Peter Johnson started The Prose Poem: An International Journal to contribute to and be part of the contemporary literary scene without having to leave the house. The journal's long run and considerable accomplishment would help to integrate prose poetry into the literary landscape, though Johnson admits, "I only planned to do one issue, so calling it Volume One was really a private joke." It seems the joke was on him because the journal lasted nine years. The success of Johnson's own work attests perhaps to how familiar and significant prose poetry has become. Miracles & Mortifications (White Pine Press) received the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets in 2001. He is the author of two other collections of prose poetry: Pretty Happy! (White Pine Press) and Love Poems for the Millennium (Quale Press). His collection of short stories, I'm a Man, won Rainbow Press' 1997 fiction chapbook competition and was published in an expanded version by White Pine Press in the fall of 2003. He is contributing editor of The American Poetry Review, Web del Sol, and Slope. Johnson has been awarded creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island Council on the Arts. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, he currently teaches at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, where he resides with his wife and two sons.

Stephen Frech: Jokes and humor have long held a place in psychoanalytic thought, but I read an article by Louis Franzini titled "Humor in Therapy" promoting "formal humor training for therapists." It seems to me that a quality about humor (just like psychology itself) eludes analysis and formal training. Nevertheless, given the humor in your poems, what coping, cathartic, or revelatory qualities do you think humor adds to poems in general or to your poems more specifically? Is humor something that helps you write, then becomes part of the very fabric of the poem?

Peter Johnson: It's a curious idea: a bunch of therapists learning how to be funny so they can teach others to be funny. Sounds like an Edson prose poem. If the purpose of this training is to make people laugh at themselves, I'm all for it. I enjoy being around people who don't take themselves seriously; they're less problematic because their egos aren't invested in every single event. It's hard to think of a bully or a narcissist with a healthy sense of humor. Jonathan Swift compares satire to a mirror in which everyone sees everyone's face but their own, which is why they laugh so hard. But I disagree. In the perfect satire — if we think of satire as actually being able to affect change — we should see our own reflections; and the best satirists are those who realize they possess the traits they satirize. Satire doesn't work when we sense the presence of a smug author looking down at his sniveling creations. That's no fun; no complexity there at all.

But, in terms of technique, you're right to stress comedy in my work. I wrote a dissertation on black humor, and my first prose poems were influenced by the ancient Greek writer Theophrastus, who wrote a book of comic character sketches called Characters. But it's hard to say how that conscious study of humor affects my work. If humor has become part of the very "fabric" of my poetry, as you say, that's occurred simply because I view the world comically. I'm a wise guy. I didn't have to invent that persona. It's who I am, so the mixture of the high and low in my work, which creates the humor is really not deliberate.

SF: So, where do you think that comic edge originated for you?

PJ: I grew up in a working-class environment. My father was a mailman and a steel worker, but because I was smart and a good athlete, I received a classical education at a Jesuit high school. I spent my formative years straddling high and low cultures, so, in Miracles & Mortifications, it comes naturally for me to present a Socrates with a booger in his nose or to have Kepler chirping, "Be good to my bird" as he tries "to shake the celestial cacophony from his head." The narrators of the two sections of Miracles are funny to watch precisely because they try to embrace grand narratives of high culture while everything is collapsing around them. In the first section, "Travels with Gigi," the narrator keeps waiting for his girlfriend to behave according to some courtly love tradition, but she's not interested in that tradition; she's unpredictable, a real ball- buster. And in the second section, "Travels with Oedipus," the father needs to believe in a dignified Western historical tradition, while his teenage son just wants to have a good time and get laid. My "high," idealistic sensibility sympathizes with the father; my "low," wise-guy sensibility with Gigi and the son. It's the tension between these two that creates most of the humor. It's important to remember that every satirist is really an idealist. You don't obsessively attack or make fun of something unless you're very hurt because that "something" is not living up to your expectations. If ten satiric poets had a sleepover, they'd begin the evening lampooning everything in sight, including each other, but by daybreak they'd all be hugging and weeping.

