Everything's an Elegy: an Interview with Jonathan Johnson in Washington State
For our inaugural interview, Jonathan Johnson suggested that we should have a destination interview, since we're a magazine that promotes a sense of place. When you read the poems in Jonathan's Mastodon, 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined, you’ll know why this revelation was satisfying. Jonathan’s body of work so often feels in motion. People in his poems are stranded and walking their way across northern Idaho, they're riding their bikes in the midnight dark, they're trucking Chevys down to Belize, they're slipping out of bars while their friends are on stage playing their favorite song and are comforted in knowing that what they notice will remain. It was only natural to pile up in an old white Mercury he calls a “farm car” and head west from from a coffee shop in Cheney, Washington, to Sprague.
The route Jonathan chose for us follows a route he once walked on a two-day trek to Ritzville. After only a few miles, we turned off the highway and onto a dirt road that hugs railroad tracks. With the exception of a helmeted girl on a moped, we had the road to ourselves, a rooster tail of dust behind us, Jonathan constantly tugging one way or another on the old car’s steering wheel trying to manage the slack. It was a classic overcast Northwest day, the thin cloud cover backlit like bones in an X-ray. You at once feel small against so much sky, the uncountable number of t-posts scaffolding the miles of half-mended fence, and if you are to judge ownership by an occupying presence, you begin to think the land is as much the cattle’s as people’s. The longer we drove, the more I felt akin to Hugo touring the Northwest for its bounty of ruin where the roofs of mobile homes and houses alike are lined with patches of blue tarps, weighed down and held in place by spare tires on each corner. And all at once we were inside Jonathan’s poetic: the push and pull of stasis and acceleration, ruin and rehabilitation.
When we finally do get to where we're going, we find what’s apparently called a Truck Rescue. Reader, imagine the famous Cadillac Ranch off I-40 in west Texas. The Truck Rescue, Jonathan says, is run by a guy who combs the state in search of old 1930, 40, and 50s work trucks. Old Peterbuilts and Kenworths rust on display next to derelict ice-cream trucks from the Eisenhower years.
Before moving to the Northwest myself, I thought of the land as being an evergreen place full of mountain pine, Douglas fir, spruce and all. And it is that. Near the coast, wild ferns grow in the ditches. The air is wet and weighed down with the scent of roses. But as much as the Northwest is a place of lushness, it’s Sprague, Washington, too: a place of rolling, sun-colored hills of wheat, miles and miles of unpeopled land, and a town square where the main attraction is twenty or thirty old work trucks coated in seven or eight decades’ worth of rust.
If there is a living poet who can alchemize poetry from the rusted vehicle bodies, the broken windows, the isolation of being in a town square where hardly anything moved while we were there for the interview, it would be Jonathan Johnson. And so it was there, in the middle of the Truck Rescue, that Jonathan, Kurt, and I huddled around a recorder placed on the lichen-covered runner boards of an old flatbed work truck and conducted our interview between the towers of silos and the church steeple, nearly alone under the sprawling western sky.
Interview
Cody Smith
What merit do you give to place-based work in poetry, work that's steeped in a certain landscape?
Jonathan Johnson
I think what a landscape does, what a place does, is it gives individual imagination a worthy partner. I think one of the things in poetry that's always a risk is that the imagination will just have its own way and it won't have much resistance. When you have something objective, especially something so much bigger than a human being like a landscape, it's something that the imagination has to answer to. So that relationship between freedom (freedom of the artist) and then something else that's contributing to the work, to me that makes for a tension that I can relate to. I can get inside the work, whereas, if it's just the person's imagination, if there's not something outside the imagination that the poem is answering to, oftentimes the work can be private.
I guess the other thing about that is landscape for me has always been a language without words. Emerson said, "The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them?" in his essay "The Poet." So I've always thought of the poet as the speaker of things that have a language but do not have words. A poet is the person who gives words to the landscape's language.
Finally, it's to be transported. I started writing poetry when I was living far away from the landscape that I love most. I was living in Louisiana, and I really missed my grandparents' farm in North Idaho. Even before that, I was living in Salt Lake. My parents were in graduate school, and I would write about the farm, about my grandfather, and I'd write about timber and the mountains. It was a way of putting myself in a landscape and deepening that relationship. And when I read someone else's work, I get a new relationship to a place.
