The Perplexities of Language: An Interview with Kimberly Johnson
By Doug Talley

Dr. Kimberly Johnson teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University and was the featured poet of last month’s column, a review of her first book of poems, Leviathan with a Hook, published in 2002 by Persea Books. She is also a recipient of the Eisner Prize in Poetry, the Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.  The following interview explores several themes of her book and her approach to poetry.

MERIDIAN: At the outset of Leviathan with a Hook you invoke the Book of Job with an epigraph that identifies the title’s allusion: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” This is a richly layered allusion, set in that section of Job, which embodies God’s great interrogation of humanity. You pose the question in the epigraph and would then seem to try to answer that question with your poems.  How do you see your poems responding to the question? 

JOHNSON: I conceived Leviathan with a Hook as a twenty-first century revisitation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, a text that is deeply concerned with the efficacy of language and its capacity to name things. Famously, Milton’s text introduces different meanings for words after the Fall, indicating that the Fall is a linguistic phenomenon as much as it is a spiritual one. I was interested in considering that point from the perspective of a period that is already wholly suspicious of language. Think of Bill Clinton quibbling over the meaning of the word “is.” The cultural skepticism that is a hallmark of our media age manifests itself particularly in a distrust of language. I certainly think of language as a patently flawed system, one that we sort of agree to adopt for convenience’s sake, but which fails at every turn to communicate accurately. But that has consequences if you believe Wittgenstein’s view that we can know nothing outside of language. Certainly human life is populated by experiences that exceed language. The challenge is, how to record these moments of … for lack of a better word, sublimity without doing them violence. The epigraph from Job is meant to be a little brash. To acknowledge the impossibility of the task (we humans are set up, through this imperfect communicative system, to fail) but to assert the endeavor nonetheless. The book makes an attempt to record sublimity. 

MERIDIAN: In one sense the image of leviathan, the great whale, is a symbol of the power and glory of God, and you would seem to pose an additional question, whether or not there might be some hook — some word or metaphor or trick of language — that might draw our understanding of God to the surface from the deep unknown for greater illumination. Do you feel that poetry has that power, to surface some understanding of God? 

JOHNSON: I don’t think of poetry and spirituality as ethically related, honestly. My interests are almost exclusively representational, and it’s a consequence of — I guess the Western canon and its concerns … that I end up conducting my linguistic explorations in terms that seem spiritual to some, naturalistic or environmentally conscious to others. By which I mean that the poetry I study as a professional specialty (Donne, Crashaw, Herbert, Milton, etc. — I took my Ph.D. in Renaissance literature) happens to negotiate these representational issues in largely spiritual terms. It’s not really surprising — at the heart of all art lies, I think, the idea of transcendence, even if it’s just the transcendence of an idea from out of one consciousness and into another. So the pursuit of something transcendent leads more or less naturally to the pursuit of the central (and invisible) transcendent term of Western culture: God.

MERIDIAN: The last section of the book is entitled “Eastward,” alluding to the phrase in the Book of Genesis, “eastward in Eden”, where “God planted a garden” and “put the man [and woman] whom he had formed.” The section then proceeds with two poems offering rather startling declarations:  “Speak as a spider” and “Mercy is the termite.” Conventionally, we might view the image of a spider or termite corrupting that first garden, but you seem intent on challenging such conventional notions and suggest that the elements of destruction are not corrupting, but rather almost sanctifying. Can you elaborate on the paradox?

JOHNSON: Well, it’s a paradox that Genesis justifies. Yes, we are told that the Garden is “eastward,” but then in 3.24, when Adam and Eve are ejected from the Garden, they’re sent even further east, and a flaming sword guards the eastern gate of the Garden. So east is either a direction of hope or of abjection in Genesis. To take a purely languagey stance, if all representation does some violence (as I believe it does) then it’s inevitable that destruction becomes entwined with creation. (Example: I describe a sunset to you, but it’s impossible for me to describe it fully, because it occurs in time so by the time I describe something it’s changed, plus I’ve got limited perspective, etc., etc., all adding up to a description of a sunset that can never really re-present the sunset.  I’ve done violence to the sunset in attempting to capture it.) But since the project of this book is to plunge forward anyway, then it must embrace the destruction, and try to use it as a part of the creation. God does it — he’s always talking out of a whirlwind, a burning bush, the Logos that gets destroyed in order to create… always a catastrophe of some sort.

