What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite writers to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems and other writing. In Delineated: Prose Writers on Poetry, prominent writers of fiction and non-fiction reflect on how poetry illuminates their creative lives, whether as inspiration, a daily practice, or a thread of hope through difficult times.
The manager lady of this apartment dwelling has a face like a baseball with glasses and pathetically repeats herself. The man next door has a dog with a face that talks of stupidity to the night, the swimming pool has an empty, empty face. My neighbor has his underwear on tonight, standing among the parking spaces advising his friend never to show his face around here again. I go everywhere with my eyes closed and two eyeballs painted on my face. There is a woman across the court with no face at all.
They’re perfectly visible this evening, about as unobtrusive as a storm of meteors, these questions of happiness plaguing the world. My neighbor has sent his child to Utah to be raised by the relatives of friends. He’s out on the generous lawn again, looking like he’s made out of phosphorus.
The manager lady has just returned from the nearby graveyard, the last ceremony for a crushed paramedic. All day, news helicopters cruised aloft, going whatwhatwhatwhatwhat. She pours me some boiled coffee that tastes like noise, warning me, once and for all, to pack up my troubles in an old kit bag and weep until the stones float away. How will I ever be able to turn from the window and feel love for her?— to see her and stop seeing this neighborhood, the towns of earth, these tables at which the saints sit down to the meal of temptations?
And so on—nap, soup, window, say a few words into the telephone, smaller and smaller words. Some TV or maybe, I don’t know, a brisk rubber with cards nobody knows how many there are of. Couple of miserable gerbils in a tiny white cage, hysterical friends rodomontading about goals as if having them liquefied death. Maybe invite the lady with no face over here to explain all these elections: life. Liberty. Pursuit.
Maybe invite the lady with no face over here to read my palm, sit out on the porch here in Arizona while she touches me. Last night, some kind of alarm went off up the street that nobody responded to. Small darling, it rang for you. Everything suffers invisibly, nothing is possible, in your face.
The center of the world is closed. The Beehive, the 8-Ball, the Yo-Yo, the Granite and the Lightning and the Melody. Only the Incognito Lounge is open. My neighbor arrives. They have the television on.
It’s a show about my neighbor in a loneliness, a light, walking the hour when every bed is a mouth. Alleys of dark trash, exhaustion shaped into residences—and what are the dogs so sure of that they shout like citizens driven from their minds in a stadium? In his fist he holds a note in his own handwriting, the same message everyone carries from place to place in the secret night, the one that nobody asks you for when you finally arrive, and the faces turn to you playing the national anthem and go blank, that’s what the show is about, that message.
I was raised up from tiny childhood in those purple hills, right slam on the brink of language, and I claim it’s just as if you can’t do anything to this moment, that’s how inextinguishable it all is. Sunset, Arizona, everybody waiting to get arrested, all very much an honor, I assure you. Maybe invite the lady with no face to plead my cause, to get me off the hook or name me one good reason. The air is full of megawatts
and the megawatts are full of silence. She reaches to the radio like St. Theresa.
Here at the center of the world each wonderful store cherishes in its mind undeflowerable mannequins in a pale, electric light. The parking lot is full, everyone having the same dream of shopping and shopping through an afternoon that changes like a face.
But these shoppers of America— carrying their hearts toward the bluffs of the counters like thoughtless purchases, walking home under the sea, standing in a dark house at midnight before the open refrigerator, completely transformed in the light…
Every bus ride is like this one, in the back the same two uniformed boy scouts de-pantsing a little girl, up front the woman whose mission is to tell the driver over and over to shut up. Maybe you permit yourself to find it beautiful on this bus as it wafts like a dirigible toward suburbia over a continent of saloons, over the robot desert that now turns purple and comes slowly through the dust. This is the moment you’ll seek the words for over the imitation and actual wood of successive tabletops indefatigably, when you watched a baby child catch a bee against the tinted glass and were married to a deep comprehension and terror.
"The title poem killed me the first time I read it. Rereading it—both on the page and listening to a recording of Johnson reading it aloud—has been like bathing in enchanted waters: deep pleasure, stimulation of youthful muscle memory, refreshment. Johnson marries the gritty American mundane with the gorgeous sublime like no other writer."
"A sonnet that is also a great poem could only have been a kind of sonnet, not an ode or a ballad. A form—whatever that is, it could be a sinuous ribbon of spare free verse, or the blocky paragraph of a prose poem—should feel that it is pushing interesting choices and also undergirding those uncanny decisions."
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