Smith
It's been a rough couple years for American poetry. We've lost Jim Harrison, Phil Levine, Galway Kinnell, C.D. Wright, and Michael Harper, off the top of my head. If we could tap the living waters and give it to someone, who is a poet that you would want to keep with us as long as possible?
Johnson
For me, it's too late. I say that now, but then I'll think of somebody when they go. Galway Kinnell and Mark Strand, when I was young, were the two that really taught me. Galway Kinnell was the first living American poet when I was about nineteen that I looked to and thought, "Yeah, that's what I want to do." And then it was a couple years later that Strand taught me the power of quiet, the power of not saying the thing. Kinnell taught me the power of ecstasy and song, kind of like Whitman, the power of saying the thing. Strand taught me the power of restraint, to dial back, quieter, quieter, let the deep undercurrent of water do its work. Further into my adult life, it was Harrison. I had the great luck of having Harrison become a mentor and a friend. The most important person throughout graduate school for me was Levine.
I still haven't figured out what it means for me that they aren't alive anymore. It's going to take a while to figure that out. People of my own generation now have advanced. I'm forty-eight, and my generation has been promoted, and I don't like that. I like looking to people who are alive and around for spiritual leadership. To have lost most of those spiritual leaders is disorienting. The people who were in charge, poetically, are kind of gone now.
I'm falling in love with writers closer to my own age—William Wright, Jesse Graves—but yeah, it's not the same thing to fall in love with your peers' work as it is to fall in love with your heroes'.
Kurt Olson
It's like, who do you call for the recipe now, in a sense?
Johnson
Right. That's for sure. It's hard, too. Adrienne Rich noticed my work at a very young age. I didn't know her from Adam, a complete stranger to me when she noticed my work and was enormously practically helpful in my career. It was also reassuring that my work matters to this person who's important and has influenced a lot of people. When she died, I thought, "Wow, that was someone who knew I was out there," because, you know, most of us write in relative obscurity. She was somebody not at all obscure, somebody at the center of American literature who knew I existed. It's kind of like when your parents and grandparents are alive and you do something and they care. They come to your performance, your game. You're a star or hero because they're out there, and then when they're gone, you're like, "Wait a minute, I'm not a hero in anybody's eyes anymore." So when I lost her and Harrison, my other big advocate, I thought I lost my audience, which was probably a miscalculation (laughs) looking back on it, to have people thirty years older than me as my primary audience.
Smith
Talking about audience, you write in your poem "Influence" that "writing poems is a lonely thing."
Johnson
For me, writing is probably a lot like people who have a rich, full, religious life. At least looking at it from the outside, the religious life is not how they think they're going to get ahead. I mean, they might. But that's not the point. And it's not even what will rescue them, although people use that term a lot. I think it's more how they make the most sense of their existence on a moment-to-moment basis. It's how they most fully occupy everything that happens, whether it's grief or joy. It's what gives meaning and how they live in their lives. And for me, writing is how I live in my life. I no sooner see something than it starts to take on language, even if I never write it down. And then when I do write it down, I feel even more deeply woven from the same fiber. I get to co-create the world with the creator of the world. If the creator of the world gives me all this, it's kind of what I was saying about landscape: You get all of this, and you get to be a partner. You get to make this experience together. So for me, that's a really private, interior world. Very much different from when you find an audience for the poem. That's wonderful. I'm not minimizing that. It's a great experience when someone reads the poem and they make a new world out of it. But initially, in the composing, it's you and your perceptions, just the two of you. That's really interior.
I had a play produced three years ago. It was intoxicating to have that private experience where you write and then these characters come to life. They were your imaginary friends, which is kind of a symptom of loneliness, I think, to have imaginary friends. I had Keats and all the people he knew, and I thought of them as friends. Still do. But then I give the script to the director, and she starts making decisions and finding things in it. Then I went to the audition and watched sixty or seventy people get up and try to inhabit these characters that were friends of mine, and then over the course of months—I think I went to seventy rehearsals—I watched their art, which is to take my art and then as partners make something out of it. By the end of it, there's this whole big group of us, so that was the opposite of lonely. That loneliness was hard to let go of. Actually, my walk to [Ritzville] was an attempt to shake that, to get back to solitude. Because the creative world had become this group thing, a composer with a symphony. So all this stuff that was in your head, you give over to these folks whose art is to try and make it right. Somebody asked me at the end if it matched [my] vision. I said I have no idea because this is now my vision. Whatever my vision was before, in my head Keats' voice is Blaine Nicols' voice. Fanny Brawn is Nicole Myers' voice. Inside of Wentworth place is the way that Sarah Goff saw it and designed it. So to go back to poetry, yeah, it is lonely. It's just you and a highway, and you're walking and walking.