Because of my comic sensibility, it makes sense to me that I rejected all the trappings of verse poetry and turned to the prose poem. Originally, I wanted my poetry to echo the metrical schemes and elevated subjects of those Latin and Greek writers I had translated in high school and college, but the results were always strained, inauthentic. I had the same results with free verse. Though I can't prove it, I think the prose poem wants to be funny. If Kierkegaard is right that "the comical is present in every stage of life, for wherever there is life there is contradiction," then what genre could be more contradictory than the prose poem, with its oxymoronic name and paradoxical nature. It steals the techniques of verse and discourses of prose, then shows up at the party flaunting them in the most unlikely ways. What better playground for my high and low sensibilities to collide.

SF: And the high and low collide from the beginning in your first book. The first time I read the title, Pretty Happy!, I laughed out loud: to proclaim one's happiness, but qualify it as only moderate seems a funny mitigating exclamation. The title poem and others in the book, "A Ritual as Old as Time Itself" and "The Games" come to mind, hold just that edge: comic strategies articulating serious or difficult experience.

PJ: I'm glad you saw the irony in the title. It's almost a half-baked oxymoron, further undercut by the exclamation point at the end. Irony, of course, is one way into humor. I've always been interested in those ancient comic characters like the eiron (the self-deprecator), the alazon (the impostor) and the buffoon, and those characters are scattered throughout Pretty Happy!. Very often the humor in those poems occurs when we look at characters differently than they do. Many of my first-person narrators are half-empty people, even the narrators who resemble me. According to the New Agers, the answer to the question of whether the glass is half-filled or half-empty is that there is water in the glass. That's a nice philosophy to live by, but it makes for lousy literature. I'm after a dark irony related to the absurd. I try to avoid that fashionable cynicism or superficial cleverness we see everywhere in our culture. If you listen carefully, you'll notice that more and more people are beginning to talk like sitcom characters. I prefer the dark ironic and comic moments of Kafka and Nicanor Parra.

SF: Stephen Dobyns says he writes with a statue on his desk of a dwarf dressed as a jester, bent over in an ugly mocking laugh. He wants to remind himself that he's practicing a deception against the reader and himself. You similarly seem concerned about deceptions of self-importance in much contemporary writing.

PJ: There are probably about five books I wish I had written, and Dobyns's Cemetery Nights is one of them. I like the idea of his dwarf; it celebrates the comic stance while also steering the writer away from that arrogant, superior position I mentioned earlier, a position guaranteed to kill any poem. I remember showing Robert Bly one of my poems when I was interviewing him. At first, he expressed a certain dismay at the anger in it, but then, as if to cheer me up, he pointed out that, besides philosophers, the tribe also needed warriors and tricksters. That was a predictable Bly-as-Shaman response, but I understood what he meant. Early in my career, I pictured myself writing and reciting deep metaphysical poems while being surrounded by fifteen naked Joni Mitchell look-alikes playing recorders fashioned from ivory tusks. But now I embrace anger and even enjoy playing the fool, realizing it's just another path to the metaphysical, and one that suits my temperament. But it's a precarious persona, because it's so easy to become topical or trivial. Just last week I heard a well-known poet say that the Age of Irony is over. She was attacking, I think, the many imitators of Ashbery and Billy Collins, yet the Age of Irony can never be over because it's built into the human condition, and recognizing it often takes us to a higher level. Consider what contemporary poetry would be like if Simic, Tate, Edson, and poets of similar temperaments hadn't come upon the scene.

SF: In what way is the prose poem, with its inherent confounding genre tension, the exact vessel for the absurd or dark ironic moments you describe?

