Observable Readings

Modesty as a Poetic Virtue: An Interview with Poet Devin Johnston

by Robert Lowes

Devin Johnston admires the virtues of anonymous poetry, which does not load down the reader with the weight of the author's life. Likewise, a poet's style can sometimes trouble him when it takes center stage. 

"Part of what I want from poetry is not so much the presence of the poet and their style and their sensibility," says Johnston. "Sometimes I want to see through that to something else-the world, or the language."

Despite a preference for self-effacement, Johnston has made a name for himself in poetry, and not just as the author of four collections of verse. The associate professor of English literature at St. Louis University has a book of criticism to his credit, and he also is a co-director of Flood Editions, a literary press based in Chicago.

I recently asked Johnston to share his thoughts about poetry, and especially his own, over coffee at Gelateria del Leone, a favorite hangout of his in South St. Louis.

Let me start off with a simple question. What literary journals do you read these days?

Well, the number definitely has gone down over time. I used to work for a literary journal--Chicago Review--and that's the one I've always kept up. But while I was working for the magazine, we would see dozens of other magazines come through the door.  Chicago Review is one of the only ones that over the decades I've stuck with just for that personal reason.

Okay. So how do you become exposed to new writers?

That gets at a really basic question of how poetry circulates now, and how you learn of anything. A lot of it for me is still word of mouth. Particularly as you get to know other people and their tastes, and then they recommend things to you. Even if it's not my favorite thing, I'm reading it through my own attention and through someone else's as well. Very occasionally for me, it will be through reviews or some other kind of source, but increasingly, that seems like a diminishing part of how we come to learn of poetry.

What author have you recommended lately?

Because I'm one of the editors for Flood Editions and we publish 4 books of poetry a year, that takes over my recommending because I'm always pushing those books. We did a selected Roy Fisher, who's a British poet. Roy Fisher has been for a number of years now the person that I can rely on poets I know not to have read. He wasn't circulating much, and he's someone who I just think is fantastic. So I always recommend his work.

What do you like about him?

There's a sort of alert, quietly crackling quality to the way he observes things. It's partly his sensibility--it's at once skeptical on the one hand, but then really vivid and saturated on the other. His poetry is also remarkably varied, which is another appeal.

In terms of the content, or the form?

The content and the form, and also the approach, or the texture of it. Sometimes it's really spare and literal in its description, and sometimes its edge is more toward this sort of surrealism where you have trouble even locating what the subject might be.

 
It's interesting to think about poets and their kind of shtick. C. K. Williams is known for these long-line poems, and then you have W. H. Auden, who is all over the map in terms of technique. What do you think about the fact that some people seem to be more limited, and other people play 10 instruments?

I don't think that, for me as a reader, I need virtuosity from poets. Sometimes I can even turn away from that. I don't think that is necessarily the sustenance of poetry, to be virtuosic.

In other words, "I've mastered this form; now watch me master another one."

Right. But on the other hand, I also can be a little bit troubled by style when it becomes too dominant. Sometimes poets have a sort of signature style that's instantly recognizable and always there. It may be a formal feature, like a long line, or it may be tonal, or a kind of diction. And sometimes that can trouble me a little bit, since I think that part of what I want from poetry is not so much the presence of the poet and their style and their sensibility. Sometimes I want to see through that to something else-the world, or the language. When (style) becomes too dominant, I can turn away from it.

Reading your work and looking at its creaturely themes, I appreciate your tremendous knowledge of the natural world. You know the names of trees and flowers. You even know the Latin names of birds. How did you come to know so much about nature?

Well, some of it I look up, (laughter) so it's not all at my fingertips.  I'm glad that I grew up first on the outskirts of Winston-Salem in North Carolina. We were right over the city line, sort of in the country, so there was a reason to pay attention to birds and plants. My mom had a good friend--Deanna Moss--and we were close neighbors and close friends, and we would eat at each other's houses, and she helped raise my sister and me. She was incredibly knowledgeable about all kinds of aspects of the natural world. She was a really good gardener, but (she) was the rare gardener who was just as interested in the volunteers and weeds as she was in what she planted. So she was a source for a lot of that stuff.