Smith
As of late, I've been obsessed with music in poetry. Where I'm from in Louisiana, it feels like everyone's a musician, whether you have music ability or not.
Johnson
Well put.
Smith
If you can't play guitar, you can play the spoons. If you can't hold a tune, you can still sing in the choir, just in the back.
Johnson
Yeah.
Smith
So, for me, music takes on an extension of place, another texture of landscape. Reading your work, music comes up all the time. There's Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Van Morrison, Catfish Keith—
Johnson
Oh, yeah! Right!
Smith
So I'm really interested in how you think of songs and music in poetry, its functionality.
Johnson
Well, for me, emotional investment has to be at the core of art. I have to sense that there's emotional stakes. That's the reason I go to art. I bring my own emotional and spiritual life to art, so I'm looking for emotional stakes. The thing about music is the emotional investment is immediately there. With good music, it's immediate. You hear the beginning of Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic" or Willie Nelson's "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground," and immediately there's an emotional access, even before the first words come. As a writer, I've always envied that. That's what I'm going for, that feeling when music just takes you and emotionally it pulls you to itself.
Then with landscape, it's funny. There are certain songs that I only listen to in certain places. Probably the most important example is I only allow myself to listen to Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic" either in Marquette or going to Marquette. It's got all this maritime imagery in it: "When the foghorn blows, you know I'll be coming home." There's this duo, Jim and Ray, who've been playing since like 1977 in the same pizza lounge in Marquette. They're always playing that song. Now they play that song every time I show up because I've written a poem about it, and they're always teasing me. It's one of the songs I want played at my funeral. It's so connected. It's the song of the place. Like you were saying about Louisiana, music just comes up out of a location. I know it was written about Ireland, Van Morrison's home, but to me, it's now woven into how I understand and think about my adopted hometown in Upper Michigan.
Smith
You talk about "Into the Mystic" being played at your funeral. It's making me think about how much of your work feels elegiac, whether it be elegiac of people or places or scenes. When you're sitting down at the blank page, how often do you say, "I'm going to write an elegy," and how often does composition organically take you to elegy?
Johnson
I think they're all elegies. For me, all art is an elegy because you get to a certain point in your life that you realize that it's all going away all the time, including yourself and everyone else. Everything's an elegy. The most celebratory, ecstatic poem you can think of, "Ode to Joy," is an elegy because even as [the choir] is singing it, it's going away. I guess I have a whole lot of mortal awareness. It's one of the reasons Keats is so big for me. Full knowledge of the passing away of everything, to me, brings full awareness of everything. So some of them become more consciously elegies. This is going away; this is passing. [Train horns blasting] This train is passing. If that's the way you're always thinking, then elegy is going to come to the surface a lot.
When I lost my mom and grandfather in 2004, I think my work got even more consciously aware of elegy. I was aware of the temporal quality of everything fairly young in my life, but then once I actually lost people who weren't going to come back, then everything took on a new intensity and urgency. So you're right, but I think my deepest elegies are celebrations.
Smith
Like the poem "New You, New Me." You elegize your past self, but in service of celebrating your daughter.
Johnson
Yeah. I was thinking of Donald Hall's "My Son, My Executioner." Donald Hall, that's who I'd bubble wrap and keep him around. He was kind enough to correspond with me in my young twenties. I've let the correspondence go now, but I was thinking "My Son, My Executioner" when my daughter was born. I had this sense that I had a strong connection to my life and a strong sense of meaning in my life, and it was a whole lot of fun. I really went about enjoying myself as a twenty-two year-old. I think I say in the poem, "Make yourself a self you'll be nostalgic for." Part of that realization that everything is passing away is really motivating. I'm going to make this moment great because I'm going to be thirty or I'm going to die, right? So I better make this moment great at twenty-two. Then my daughter came along, and I realized, yeah, all that stuff was kind of "just" fun. [My daughter] was what I was waiting for. It's sort of an elegy for that life where you're primarily trying to fill it with trying to feel cool.
Olson
Never done it.
