"The Third Throne of Heaven" by Denis Johnson

More than thoughts on Denis Johnson's work, here's some thoughts on poetry.

Is it just me who thinks that poetry can save the whole world?  Or at least that the experience of poetry is synonymous with the experience of life itself?

Poetry is hard.  Life is hard.  Poetry is mysterious.  Life is mysterious.

As Wallace Stevens said:

. . . A more severe
more harrasing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
of poetry is the theory of life

Or as my great poetry teacher Joanna Klink liked to say at the end of her emails:  "take care of your poetry and take care of yourself, which is the same thing you know."

It's too bad that hardly anyone reads poetry books for pleasure anymore.  It teaches you a lot.

When I read though the Denis Johnson book of poetry, I liked 10 out of the 128 poems.  Roughly one out of every 13.  Those are low odds, but it's worth it.  (Once again, poetry is like life:  1 out of every 13 dates you go on is a good one, 1 out of every 13 days of teaching is a good one, 1 out of every 13 songs you listen to is a good one, etc.  It's a reminder to keep slogging through all that doesn't work for you, because it's the only way to get to what finally does.)

Poetry mysterious, and we need a lot more of that in our world. Sitting in the mysterious, in the unknown, in the transcendent, in what can't be defined--that's what we crave.  But these days we like to quantify and mechanize and measure everything (this is why high school English is so unpopular), and we're paying a high psychic price for it.

I don't know why the following lines from Denis Johnson work for me, but they do.  And I don't want to know why--because if I tried to break down the reasons, the magic would disappear.

From "The Risen"

How sad, how beautiful
the sea
of tumbling astronauts,
their faces barred
and planed and green amid
the deep

From "The White Fires of Venus"

The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
the bayonet:  gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.

From "What This Window Opens On"

among the trembling organs
of a captured bird

A book called "The Keep" by Emily Wilson is another great example (for me).  I read through the book, not really getting it, not really resonating with anything . . . and then one poem, for some unknown reason, grabbed me (making the whole book worth it):

"Radical Field" Emily Wilson

We have tenuous edges. 

We have striated hides. 

Glandular black ribbons all
inside us,
pelagic and sweet. 

We have reservoirs you can't see. 

The caribou move
through us beyond
numerous. 

One of the cortical
adumbrations,
one of the ferns. 

Our heaviest metals accumulate. 

We wouldn't dream.