with compassionate X-ray eyes with the belle-lettrist at the height of his powers.

After these heights there’s another falling off, a slackening, with his next volume, The Veil, and also the new poems. But to his credit through all of his books there is tremendous insight and feeling and compassion, and within his chosen milieu of the down-and-outers, vagrants, drug takers, and seedy survival there is a welcome absence of himself, a total lack of self-absorption, like Bukowski, say (though I'm not knocking Buk). Many of the poems are first person, but often a persona is employed, even as one knows he’s writing from first-hand experience. He remains for the most part behind-the-scenes, which adds a mystery and power to his work. He's there, he's living that life, but he's given himself over to the recording angel. Through reading this I learned very little about Denis Johnson the personality, but I have learned much about his profound and shadowy emotional involvement with people and things, his far-ranging sensibility (from gutter to glory), and his all-enveloping disembodied compassion. He had a good run when he was good.

Johnson’s prose or so rhythmic and poetic I was curious about his poetry. And as I figured, it’s just as good as his prose.

I find it truly hard to review a book of poetry since it's a very subjective medium. There is no story or character arcs to comment on, more like explosions of consciousness put on paper. So this review will be short.

But as a lover of Denis Johnson these poems are beauty, isolation, sadness and transcending thought in poem form and I loved every word. Johnson is a master of finding these themes in everyday situations whether it's working a night shift as a construction worker or waking up next to the person you love his words capture that special feeling we all have experienced.

If you like poetry, hell even if you don't read this collection it won't disappoint. I feel it sums up this man and everything he tries to say in this. Life is a beauty and a horror we have to find the cracks in between and even though we aren't always successful it's worth aspiring to.

4.5/5

The poems range in quality from just under three stars to five stars.

I have tried to get into Denis Johnson a couple of times but so far I have not succeeded. I guess, his writing is just not for me. The only novels that I kind of liked were ‘’Resuscitation of a Hanged Man” and “Fiskadoro” — but I wasn’t really thrilled while and after reading them. I kept reading high praise for Denis Johnson so I bought his latest collection of stories: “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” and came to the conclusion that the best thing about this collection was its title. Finally I also gave his poetry a try and, alas, I could not get into it — the majority of these poems (although I would refrain from calling quite a few of these snippets “poems”) did not connect with me — neither the language nor the subject matter grabbed me in any way, made me reread, mark up, take notes. To me, there are a couple of intriguing verses — that’s it

Mostly, I found the construction of Johnson’s poems, his use of language (especially the imagery he chooses) odd and unsatisfying:

“…you know our clothes / woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels”

“my office smells like a theory”

“I can see the lights / of the city I came from, / can remember how a boy sets out / like something thrown from the furnace / of a star.”

His similes often feel abstract and stale — many poems read as if Johnson just wanted to write something that sounds different or odd — but there is not much behind this abstract oddity.

He often uses abstract terms and combines them in unfitting ways. Some of the poems are like longer strings of beads leading nowhere.
I couldn’t really find anything that grabbed me: no fascinating metaphors, no astonishing enjambments, no funny or memorable rhymes, no relatable speakers.

It seems, Mr. Johnson, you are not for me.

This book consists of all the previous Denis Johnson collections that I'm aware of. The three earliest collections, published in his twenties are good, but relatively not my favorites. "Incognito Lounge" and "The Veil" are almost perfect, and I'm sure I'll selectively reread those in the future.

One of the most perfect collections of poetry ever written. I could put this down.