Johnson
I've always been heartbroken by that Neil Young line in "Keep on Rocking in the Free World" when he's talking about the junkie woman in the alley who is putting the kid away and is going to get a hit: "That's one more kid that'll never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool." Because being cool, man, that was so great. I wasn't at all cool when I was thirteen, fifteen, eighteen. But then in college, I guess I sort of decided what cool meant to me: poet, sleeping outside, living free. I redefined cool. It had to do with the woods, literature, collecting stuff on beaches. Then I went and did it. Then I had a kid, and I'm like, "All that was great, but this is the real thing."
Smith
Talking about defining cool, in your work, oftentimes, there's a value in finding something that you love that maybe no one else can love or at least that you love in your own specific way.
Johnson
That's actually a whole lot of the motivation for doing it. If someone said, "You know what, you're going to be blacklisted from publishing forever," I'd still do it because in doing it, you find stuff like this old Truck Rescue place. It's one thing to find it and look at it, but it's another thing to know it can give you language, that you and the Truck Rescue, together, can make this new thing that's a poem.
Jim Harrison used to talk about when he would drive all over America, he would stop to check in on thickets, unknown, uncelebrated, unnamed little thickets or ditches or stumps. They were just his, these places he'd stop in and check on. I think that's how to live, to have some little dirt road off the interstate in North Dakota, and every time you go by, you drive down there and you check in on this patch of ground. That's how to live. Writing can give you that. I suppose the same thing is true for photography or painting. My wife is a photographer. I go back to her work that she shot when we were living in Scotland. I think that place is still out there, and for a moment in time, they had a relationship and these photographs are what came out of it.
Smith
I would think that having a wife for a photographer is great for a poet, an artist in general, to understand the struggle, to get the desire to sit at a desk to brood.
Johnson
We've made a really wonderful partnership; I think in part because she's decided that the thing for her is her responsibility to others. She's a social worker. She works with kids. She gives to the world. The other thing she does that's really close to her heart and is sustaining for her is taking pictures. I've decided I'm going to give everything to my art, but I also teach. Teaching is really important to me and sustaining, and I would never want to give it up. But the main thing is the art, and the secondary is being responsible to others. She's the exact opposite. The main thing for her is being responsible to others. The thing that sustains her is art and her own private relationship to the world.
You guys write imagistically, so you know that you spend all this time trying to get something right—this rust, the oxidized wood, the way old tires smell after sitting here for twenty years in the sun—you try like crazy to get that right. Somebody comes along and photographs it. They get it just right in a second. So I'll look at something in her work and think, "She got it in a second."
Some of the most fun I've ever had regarding art was being her assistant. She had a solo gallery show in Michigan. I was her mounting and framing assistant. We had the whole dining room, all the flat surfaces, everything. We were mounting her work, going around piece to piece. We had rock and roll playing. God, it was a good time.
Smith
When I read your work, in my head, I hear Hugo in his "Letter to Peterson from Pike Place Market," and I'm paraphrasing, but he says, in spite of all my terrible mistakes, I know I've done the right thing by choosing to write poems in love with people and places and scenes. I feel like your work lives within that sentiment, too.
Johnson
Art is incredibly self-indulgent, to say this is my thing for me. People can say, "Well, other people read it." Kurt, for instance, had this cool experience where a woman read a poem of his and anonymously wrote to him from North Carolina and said, "You exactly got this thing that was really important to me." So we can hold on to such moments where we do something good for somebody else through our art, but the three of us know that's not why you do it. It's a wonderful bonus when that happens, when people say you're not selfish because your art helps others. You're like, "That's a side-effect." It is selfish, right? You do it because it's how you're most inside your life. You do it because you need to do it. You do it because it happens to make you a better person. However, I also feel this really strong sense of responsibility to others and this really strong sense of responsibility to the world. By having a subject and trying to be responsible to it, by trying to make other people live your work, to make a landscape find its language through you, to be a spokesperson for an old truck or a sky or bird, that's a great, wonderful responsibility. I share that with Hugo. A place is a thing that triggers. I share a lot of his methods, too. You just go out looking for it, walking or driving, and then let it find you.
Olson
When you talk about a sense of responsibility and you write about these places you've been before, about people you've known, how much worry or stress do you go through wondering if you're going to betray them or let them down?
