Write Stuff: Devin Johnston

I grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and I now live in the Tower Grove neighborhood of St. Louis with my wife, Andrea, our dog Edie, two hens, and two children. I went to graduate school for literature in Chicago, and I was always a reader and writer. But I have as much affinity for music and visual art (to listen and look, as I have no great skill with either). Right now, for instance, I'm sitting in the kitchen and listening to Paul Clayton's "Whaling and Sailing Songs" from the Days of Moby-Dick, while doodling a picture of my dog.

I teach poetry, through both literature and creative writing classes at SLU. I am also involved in the Prison Education Program, organizing a speakers series and some workshops at local prisons. That experience has been deeply rewarding these past ten years. Outside of the university, I'm an editor for Flood Editions, a nonprofit publisher of poetry, art, essays and short fiction.

Mosses and Lichens was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux last year. I wrote the poems in my mid-forties, and I think they reflect an experience of midlife. Some of the poems often take place at the edges of human community, where things break down or run wild. Some are distinctly Midwestern, as I naturally draw from what's close at hand. But the book is also a miscellany, a collection of poems that emphasizes variety (of forms, subjects, tones) as much as coherence. It includes some passages of translation from Ovid's Metamorphoses, brief lyrics, sonnets, sequences, sketches . . .

I couldn't begin! The English poet Roy Fisher has a poem that begins, "Style? I couldn't begin . . . Those intricacies / of self and sign. The power to mimic / and be myself. I couldn't." Style is important, but it's difficult for me to characterize my own. That said, I aspire to concision, condensation, and musicality. I tend toward song structures, sensory images, and to words that have sharp edges. My poems rely on shades of irony, by which I mean, sympathetic recognitions of tensions and contradictions. My poems tend to be observant, rather than declarative. I trust readers to sound the poems, and then to feel the implications of the words.

In my twenties—the 1990s—I wrote a great deal, read a great deal, published only a few poems, and shared my work with a few friends. I developed slowly, without an audience. That was lucky, as I needed time to explore and experiment. My first book was published in 2001, in Australia. I traveled to Sydney to give readings, and I was a poet in public for the first time, on the other side of the world. Since then, I can mostly trace my development in terms of the challenges I set myself: to learn certain forms, to try more narrative modes, to find ways of approaching edges of experience that I haven't yet.

I think everyone comes to poetry and poetic thinking in early childhood, in the first unfurling of language. Kids tend to love rhyme, patterned language, puns, wordplay. Many people decide to set poetry aside, or get told it's not useful, or become embarrassed by it, in the teenage years. Most people never return to it again. I wrote poems from a young age, and for reasons I can't trace, I never stopped.  What's the appeal? Poetry brings together the dreaming mind and the waking mind. It's like a trance, induced by a phrase or rhythm, produced through a sort of exuberance. Poetry offers solvable, even seductive problems. A half-finished poem is a good sort of problem to have.

I'm not the sort of person who gives much advice, and I am not really an evangelist for poetry. But I do think people need creative expression in their lives, in whatever form. It can be dangerous, to disregard that whole part of ourselves, in favor of more practical concerns. The danger is usually unhappiness. If someone is drawn to poetry, as a reader or writer, I mostly suggest they find a scale that fits their days. It might be haiku, which takes about three seconds to read. Basho, Buson, and Issa are wonderful, and Hiroaki Sato's book On Haiku is a good introduction.

Happily, most of what I teach is poetry, whether in creative writing or literature courses. I think my experience as a writer gives me access to the craft of it. I encourage students take a poem apart to see how it works. As a poet, I tend to worry less about critical interpretation, and more about a poem's presence: the effect of a poem on us, as an experience.

Poetry is one ongoing conversation, with the living and the dead. The poets I find useful, that have influenced my work, include too many to list. But these influences are mostly submerged when I turn to writing: I don't consciously think about them, but I sometimes think through them, making use of something I may have learned long ago.