MERIDIAN:A number of lines actually seem to welcome the idea of destruction, again in the image of Job’s whirlwind, as the means by which life, after shock and jarring, both recovers and progresses, as suggested in the initial untitled poem:

“After the tornado …

Wreckage. A wash
of small lives amplified.”  

as also in the final poem, “Confirmation as a Sign of Spring”:

These poems observe simple facts: after the tornado, “Tadpoles ripple / the water in the gutters” and “Bees pour honeyed from the hive,” and yet these simple facts suggest broader and deeper ramifications. They seem almost therapeutic, a kind of healing balm after tragedy. Does poetry have the power to help cope with pain? 

JOHNSON: I recognize that many people are soothed by poetry, by art generally perhaps. Aristotle suggested that art is necessary to relieve pain or anger, that it provides a sort of social service by offering catharsis. And I experience a sort of humane tenderness when I read certain works, like Marilynne Robinson’s recent Gilead, an appreciation for the suggestion of human potential and goodness even in their composition. But as a writer I don’t use poetry to exorcise, or exercise, any personal stuff.  It’s not autobiography for me. It’s a formal means of figuring out some pretty complex ideas about the way language works. 

MERIDIAN: On the acknowledgement page at the end of the book you thank your family for teaching you the names of things. How did your family go about this teaching and how has it made a difference in your writing?

JOHNSON:My family are very verbal, and there were a number of different kinds of discourse floating through our house. My dad is a science type. My mom is more literary. And they both come from rural backgrounds, so there’s this rich vernacular that contributes to, or grounds, the more heady kinds of speech. I learned a lot of nouns. It always seemed important to them to call things by their right names.

MERIDIAN: Tell us about your obvious fascination with words, words like plinth and gabinule. Is that fascination something that developed naturally early in your life and was it also encouraged by your family?

JOHNSON: I am, at heart, a science person myself. Most of my undergraduate work was in the sciences. There’s something appealing to me about the kind of attentiveness one brings to bear on minute things in the hard sciences. But language opened up for me when I began to understand it as a system that can be attended to with the same microscopic fascination that one uses in a laboratory. It’s the quest for the ever-elusive specificity again. It’s what’s led me to learn ancient languages, as opposed to more useful languages: the desire to know the little contributory parts.

MERIDIAN: It would seem that a focus on naming things, on pointing out the objects of the natural world and their relationships, would tend to joyfulness — as in the scripture, “Yea, all things which come of the earth … are made … to gladden the heart … and to enliven the soul.” (D&C 59:18-19). Do you think this is one of the elements of your work that makes it seem so joyous? 

JOHNSON:Well there’s a pleasure, isn’t there, in these kinds of play?  It’s not unlike making mudpies — very messy, and very fun.  And the challenge of the project in general is stimulating to me. These kinds of intellectual work — these georgics of the mind, as Francis Bacon called them — are endlessly pleasurable to me. It’s the delight of creation, being able to look at some connections you’ve stumbled upon and to call them good.

MERIDIAN: You have recently finished a translation of the Georgics of Virgil. What about that book prompted your interest?

JOHNSON: All the things you’d expect — its density, its fusion of art and science, its wrought syntax and overt difficulty, the work that I had to do to find modern approximations for Virgil’s language. 

MERIDIAN: Has the work of translating Virgil made you a better poet?

JOHNSON: While I was translating, I was freed from the mandate to figure out where the poem was going, and had to concentrate on getting each line to sound right, to sustain a music.  I had to render Virgil’s syntax in a way that approximated the Latin without making the English incomprehensible. Those concerns taught me a lot about line structure, and even more about compression in my own language.

MERIDIAN: Would you recommend translating other poetry as a means to improve as a writer? 

JOHNSON: I would certainly recommend translation if the writer has a good grasp of the original language, and if the writer is willing to let the other language dictate the translation rather than imposing too much of the translator’s sensibilities onto the translation. That process, I think, allows for the most learning.

MERIDIAN: Tell us who some of your favorite poets are and why.

JOHNSON:  Gerard Manley Hopkins. John Milton. John Donne. John Berryman. What unites these writers, aside from the name John, is that they wear their difficulty on their sleeves.  I am attracted to work that requires something from me, that urges me into activity rather than lulls me with loveliness.  Which is not to say that these poets don’t provide loveliness:  I can’t think of anything more lovely than this sonnet by Hopkins:

 But despite the seductions of its lines, it ain’t easy.

MERIDIAN: Throughout this interview I have been tempted to call you Dr. Johnson, as it makes me naturally think of the famous literary friendship of Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Do you see a value in developing friendship with other writers? What do you learn by your association with them? Can there be a healthy “rivalry” with other poets?