PJ: As I said, formally speaking, because of the inherent contradictions in the prose poem, I think it has a predisposition toward comedy. I also wonder if so many prose poets are comic poets because they became interested in the form while reading the French symbolists and surrealists. We can see the beginnings of comic and absurd juxtapositions and puns associated with surrealism, Dada, and cubism in the works of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. And in such writers as Breton and Jacob, these juxtapositions even structure the poem. Perhaps, then, part of the comedy we're discussing is organic in the prose poem itself, and part is learned. Of course, I have no proof for any of this.

SF: I'm very interested in your inclusion of the surrealists and wonder if we could linger there for a moment. Surrealists of all disciplines used conscious strategies (games, optical illusions, juxtapositions) as vehicles for accessing altered or other states of consciousness. Again, perhaps in prose poetry's play of cross genre, we see the irony of conscious access to the unconscious. What can you say about the prose poem as a discourse or even a struggle between the conscious and the unconscious?

PJ: I think the freedom that prose allows encourages the kind of leaping Bly speaks of in his essay "Looking for Dragon Smoke" — a leaping from the conscious mind to the unconscious and back again. But it's impossible to describe this process; it's intuitive. If we could pinpoint the leaps between the conscious and unconscious in a poem, then it would be a lousy one. But, still, both parts of the mind must be at work. When I write a poem I bring experiences, emotions — whatever — to it. I trust my imagination to create a poem from this raw material, and in the first draft, I often feel like someone working on a jigsaw puzzle, blindfolded. I guess you could argue that I tap the unconscious here; I guess you could say, as Bly does, that in the prose poem "the conscious mind, at least to a degree, gives up the adversary position it usually adopts toward the unconscious, and a certain harmony between the two takes place." But I'm skeptical of saying too much about it. Poets love to sound mystical in order to seem like mystics. In fact, I'm more interested in another part of the process — the constant rewriting and reinventing every time I go back to the poem. Houdini thought genius was repetition. At times, even he was surprised by some of his escapes, but he believed he reached this mystical state (though he wouldn't have called it that) by repeating his routines over and over again, not by invoking the gods. He was referring, I think, to a kind of obsessiveness that is very creative, a kind of controlled pursuit of the G-spot of the poem. If one doggedly suffers this process over and over again, it's easier to get there the next time. But, again, you can analyze things too much. When the first volume of my journal came out, someone said that the black and white cover captured the poetry-prose and conscious-unconscious oppositions in the prose poem. In fact, the cover was black and white because I started with a $2,000 budget and couldn't afford a four-color cover.

SF: Russell Edson describes as the ideal prose poem: "a small, complete work, utterly logical within its own madness." He's come to understand his process as "dreaming awake." If we overlook the easy misunderstandings/manipulations of his ideas, what can we say about the prose poem's long interest in the unconscious as creative vehicle?

PJ: I guess you could argue that if you privilege the unconscious, it makes sense you'll be attracted to prose. It's the difference between being lost in an endless field or in a city. There are no boundaries in an endless field, while in a city you're going to have to make some turns once in a while, maybe even pause at a stop light. Remember that the word verse comes from the Latin verto, to turn, so if you're a verse poet, even if you rely on the unconscious, as of course you must, your line breaks or metrical choices, the various twists or turns you adopt, will eventually come into play. I like to think that Rimbaud didn't consciously choose the prose poem, but that, in his attempt to make himself a vehicle for the unconscious, prose naturally presented itself Ironically, he had to go deep into his own unconscious to escape from himself. "For I is an other," he said. "If brass wakes a trumpet, it is not its fault." I'm sure the Surrealists were aware of this possibility of prose, even if they looked at it more subjectively than Rimbaud did. Perhaps the freedom poets feel with the prose poem comes from this opportunity to wander and listen to the unconscious, instead of having to write with all the great versifiers of Western Civilization looking over their shoulders.

SF: The prose poem has earned considerable recognition of late: magazine allocation and prizes, among them your Miracles & Mortifications, which received the 2001 James Laughlin Award. Do you think, as some have said, that The Prose Poem: An International Journal single-handedly began a new prose poem renaissance?