Johnson
That's a great question. I very consciously separate the composing from the publishing. Generally in my life, I do that. Writing is my sacred space. Writing is so psychologically necessary, so interior like we were saying before. It's so private that the last thing I want to do is make it like so many other areas of my life where I'm self-conscious. How did that conversation go? Am I getting what I need out of the world? Is the world being good to me? The last thing I want to do is make my writing a part of that. So I've very consciously divorced my private writer life from my public writer life. I send stuff out, and it's great if it gets published and people read it, and I enjoy that. But I try to keep that as separate in my head as I can from writing. I keep editorial correspondence on a different desk. I do it at a different time of day, try very hard not to let it affect my writing. I treat it as biohazard because it could affect this thing that is sacred to me. So much of your life is infected by worrying about what other people think and how you're going to get by in life. When it comes to writing about people and the past and this question, "What will the impact of this be on them?" I think, "Well, I'm going to write it. And that's a question for later." If I publish it, how do I publish it? Do I need to change some things? Do I need to publish it where nobody will ever read it that knows them? Do I need to not put it in a book because they'll read my book? I don't think there's anyway around your subject matter except through it.
I can imagine someone walking into a Monet studio and going, "Again with the water lilies!" or "Oh, God! Now it's haystacks." The truth of the matter is, there's no way around it but through it. You have to create the thing that demands to be created until you're on the other side of it. I think it's the same thing with difficult material from your past or material that would expose other people. You create it, and then you worry about what to do. Someone might be like, "Okay, my grandma is still alive, so I'm going to wait to publish this when she's passed."
I've seen quite the opposite of that, and it's not pretty. I was teaching this undergraduate class this one time and thought it'd be good to have a final reading where all the students' families will show up. Even if the family doesn't quite get what the student is doing, I reserved the most dignified beautiful old room and had refreshments to serve. Sure enough, people started showing up wearing great, big belt buckles, great-aunts with walkers with tennis balls on the walker, all the family coming in. Well, there was this kid in the class who had written this short story that was about these people filming a pornographic video that involved a horse and a guy dying. I thought, surely the kid has the sense not to read that one. Sure enough, he read that thing. So then I thought, "Yeah, maybe we shouldn't keep doing these readings."
I think you have to have good sense about whether something is going to hurt people. It matters. People matter to me. I'm not one of those Machiavellian artists who thinks whatever it takes to become successful as an artist, I'll hurt who I have to hurt. People matter more than art to me. People are infinitely valuable. Art is almost infinitely valuable. It's valuable insofar as it helps people. But at the same time, there's no way to get through it without writing it.
Smith
Recently, I read an interview with Alison Pelegrin, who has three poems in our current edition. The interviewer asked her, in effect, if locally-focused poetry had a place in the canon, to which Pelegrin brought up an interesting counterpoint: What makes us deem someone a southern writer or a northwestern writer, but someone writing a poem on a subway in New York is able to escape the regional label? I'm paraphrasing here, of course. What makes a poem or poet "Northwest" or "Southern" or "Midwest" or the like, as opposed to just a poem or poet?
Johnson
Two things for me that are really important about that: One is a whole lot of [writing] starts local. Most of it starts local. Wordsworth was a Lake District poet. We think of Wordsworth as this great, canonical poet. I mean, there's Shakespeare. There's Wordsworth. Who else is there? There's a couple more in that same league of truly universal, at least among white, British guys, right? But as close as universal as you can get, we think of Wordsworth. This is a guy whose work goes everywhere with us. But Dove Cottage, Grasmere, the Lake District, that small bit of geography was his partner. It started out for him, just like it starts out for us, whether it's Spokane or Upper Michigan or Louisiana. You have to find a place where you connect with the world, where you start from.
When I went and visited all these places where Wordsworth had written, I was worried. These places were for me in the imagination, these visions that I've lived with all my life. My mom was a Wordsworth scholar and lover of his poems, so I've known him since I was a kid. Dove Cottage had always been there, Grasmere, the Lake District, Hawk's Head School. So when I went and actually saw them, I was concerned. I thought, is this going to wipe out all these wonderful, spiritual geographies in my head? And it didn't. It was a good pilgrimage. The spiritual versions of them were so strong that they endured and were fed by seeing the physical places.
On the other hand, I think it's useful to see the places to know, "Ah, it's the love; it's the tension; it's the art that makes it a spiritual place." I've taken students up to the Yaak Valley where Rick Bass writes about. We'd read Winter and then went up to the Yaak Valley. It's vast, and it's beautiful, but it's not anybody else's paradise. It's Bass's paradise. So we show up. We go to the Dirty Shame Saloon he writes about and we go, "Okay, this is just a place." Right? We thought we were going to show up and it be the interior of Bass's heart. It's not. The interior of his heart is the interior of his heart. The creation of a book like Winter is a partnership between a place like that and him. It creates that third thing.