JOHNSON: I have a handful of writer-friends. I picked up one during graduate school at Johns Hopkins — David Greenberg, whose wonderful Planned Solstice was released as part of the University of Iowa Kuhl House Poetry Series. I picked up another during graduate school at Iowa — Jay Hopler, winner of this year’s Yale Younger Poets Prize for his dazzling manuscript Green Squall. In addition to being writers whose work I pantingly admire, these two poets are great readers of poetry, and more to the point, they are fabulous readers of my work. By which I mean that they understand the projects I’m seeking to accomplish with my writing and they are able to provide acute, relevant feedback. My relationships with Greenberg and Hopler are of immeasurable poetic value (and personal value, because they’re great people). But I feel fortunate to have lucked into friendship with these poets — there are lots of other poets out there with whom I’m friendly, and whose work I may admire, but we don’t share a sort of mental approach to poetry. In my experience, there are mutually productive poetic friendships, and then there are cordial poetic acquaintances, and then there are polite poetic near-indifferences. I don’t see how I could have a “healthy rivalry”: if the other poet is stimulating my work in some way, the rivalry vanishes and it becomes a friendship. (That goes for poets I don’t know personally as well, like Hopkins.) If the poet doesn’t stimulate my work, s/he drops off my radar.

MERIDIAN: What do you see as the value of literary criticism?

JOHNSON: Of course my response is based upon my being a practicing literary critic, so my bias will show. But for me, literary criticism done well illuminates a text so that it continues to give pleasure to readers. Criticism that is elegant and well-constructed, contextualizing the literary work and sustaining its interpretive life — that’s an art form in and of itself. Much current criticism, of course, is written in plodding prose, and one wishes that were not the case because it gives the sense that literary criticism takes place in a highly specialized language and serves only a small set of elite readers. Which perhaps it does, these days, but it shouldn’t.

I also want to say that I cannot write poetry unless I’m also working on some critical project.  My brain requires stimulation of its critical cortex in order to produce poetry.

MERIDIAN: Tell us about your writing habits. How do you work through a poem? Do you encounter blocks and if so, how do you overcome them?

JOHNSON:  I write while I’m running, usually, because my body is participating in a predetermined rhythm. I revise in the car, which is one of the few places I’m ever alone. I keep lists of words that seem to me to be, in some way, connected — though their connection is not yet clear as I begin work on a poem. The work of the poem is to tease out their relationship and write them together. I write very slowly — I consider finishing a poem in six months to be a success — so it’s hard to identify periods of “blockage.” Mostly, I figure that I just haven’t found the word necessary to proceed, so I go through my day with my language antennae up and wait for it. That feels like active work to me, so I don’t tend to regard it as a block. 

MERIDIAN: What are your aims and aspirations as a writer? 

JOHNSON: These poems would come out whether I was actively trying to publish or not — writing is just the way I process the world. I suppose I hope to present my reader with an interpretive experience that both challenges and delights. I’m not interested in doing only one of those two things. And by “my reader,” I don’t necessarily mean some public audience; if I can satisfy my own mind by working a poem through, I’m quite pleased.

MERIDIAN:What are your aims and aspirations as a teacher?

JOHNSON:  My best teachers have been those who made me want to know more. I would hope to be that kind of teacher — the kind of teacher that inspires enthusiasm … no, passion… for all the things the world has to teach. A literature course has the luxury of isolating the acts of reading and interpretation, skills that require thoughtful analysis and an attention to specificity, but that have application far beyond the reading of books — skills, in fact, essential to living meaningfully in the world. I try to inculcate in my students both awareness and ownership of their own interpretive faculties in order that they might become better observers of the relationship between perception and self-conception I want to accustom them to parsing out the act of reading, and to help them develop the ability to discern how texts of all kinds, literary and otherwise, merit scrutiny and reward interpretation. 

MERIDIAN:Do you have any advice for the aspiring young writer?

JOHNSON: Read everything you can get your hands on. Read far back into our literary history, because twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing tends to make use of a far smaller number of words in English than does older literature. Get to know words — they are the materials a writer works with, and are often neglected in favor of “big ideas” or “themes.” But those things cannot be communicated without accurate language.

MERIDIAN: Do you have any final thoughts on what poetry might teach us about God and faith? 

JOHNSON: I think that, if anything, poetry ought to give us a little humility. Reading poetry allows us insight into the thought processes of other persons, which ought to breed compassion, and perhaps writing poetry offers the opportunity to get outside our own “stuff” for a while, or at least to reflect with some critical objectivity on it. But these are general musings, and optimistic in a humanities department sort of way. I suppose that in trying to form a poem, I gain a greater appreciation for the intricate miracle of the mind at work, which gives me the slightest glimpse at the incomprehensible and uninterpretable complexity of God.