Do you ever think that your audience doesn't catch on to your observations about the natural world?

Sure. Yeah. I have plenty of friends who could care less. (Laughter)  Some of them are people whom I'll show poems to. So that ends up being a good test--is the language still interesting? Is there still at least some music coming through? In that sense, I've always been just a little wary of nature poetry. I don't want it restricted to that.

I was going to ask you, has anyone ever categorized you as a nature poet?

I don't think so, no. (Laughter)  Not to my knowledge at least.

The poet Mary Oliver has been classified as a nature poet. She writes about snakes and foxes and such.

I love a lot of poetry that would fall into that category, but that doesn't feel like total commitment for me. It feels like what happens to be there.

When did you become acquainted with classical writers like Horace and Virgil?

When I was in college, I had no idea what I wanted to study. I happened to take a classics course, and based on that, I was a classics major. I did my undergraduate degree at Oberlin College, and there were some terrific classics teachers there. Ann Carson was first publishing her classics criticism, and I heard her lecture my sophomore year of college. And I think that the demand to read closely, particularly a language that at that point I was only vaguely familiar with--you're looking up every word, and it's almost like blowing up a line.

You're reading the original.

Yeah, particularly in Latin. I would see things in the Latin that I couldn't at that point have seen in English poetry because of the demands of translation, the demands of paying that close attention. So it was that slow attention that it developed that was immensely appealing to me. I think, in fact, that was my way into poetry more generally. I was already reading a little bit of poetry, but I really took to it through reading Latin poetry.  

Did those poems influence you in terms of your poetic sensibility?

Yeah, I do think so. I really admire Horace's odes, the way they take a natural occasion and with a ringing clarity relate it to some phase of life or relationships. So those odes, I think, had a strong effect. And Propertius and Catullus. Lively, demotic, sometimes obscene. Not that my poetry is very often obscene! That's another way I should branch out. (Laughter)  That sense of being bawdy and funny, that lived quality, has been appealing to me. It ends up being profound poetry, but it's not (by) taking on some grand idea. It's by giving us a sense of lived experience.

I've read very little of the classical writers. The ideas of personality and self -expression, individualism--were those ideas en vogue then?

In some ways they were coming into view for some of those writers. I think they still had to some degree the aspiration to write poetry that's nearly anonymous. And that's something I think a lot about. It may be idiosyncratic, it may be weird, but (anonymous poetry) stands clear of any person being attached to it necessarily. Now, people so often think of  "impersonal" as being a bad thing, as being ascetic, or cleansed of something, or cold. But I think that it could be something to aspire to, that the poem floats free of even a body of work and becomes common in some ways.

Does that relate to what T. S. Eliot said when he talked about escape into impersonality?

I think so, it might. I don't know. I think he's talking about it from the perspective of the writer, what it might do for the writer who wants to escape from his own personality through writing. Whereas I was thinking of it more on the part of readers, that the poem isn't always under the sign of this writer. Because certainly there are writers that I admire, but every poem carries the weight of their whole personality or life or troubles or context. And then there are other writers that you can pick up, read the poem, and not be sent back to them. Maybe be sent in some other direction.

You would rather be the latter?

I think I would, or at least I think that's mostly what I have experienced writing as being for me. Because I think when I'm writing, even if I'm thinking about something that's personal to myself, I'm objectifying it in some ways, I'm bringing it into the poem, and I'm normally not writing with the presumption of, "Oh, but people know me." I think I aspire to that variety, too, where I'm not always burdened by myself. But there are great writers like (Robert) Lowell. I don't think anyone reads a Lowell poem without experiencing him, but he's a large personality and in some ways a historical figure, and I think he felt himself to be both of those things.