Poetry for All Transcript for episode 18: Jenny Johnson, “Dappled Things” Joanne: Hello I’m Joanne Diaz. Abram: And I’m Abram Van Engren. Joanne: And this is Poetry For All. Abram: In this podcast, we read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and read it one more time. Joanne: Today, we are excited to welcome Jenny Johnson to the podcast to discuss her extraordinary poem, “Dappled Things.” Jenny is the author of _In Full Velvet,_ she is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. She teaches at West Virginia University and the Rainier Writing Workshop. Welcome, Jenny. Jenny: Thanks for having me. Abram: It’s great to have you with us today, Jenny. And I was wondering if you could do us the honor of reading your poem for us. [Jenny reads "Dappled Things" from _In Full Velvet_.] Joanne: Whooo, bravo! That was so good! *laughs* Jenny: Thank you. Joanne: Wow! What a beautiful example. I don’t know how you feel about longer poems, I love long poems, precisely because quite often there’s a focus on shorter lyrics. And then you don’t really get a chance to see the kind of energy and excitement that a longer poem, even with lyric elements a longer poem can create, and I think that’s why I love this poem so much. Jenny: Thank you. Abram: Yeah, precisely because of its long form, you get these kinds of movements. You get joy, you get sorrow, you get wondering. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about how you constructed this poem, as you were going about making it. First of all, of course this conversation with Gerard Manley Hopkins that you’re having. But also the way in the poem moves, from one kind of stanza to the next, one sort of emotion to the next. Jenny: I was reading a book called _Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity_ by Bruce Bagemihl and so I was just immersed in all of these just, delicious facts about difference in the natural world. So that was one obsession that was in the air, and then I was simultaneously reading Gerard Manley Hopkins and it was during a time when I was really busy teaching, and didn’t have a ton of time to write. And so I had this poem that I was saying to myself, and I – and then simultaneously I was just thinking about animals and difference and Hopkins's poem "Pied Beauty" is a poem in which he’s celebrating difference in the natural world. He’s also praising God, and I started to think it would be really interesting to talk to back him. But at the same time, I’m living in a moment where I can’t not think about the climate crisis, then I felt like it couldn’t be just a poem of praise. It would need to simultaneously be a poem of lament. And then that felt like “oh I can’t do that in one short lyric poem.” Abram: As Joanne knows, Hopkins is one of my favorite poets, and as you read through his shorter lyrics, he does some similar movements but they are separated by different poems. So he’ll have a poem like "Pied Beauty," that’s all praise. But then he’ll have another poem that was thinking about the way in which we trampled the earth and separated ourselves from nature. And so you sort of have to read different poems of Hopkins back to back. And here in a long-form poem, we get those movements put together. And so I’m curious about where those movements end and how they end. So one of the places I marked, as one of those moments, you start reading about ecological disaster and climate change, and so forth, and then you say “Have I come to terms with dominance?” And suddenly we’re into a different kind of conception. Jenny: Yeah, yeah, when I was writing this poem, I was having so much fun at the beginning. Just celebrating. And then I was like, “alright Jenny… let’s be honest.” You just start when you’re thinking about ecology. What is natural? What is normal? What is invasive? Am I invasive? And then it gets more complicated. I didn’t think the poem could solve all the problems, but I felt like I needed to let that complexity in if I were to write a poem that felt honest. Abram: Can I just follow up on that? Because what I LOVE is there’s a final turn there. So you ask, very near the end, “Where is hope?” And that’s what gets us thinking about this image of this frog. Could you unpack that last page, that last couple of stanzas, and how this poem comes to a close? Jenny: Sure, and I feel like I should share for your listeners, I was listening to NPR one day, and there was an episode, and it was about the female Gastric Brooding Frog, which is now extinct. Which was a kind of frog that scientists were trying to bring back to life. Joanne: Wow. Abram: Huh. Jenny: And the fact I learned about the female Gastric Brooding Frog, is that the frog, the mother, could transform her stomach into a womb. So the mother would swallow her own eggs, and then after several weeks of metamorphosis, she would give birth to fully formed froglets out of her mouth. So if you Google “Female Gastric Brooding Frog,” you’ll find pictures on the internet of a frog with tiny little froglets in the mouth, like about to hop out. So, *laughs* sometimes you have an image, when you’re writing a poem, and you’re like “that’s where it’s gonna have to end. I don’t know how.” But I had this impulse. Abram: Well! Talk about all things counter-original, spare and strange. Jenny: Right, right! Like this is a strange being that also is joyful and amazing to think about. That’s not with us anymore. That’s not with us anymore because of people! So, at the end, I guess the turn at the end, was one of trying to imagine the self as that frog, part of the stream of human life. Abram: One of the things I noticed is that so much of naming and celebrating, especially at the beginning, these various forms of things. And also it’s a poem that has its own form to it. You’re taking a similar sort of form to "Pied Beauty," and then replicating it over these different pages. And then we end with this line “And nameless forms / this future that’s not yet sketched out / and might break away from any sense of our ability to name it to know it to shape it.” But it also leads me to think about the form of this poem itself. And the various formal features that you’re using, both in terms of the structure and the lines, the way it looks like "Pied Beauty," for example. But also the sounds and the rhythms