The other thing I think that's worth talking about since you brought up New York and what makes poetry of a place, one of the reasons it's so wonderful to have things like Poetry in the Schools and have young people writing poems and poetry slams and what I like to call street poetry of every place—whether its Sprague, Washington or Chicago or New York or Seattle—is that American Art gives us the message that American life happens in a tiny little geographical location. American life happens in Los Angeles, New York, occasionally in a suburb of a city. If you look at film, television, and rock n roll, that's where American life is said to happen. Well, if you're a high school student in Sprague, Washington, you get the message that your life is not the material of art. It doesn't have that same quality to it that some other kid's life has who's going to high school in L.A. You bring a poet into the schools or you give them a poem by somebody who grew up there, and there's this opening up, this, "Oh my God! I could look at my life as rich in meaning and worthy of art and maybe as necessary for art." Because, unlike a movie where there has to be this big capitalistic investment, or unlike rock n roll that requires you to tap into this network to make it happen, poetry you can make it happen with nothing. You can make it happen with the raw materials you've had from the time you were four. So the fact that anybody can do it drives a lot of poets up the wall because you spend your whole life trying to get it right to then live with the fact that anyone can come along at anytime and say, "Well, I'm a poet, too." But that's a great thing because poetry is an art that says, "Hey, even though it's not celebrated by the art of the bigger culture, your experience in some corner of the Northwest counts, too. It has worth."
Smith
In what way are you currently pushing yourself as a writer and to what direction?
Johnson
Focus. As a younger writer, I was really attracted to that thing that Ted Hughes talks about in "The Thought Fox" where you just follow your thoughts like you're following the tracks of a fox through the snow. I love that. But in the last few years, I've really been attracted to writers of incredible focus. Writers like Wisława Szymborska, for example, who can say, "This is what I'm writing about" and can sit comfortably with a subject until the subject or the moment or whatever it is that's the focus gives up more and more layers of itself and depth. So trying to sit still, my mind flits around erratically. So I'm trying to sit still with a subject and let it give up its truths rather than moving along at seventy miles an hour trying to grab the next truth. That is what I'm trying to do in poetry, specifically.
Also, writing in other genres. I can write poetry for about three or four hours. At that point, I find that I'm usually not very productive. I'm working on two words again and again that I look at them the next day and think, "I spent all that time on that and nothing ever came of it?" So three or four hours, I'm done writing poetry. But I've found when I'm not teaching and have the time, I can write for seven or eight hours in a day, but not poetry. Poetry will always be home base, but working in more genres—fiction, non-fiction, play writing—to complement my poetry.
Then subjects. You know, writing about characters and people and how they change over time, that gives itself so much over to fiction. To have this imaginative world that you can step into that's only yours that you carry around with you all the time, when you're working on a story, there's nothing quite like that. It's this thing where there's a bunch of people in your imagined world who are doing something right now and you're the only person that knows about them. You're the only one that gets to go back and forth. I like doing that.
Smith
I love when characters and speakers show up in your poems, too. You make it to where the reader can inhabit all these characters and lives.
Johnson
Well, literature is the art, more than any other, that trains the empathetic imagination. Literature is the art that puts us in other lives and other perspectives. I'm jealous of musicians because music has that immediate emotional access. It takes you to its emotional place quicker than any other art. But what literature has for it is, more than any other art, it can make you know what it is to be another human being, or at least have some idea of what it means to be a person in China or a different race or gender or different values. To me, that makes it, in some ways ironically, the least lonely of the arts. You read something that somebody wrote who's long-gone, and they're in you for a little while or you in them.
Olson
How very Tao: To create poetry, you must be lonely so you can actually look into another so that when the art is made, you're not lonely. It's circling my head.
Johnson
Yeah, well, loneliness is the thing that brings us together, right? We're all going to die, and we're all alone, [laughing] together. That's what we share. Every single person is alone in profound and deep ways.
Olson
You end "Getting Further from the Idaho Line" by saying, "both of us knowing you can't sing to the land if it kills you." Do you need a sense of removal from a place? Is there a way to go back to those places and reclaim them? Or do you think in order to keep them the way they are in your memory, you need to stay away?