PJ: If that were true, then I would be a visionary. How nice! But, in fact, there was prose poem activity in journals way before I came along. Steve Wilson was publishing a journal a few years before mine; Greg Boyd was always receptive to prose poems in his Asylum Annual; and in 1985 Karen Donovan and Walker Rumble began Paragraph Magazine, which has published and is still publishing "paragraphs," which, to me, look a hell of a lot like prose poems. Over the last twenty years other journals have done special issues on the prose poem. And although the Oberlin Press and New Rivers Press anthologies were published in 1995, I'm sure those editors were thinking of editing them before that. But I think my journal did give people permission to write prose poems. I noticed that many poets who were writing both verse and prose poetry turned exclusively to the prose poem when they saw it was being taken more seriously. Also, I was fortunate that Bly, Edson, Simic, Naomi Shihab Nye, David Ignatow, and Sybil James came on immediately as contributing editors, and then Morton Marcus joined up later. These people gave legitimacy to the journal and made it easier to distribute. Now it's common to see prose poems in magazines and books, though I don't like a lot of them. Poets have misunderstood the so-called freedom of prose poetry. Many of the poems I see are overwritten, even sloppy. Many seem to be little more than journal entries with no internal tension or leaps. It's a bit depressing. Edson once said to me that the problem with most poems is that there is too much language chasing too little of an idea. Every poet, especially every prose poet, should have that taped over his desk. I do.

SF: You said earlier that poets have misunderstood the "so-called freedom of prose-poetry." The truly bad children will ignore us, but what do you think they should understand?

PJ: While editing my journal, I was irked by many tendencies in the submissions. Mostly I was annoyed by the lack of discipline in the prose of the same poets who would bring much higher standards to their verse poetry. Also, mistakenly, many young poets think the prose poem gives them permission to write more and faster with little revision, adding even more flotsam and jetsam to an increasingly manic literary scene. I can't tell you how many times I heard, "If you don't like these poems, I've got a hundred more." Indeed, they did. Remember that repulsive Reagan-era bumper sticker: "Whoever dies with the most toys wins"? Well, now many poets believe that whoever writes and publishes the most poems win, though they probably wouldn't be able to tell you what the prize is. Unfortunately, the prose poem offers what appears to be an easy form for poets who don't want to work hard. They think, "Wow, I can just sit back, look out the window, and be clever. And I don't even have to worry about line breaks."

Another thing that annoyed me was how little poets knew about prose poetry. Believe it or not, the prose poem is an actual genre with a real literary history. It didn't start with Bly and Edson, and you'd be surprised what you can learn from poets who wrote something before 1960. I don't mean to be facetious but year after year I was amazed at the arrogance of poets and how cavalierly they approached the prose poem. I was also surprised at how poorly read many younger poets were. It's clear that nowadays you can graduate from many MFA programs without having to read very much. So I wonder what will happen to the prose poem in the next few years. I fear that I may be forced to resurrect my journal, muck up my life for another nine years, then come out with another "Best of The Prose Poem," which David Foster Wallace will review in his attempt to create yet another obscure literary genre while simultaneously pointing out that I'm a moron.

SF: Going back to the idea of "Best of" books and to anthologies of prose poems, what do you think of the two new anthologies that were published this year: David Lehman's Great American Prose Poems and Ray Gonzalez's No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets?

