I knew Denis Johnson for his short stories. Without hyperbole, they towered over all other short stories I've read. So the worst that could happen is his poetry is just prosaic, just lineated short stories. Right?

Unfortunately not. Throughout this career-spanning book, Johnson gropes in the dark at what he thinks poetry is. Early on, that means no capital letters, lots of heavy enjambment, but only the last word of the line. For example:

the dry dry land. here
and there from the
rasp and muscle of its flatness
a tree gushes forth. i

have seen trees, have
heard them at night being
dragged into the sky.
i know that they are very
real. i know they know.

The first stanza has not one but two of those "period before the last word of the line and that word starts a new sentence." At times this works very well, but after two collections of poetry it wears thin. Denis detects this, and shifts his approach. The sudden improvement stunned me. According to wikipedia, he quit drinking around this time, but hadn't yet stopped using drugs. The poetry clearly reads as various states of mind. The drunken stupor of the first two poetry collections in the book don't allow him to even capitalize, constantly spilling over one line into the next. The main momentum in these earlier poems is that of falling over, falling off the barstool, retching on the sidewalk outside the bar he was just thrown out of. It's pitiable to watch, and even at times darkly beautiful. Johnson's early, largely self-imposed frustrations transmute through his swimming drunken gaze into distant and muffled voices. He watches violence happen without passion or reaction, observing and reporting like a journalist, or rather a meta-journalist, savagely critiquing the indifference of others, of the universe. Perhaps he was raised by television to expect such gore, and thus it doesn't surprise him. The line between intrusive thoughts and daily life blurs like the traffic lights as he drives drunkenly home. He complains of lacking even outrage, any fully-experienced emotion with which to speak.

If the soft falling away of the afternoon
is all there is, it is nearly
enough

Night and weather, and especially night-weather feature frequently, complicating his already-adled observations. Distant events conspire around the city to form a constellation of dissipation, a mirror of his own self-loathing and dissatisfaction.

But suddenly, like the flicking on of ceiling lights, or the loud whir of raised blinds, his third collection hits you. "The Incognito Lounge." Aptly titled for our contemporary age, Johnson wakes up, dream-residue still clinging to his tongue, his fingertips, his hair. He spews Plath, Mayakovsky, Neruda, confusedly, but also so convincingly that you can't disagree. Bookended by two long, absolutely devastating poems, he rips colors out by the roots and squeezes them for juice.

She pours me some boiled
coffee that tastes like noise
...
And so on--nap, soup, window,
say a few words into the telephone,
smaller and smaller words.
...
right slam on the brink of language
...
The parking lot is full,
everyone having the same dream
of shopping and shopping
through an afternoon
that changes like a face.

I commend early Johnson for disregarding line lengths, playing with the line, trimming and pruning in his own hazy way, but I commend later Johnson for revolutionizing the imagery so that the lines disappear completely. Everything inanimate comes alive in these poems, the world pulsates, lunges at you, cries out in pain upon your touch. Synesthesia reigns unopposed, a merciful tyrant, so merciful he sets all the prisoners free, declares everyone and everything innocent. Anarchy washes over all like sunlight.

We part with a grief as cutting
as that line between water and air.
I go downstairs and I go
outside. It is like stepping into the wake
of a tactless remark, the city's stupid
chatter hurrying to cover up
the shocked lull. The moon's
mouth is moving, and I am just
leaning forward to listen
...
naming
those things it now seems
I might have done
to have prevented his miserable
life. I am desolate.
What is happening to me.

The randomness boils over at times, but mostly the accidental metaphors charm, they disarm suspicion and lock the suicide doors so you can't escape. And this car has no seatbelts. Some quieter moments slow down, but they often prove the top of a roller coaster, only the deception before the fall. Johnson is wrestling magnificently while writing these poems; he has broken free from alcohol, but not yet other drugs; he knows he has a problem, but much of his old, broken self impedes forward progress. Things veer sideways, and sometimes the backspin on the cue ball stops it just short of entering the pocket. A devastating story of trauma caps the Incognito (Mode) Lounge, and, if autobiographical, it's both illuminating and saddening.

But when he gets totally sober, things shatter. The hangover kicks in with a vengeance, and any clarity has sharpened into the broken end of a beer bottle, and he's holding it at his own throat. His poems wander in to art galleries, but they leer at the art with a skeptical, unempathetic eye, scoffing under his breath at not only the works, but the people who would dare create or, god forbid, view such works. His resentfulness shows its ugliest face toward women, unfortunately. His relationship with sex seemed to have been already complicated when in a stupor, but its squinting at the sun of sobriety makes him return to a dark den, away from anyone and everything. He blames his mother, he blames women, he blames everything but himself. His fascination with young women and girls unsettles the sensitive reader and makes him feel like a crusty old creep.

These poems bloat up, like a potbelleyed middle-aged man, with only one or two memorable lines per poem. Guns held to heads feature more frequently, and with less ironic distance than before. It seems that after someone flicked the lights on, he chose to roll over and cover his head with the sheets. The poetry remains largely shocking, but in a way which transformed from the shocking freshness of the jarring imagery of "Incognito" to an often-unintentionally jarring sexism and occasional racism. Only one poem from the last collection stands out: "The Honor;" of course it's a bitter poem, resentful even, but its sharpness remains carefully sheathed. Glances refract like light through drink glasses, and the absurdity of egotism gets attacked, not just women.

But it was nothing
to her, and in fact she didn't remember it.
I didn't know what else to talk about.
I looked around us at a room full of hands
moving drinks in tiny, rapid circles--
you know how people do
with their drinks.

Soon after this I became
another person, somebody
I would have brushed off if I'd met him that night,
somebody I never imagined.

The crowning fault of this last collection is titular. If you're not familiar with James Hampton's Throne, watch this video, it'll get you up to speed. This was easily the most disappointing poem in the entire book. Its diction is tedious, its tone of voice dismissive; it proves a wasted opportunity to reflect on religious outsider art, and instead Johnson merely insults Hampton as "probably insane" and "crazy." The cliched phrases around "going crazy" and "go[ing] out of your mind" abound, to the point that I was crossing out half the lines of the poem. It felt uncharacteristically lazy, and I was surprised that Johnson didn't see within Hampton any kindred spirit, any joint striving for mad religious fervor. For a guy who wrote a short story collection called "Jesus' Son," I'm shocked that he missed the boat this badly. I want to write something much better on the topic of Hampton's work, just to spite him.

By the very end of the book, we get not even 20 pages of new poems, a paltry showing of watered down, sometimes utterly unremarkable poems. A faint glow of the "Incognito" years shines behind various lines, but none of the poems connect fully; they all derail sooner or later. The sexuality remains uncomfortable, and lines return to their variable lengths of yore. But the damage has been done. Knowing this trajectory within Johnson's life and poetry, I want to revisit his short stories. I hope they hold up, but I fear I'll smell the bitterness hiding under the surface. If anything, this book serves as a via negativa, a guide for how not to write poetry, albeit with a bright light of inspiration cutting straight through the middle.