Johnson
That's a beautiful question because the answer is both. It's a terrible paradox. When I go back and walk in to Vangos, Jim and Ray are playing. They're a little more gray, but it's the same smell from the fryer, the same room, the same place as it was when I was in high school. And Jim and Ray are singing the same music: old Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, Clapton. It's like no one has to get any older and no one has to die. It's the most wonderful feeling to have your memory line up with your experience.
On the other hand, more and more, places are not places, but they're times. It's difficult for me to go to our farm in Idaho as the years pile up because that place, for me, is actually the time when we were raising Anya in the cabin by candlelight, warming up her bath water on the wood stove, my grandparents alive just down the road in the farm house, or when I was fourteen and learning how to drive by driving the '65 Chevy pickup truck when we'd feed hay to the cows. That time is actually the place. That makes it difficult for it not to be how it was.
People ask Marilynne Robinson if she goes back to Sandpoint, Idaho, which is where Housekeeping was set. She says, "No, because it's not a physical location. For me, Sandpoint, Idaho, is when I was a kid." So you can't go back there.
It's important for me to spend time in Marquette, Michigan on the shore of Lake Superior. If I can, most years, I try to be in the Highlands of Scotland where my mom's extended family lives. The reason for that is to go through the changes with the place. The thing I don't want to have happen is to go back to Marquette and feel that kind of alienation because it's changed out from under me. A lot of friends from high school and college go back and go, "Ah, man. That used to be the this and that used to be the this." To me, it did. The big, organic food yuppie co-op store where you can get two-dollar yogurt, used to be Dick's Family Foods. My friend Brian Gunther used to drive his Suburban to plow the lot. He'd come get us on Friday night with the plow down so he could get through the snow, and we'd go out to the movies. But I saw the changes. I'd go often enough to watch the landscape change. So for me, it's both the past and the present reconciled because I migrate through the places.
I think human beings are migratory. I think, like a lot of animals, we evolved going to various places for various reasons and through various seasons. So for me, it's really healthy to leave a place and miss it and attempt to come to terms with it from a distance—
Smith
To write both elegy and ode.
Johnson
Elegy and ode. Exactly. Then you come back, and you're renewed. You're restored in a place for a while.
You're going to be doing that with Louisiana.
Smith
I hope so. That's the "plan."
Johnson
Your writing, I think, will get more complicated and nuanced and richer for having had missed the place and for also being free from of it. For all of the things that it does to you, requires of you, and imposes upon you, to be physically free of that for a while will allow you a kind of access.
My parents moved school to school as they went through graduate programs, so I grew up in student family housing at this university or that, my parents broke graduate students through most of my childhood. But in the summer, we'd come to North Idaho, and it was the opposite kind of existence. It would be very physical. Smells of hay, the woods, the trucks, the flannel shirts. Then I'd be back on a university campus with cinder block walls, which was wonderful, too, it turns out. Then we moved to Marquette later in my childhood. I deliberately fell in love with that place. But then I was twin-hearted: I had North Idaho, and I had North Michigan. Then at forty years old, I discovered the glen in the Scottish Highlands where I have all this family. Sheep farmers who've been there since the thirteenth century. So I fell in love with that place. Now I've got this circuit of places that have this huge hold on me. Because I don't stay in any of them permanently, they stay both real and imaginative.
Smith
I think you have to have that distance to allow yourself some sort of myth making about the places.
Johnson
Yeah, well put. The best love letters you write to the girl is when she's away for the summer. The love letters you write when you're going to see her in third period, meh, but the love letters when she's away, those are the ones.
Olson
"Do you want to kiss now?" "No, I want to write a poem about a kiss."
Johnson
Yeah, yeah. No, be in the moment. Be in the now.
Jonathan Johnson’s poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry, published in recent issues of Plough-shares, Southern Review, Witness, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Missouri Review and Gettysburg Review, and read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. His books include the poetry collections Mastodon, 80% Complete (Carnegie Mellon, 2001) and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves (Carnegie Mellon, 2010), and a memoir, Hannah and the Mountain (Nebraska, 2005). Ode, his play about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, premiered in 2013 as part of the GetLit! Literary Festival. He teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University and migrates between Washington, the Lake Superior Coastal town of Marquette, Michigan, and his ancestral village of Glenelg in the Scottish Highland where his extended family are still crofters.