Observable Readings
Poets Devin Johnston and Maureen McLane Visit Observable Readings on Dec. 5 To Cleanse the Doors of Perception
Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 08:59 PM
Devin Johnston escapes the indictment issued by William Wordsworth when he told an industrializing Great Britain in the early 19th century that "Little we see in nature that is ours...we are out of tune." Johnston is in tune with the natural world; his well-observed poetry knows the names of weeds, trees, and birds that most of us will never bother to learn. His work is more than well-observed, however. It also is well-imagined, going inside the body of a river sturgeon, for example, to describe how thunder shakes its bladder. And his verse is as tuneful as the Blackburnian warbler in the title poem of his latest book Traveler, its short lines pulsing with meter, bright with rhyme. Yet to call Johnston a nature poet would do him and his wide-ranging work an injustice. Whether he touches on a ghostwriter's disillusionment, levitating Harrier fighter jets, the noisy demolition of a brick house, or language itself, Johnston does the poet's essential work as envisioned by William Blake, cleansing the "doors of perception" so everything appears as it truly is--infinite. Or as the poet Peter Campion writes, "Johnston turns away from the world at hand and moves into a kind of hushed borderland, even as he redirects our attention to the here and now." Johnston's poems are slim keys that open big rooms of wonder. They are, in the words of Campion, "great feats of enlargement."
Johnston is an associate professor of English at St. Louis University and the author of four poetry collections: Telepathy (Paper Bark Press, 2001), Aversions (Omnidawn Press, 2004), Sources, (Turtle Point Press, 2008), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry, and Traveler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). He also has written a book of criticism titled Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice, and a book of essays titled Creaturely. Johnston is co-director of Flood Editions, an independent publishing house. To read a review of Sources, click here. To read some of Johnston's poems, click here.
Maureen McLane grew up in upstate New York, and was educated at Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Chicago, where she 
studied Romanticism with James Chandler, receiving her PhD in 1997. Her work at Chicago was on the discursive networks of humanism in post-revolutionary English poetry. She was also writing poems at this time, as she came to identify poetry "not so much as a corpus of artifacts, or as a metaphorically living thing, or as an ideological formation, but rather as a discursive movement dispersed over or moving through those objects we call poems." This definition was fortunate; it permitted her scholarship and poems to co-inhabit a Same Life, the title, as it occurred, for her 2008 collection of the poems that she wrote concurrently with her dissertation, published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press as Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species. What was remarkable from the first is that while McLane's reading, as well as her insight about the status of persons, in its acknowledging the highest ambitions for poetry among the Romantics, compromises not at all with their ambition; in her poems, she is of no school, carries no grudge, yodels no particular elective affinity among the highly structured discursive field that is the network of groups making up 21st century Anglo-American poetry. McLane's poems are as smart as they are glamorous, as verbally accelerated as they are truly curious. A second scholarly project, on Scottish ballads and minstrelsy, appeared last year, along with a second extraordinary volume of poems, World Enough. A new critical work, of a more personal-type criticism, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, in June 2012, is titled My Poets.
An associate professor of English at New York University, McLane has published essays on poetry, fiction, teaching, and sexuality in The New York Times, Boston Review, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and many other venues. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing, she is currently a contributing editor at Boston Review. To read an interview with McLane, click here. To read some of her work, click here.