PJ: Any anthology on the prose poem is a good thing, and I'm hesitant to be critical since I'm included in both anthologies, and because I know how hard it is to edit one. Lehman's anthology has a truly excellent introduction, and it should be standard reading for any course on the prose poem. As far as the poems go, he chooses a wide variety of styles, and many of the contemporary poems show how indebted the prose poem is to other prose discourses and genres, like the epistle, the footnote, the apology, the aphorism and so on. I was especially glad to see T.S. Eliot's "Hysteria, " a very curious poem for Eliot. We can only wonder what would have happened to the prose poem if Eliot had continued to write them. Lehman got himself into the soup, though, with his title, "Great," and although you can't include everyone, his omissions are glaring. There are certain books written over the last ten years that have drastically altered the direction of the prose poem. My first assistant editor quit because she said all the poems sounded the same. The books I'm talking about are unique, written by people missing from Lehman's anthology, poets like Greg Boyd, Morton Marcus, Lawrence Fixel, Gary Young, Steve Berg, Barry Silesky, Linda Smukler, Gian Lombardo, Ray Gonzalez, Jay Meek, Mary Koncel, and I could mention at least ten more. Also, some of his choices stretch the genre too far. Sometimes an apology is really an apology pretending to be a prose poem, instead of a prose poem sharing some traits of an apology. I'd be the last person to try to pigeonhole the prose poem, but not everything is relative, though it's not too hip to say that nowadays. I've often thought people recognize a prose poem more than they let on, especially if they've read what has been generally presented and received as prose poetry.

Gonzalez is immediately off the hook. He insists that one of his primary guiding principles is "quality," but he doesn't suggest he's collecting "great" prose poems, and he admits to being subjective. I tend to agree with most of his criteria, especially his decision to choose poets who have "published prose poetry extensively" and have "helped to erase the boundaries between the linear and prose lyric." I don't think a lot of the younger people in Lehman's anthology (no matter how good some of the individual poems are) have made a real commitment to the form, and some of the bigger names are, at best, "occasional" prose poets. But it's easy to be kinder to Gonzalez because his approach is not as comprehensive as Lehman's. Gonzalez chooses only twenty-four writers with ten poems from each, so he has to be more selective than Lehman; consequently, it's harder to fault him for his omissions. If you were to teach a course on prose poetry, probably the best thing would be to order both books, and add Models of the Universe for its international flavor. Gonzalez’s book, especially, works well because you can direct students to big chunks of work that might suit their sensibilities. I could go on about both anthologies, but I've probably already gotten myself kicked out of their second editions.

The best anthology, of course, would be edited by Michael Benedikt. He should grab his old one and sit down with the editors of recent anthologies: Lehman, Gonzalez, Stuart Friebert and David Young, the New Rivers people, Rupert Loydell, Steve Wilson, and even me (strange bedfellows for sure). The final product would probably be about two thousand pages long, and still piss off people, especially those who weren't in it. In other words, if you don't like an anthology, I suggest that you edit your own and find out what a pain in the neck it is, and how impossible it is to make poets happy.

SF: You certainly must have been happy when Miracles & Mortifications received the 2001 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. I'm wondering how that award has changed your life?

PJ: I was really honored, and quite frankly, stunned that Miracles & Mortifications won the Laughlin Award, and I was pleased when a reviewer said that it was a book James Laughlin would have loved. But the award itself hasn't changed my day-to-day life because I tend not to do many readings or to socialize as much as other poets do. I find that between my teaching and my family (and we just had a new baby) I have very little time to do anything, and my undergraduates would be more impressed if I were a contestant on "The Weakest Link" or eating a pig's eye on "Fear Factor." Moreover, it's impossible for me to get a fat head when I still get form rejection letters from most journals, many of which I'm convinced don't really read unsolicited submissions. But the award did change the perception of my work, even my own perception of it. More important, I will always be indebted to the Academy of American Poets for placing 10,000 copies of Miracles into the hands of poetry lovers. That's mind-boggling. And I will always be grateful to the judges for choosing a book of prose poems from such a small press. I've judged a few contests, so I realize that that there is very little that separates the final manuscripts. I'm very aware that the poetry gods have blessed me.

Another Chicago Magazine

Editor and Publisher: Barry Silesky
Managing Editors: Sara Skolnik, J.M. Vincler
Fiction Editor: Sharon Solwitz
Poetry Editor: Simone Muench
Creative Nonfiction Editor: S.L. Wisenberg
Reviews Editor: Karen Wilson


Copyright © 2004 Left Field Press
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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