and the rhymes and assonance and so on. Could you say a little bit more about how you structured the form of this poem? Jenny: Sure! So again, since I had decided I was gonna take a nod from Gerard Manley Hopkins, something that interested me about Hopkins is that he was kind of a troublemaker, when it came to form. And I love a troublemaker. He wasn’t satisfied with the traditional sonnet, so he experimented with both lengthening and shortening the form. A sonnet is typically 14 lines, but his shortened version, which is called the curtal sonnet, is 11 lines. And he was so obsessive about wanting to come up with his own version, that he even had a math equation that he had come up with to figure out the proportions of it. And I just love that! I just love that he was so fixated on reinventing a form. And then I had to think about why? Why does he want to make the sonnet, which is usually 14 lines shorter? And the thing that strikes me is that his curtal sonnets have an elevated intensity. Everything has to be packed into those 11 lines. And it allows for sounds to really crash into each other. That was something that I was interested in playing with. And I felt like Hopkins gave me permission to do that. Rather than write this as a more free verse, narrative poem, reflecting about these concerns. It just let me try to say it by letting sounds crash together. Which has an elevated intensity in terms of exuberance, but also in terms of weight and the grief. Joanne: That is so helpful to hear you describe that process. Every page just feels electric with sound to my ear, and it’s so enjoyable. But also it feels like it’s useful to you, to think about how sound relates to the content and the tensions of the poem you’re creating. I’m looking at the section of the poem that begins, “I kiss my hand to male bonobos making out in public.” And I just started making a list of all the related linked up sounds, you know, kink, click, clook, brink, tall, tale, build, roll, kill…Is that a way that you’re naturally inclined to think, as a poet? Do you think in an auditory way about how sound guides what you’re writing about? Was this exceptionally amplified in what you did with this poem? Jenny: Yeah, so this poem was an exception. Because I decided I was going to write these sequences of little tightly packed 11 line sonic explosions, it just gave me permission… To sometimes, as a poet, too much alliteration, or too much assonance, that might seem like too much. That might seem too indulgent or too sing-songy, or like a nursery rhyme or something. Then I thought, Hopkins did it. I’m gonna try it. I’m gonna feel, I’m gonna let him give me permission. That’s a thing I think that reading allows for. It gives us permission. So I feel like he gave me permission to just try it, and to not hold back, and if something sounded kind of silly like “my black billed magpie babble-singing to my begging call,” to just own it and just go for it. That felt new, to try that. Abram: One of the things that I often say to people who don't typically read poetry much, or are new to it, is to listen to it first. Before they try to make sense of it. And just hear it, and hear the music of it. One of the things I love about this poem is that you’re explicit about the fact that you’re making music, and that you have been given permission to make music through Hopkins. And so I love these lines, “and because I’m ??? this morning the gay old music, thanks old Hop, for this THISNESS, for teaching attention, how to mark hard word bodies with stress, acute glyphs, blues chords.” I love those lines! But it also draws my attention in this poem, to some of the values you have as a writer. And some of the values that are coming out in this. And so one of those values right there, is for teaching attention. The idea of paying attention. Jenny: I do believe if we pay close attention to something, even if it’s a tree, and this is getting, I mean, I feel like Hopkins thought this, because he had this whole theory of inscape, and like, the power of looking, and being with the world around him. So like, he taught me that. But also Martin Buber also writes about the “I” and the “thou,” as a space where, rather than seeing something in an objective sense, you see something even if it’s a tree, where the tree has subjectivity too. Joanne: This is a poem that is constantly reaching out to sentient and non-sentient beings, whether it’s apples, wild sweet williams, a flower, hammerhead storks, bonobos, house sparrows, but also to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and to some of his own language like “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.” Does that come from one of his journals? Jenny: It does come from one of his journals, yes. Joanne: Yeah, so, there’s a way that you’re bringing in his, or not just some of his formal and aesthetic interests, but his actual voice. And bringing in the visit to the friend who’s been ill, bringing in the lover, it’s just such an all-encompassing sort of vision, that again, in a tighter, smaller narrative, or perhaps a small lyric poem, it would be difficult to achieve, no? Jenny: Yeah, I think that absolutely. I think of long poems, and sequences as an opportunity to enquire. To try to solve whatever questions are looming large in my heart. And so, sometimes I feel like I just can’t resolve in one page. The long poem allows for a kind of prismatic looking and thinking. Because you turn the page, and you can make a turn, and be like “oh but what about this?” And turn the page, “well what about THIS?” It sorta gives the space for going in all the different directions of inquiry. Abram: Well with all that said, would you be willing to read the poem again? Jenny: I would be happy to, and this has been such a good conversation. Thank you both! ["Dappled Things" from _In Full Velvet_] Abram: Thank you so much, and thank you Jenny, for being with us today. Jenny: Thank you both! Abram: And thanks to Sarabande Books for granting us permission to read this poem, which appears in Jenny Johnson’s book In Full Velvet. You can learn more about Jenny Johnson and her poetry on the Poetry For All website at poetryforall.fireside.fm. Joanne: And please remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Abram: Thank you for listening.