BC Publishing Spotlight: Michael Johnson

BC Poet Michael Johnson published How to Be Eaten by a Lion in 2016

Over the next couple of months, The Puritan’s Town Crier blog will feature short interviews with Canadian authors published by BC publishers, conducted by BC publishing professionals. The latest in the series is an interview with Nathaniel G. Moore, a columnist with subTerrain magazine and BC poet Michael Johnson, author of How to be Eaten by a Lion (Nightwood Editions, 2015). Described as “[P]oems of praise sung into the boozy midnight choir with Ted Hughes and Richard Hogo” by acclaimed BC poet Matt Rader, this debut collection is a gift rather than a loss, an opportunity for grace. The interview begins with a poem by Johnson.

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CHURCH OF ROT

Born of filth and putrid perfumeand rarely mistaken for a blessing:corpsemusk, fetid sump thirstingbeneath the trees, sink of rotting chaff,sodden arms reclaiming the dead.Here in the understory, the grey-greenwooded fog, the air’s wet touchleaves a rampant fertility on the skin.No parley of echoes, no babbleof colour and silhouette,but burnished rot and fungusbrewing return, brewing sludgeand silk mold, that heaven of decay,where to fall is to be borneinto the rising, the risen.

Nathaniel G. Moore: You’ve published poems from your debut collection extensively over the last couple of years. How important were these publications (PRISM International, Mid-American Review, The Malahat Review, Poetry, The Antigonish Review) as stepping stones? Did they encourage you to build and shape the final book?

Michael Johnson: Long ago I submitted poems often, and widely, and had those periodic acceptances that feel somehow like permission to carry on. But then many of my best pieces were accepted in a short period, and then I barely had anything I thought good enough to submit. So I went back to some older drafts and kept working and reworking, which is fairly typical for me. I think that process taught me patience, and I wasn’t in a hurry to put out a book because I knew I had a couple of strong poems, but I wanted everything else to live up to those. I might have waited forever if it hadn’t been for Silas White at Nightwood keeping after me to see a manuscript. I wanted a book that hopefully went from strength to strength. Not sure if I succeeded. But I took an awfully long time to finish the manuscript. I thought I had it finished several times over the years, only to get very self-conscious and hyper-critical and launch into another revision. That obsessive reworking helped me shape the manuscript certainly, and probably took years longer than it should have.

NGM: Who are some of your favourite poets to read, Canadian or otherwise?

MJ: A short list of favourites: James Wright, Dorianne Laux, Mark Doty, Robert Wrigley, Billy Collins, Li-Young Lee, Lorna Crozier, Karen Solie, Lucia Perillo, Robert Hass, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Oliver, Don Domanski, Sherman Alexie, Galway Kinnel … I went to school in the States, so it has taken me a while to catch up on everyone writing at home. Most recently I’ve enjoyed Natalie Diaz, Bren Simmers, Matt Rader, Stevie Howell, Garth Martens, Raoul Fernandes, Elise Partridge … the list could go on a long while.

NGM: “Death by Forgetfulness” is poignant and reads like an undisturbed, voyeuristic segue into someone’s intricate privacy. Can you talk about how this poem evolved?

You know, apparently you couldn’t write about the moon, couldn’t write about a dead dog, and you certainly couldn’t write about moonlight dancing on a dead dog.

MJ: I wrote the earliest draft of "Death by Forgetfulness" around 2004, and then put it away. I’d been writing unusual titles for prompts: Death by Guinness, Death by Lightning, Death by Chevy …. and just going where the poems took me. My roommate had two awesome mutts, so our lives were dog-centric, and in one of my workshops clichés came up: what you couldn’t write about, what was so overdone, etc. You know, apparently you couldn’t write about the moon, couldn’t write about a dead dog, and you certainly couldn’t write about moonlight dancing on a dead dog. Of course being told what I can’t write about is almost a guarantee I’ll give it a whirl. Apparently a man had gotten stupidly drunk and dragged his dogs to death somewhere. Whether it was urban myth or true story didn’t matter, something about it was more heartbreaking and compelling than any piece I could remember. And I couldn’t do it any justice. I didn’t know how to tone it down enough to counterpoint the subject, which was so brutal. I probably wrote it a dozen different times. When I came back to it, I knew I had to chisel it to something so blunt and spare that it just stood there awful in the light. Something about distancing myself, changing the narrative tone subtly to seat the reader on this ride in the first line, changed everything. I cut the poem to nearly half, and it took more of its current form. It really does feel voyeuristic and devastating for simply bearing witness. How could you ever see this, discover this, discover you had done this, and not be changed? That was a tougher poem to write than most I can remember.

NGM: What is your life outside of poetry comprised of?

MJ: Oh boy, I’ve done a lot of unsavoury things to support my poetry habit. I grew up in an autobody shop fixing and painting cars. It can be pretty noisy, filthy work, which I’ve fallen back on a few times. I was a technician for a fitness equipment company once, until I ruptured an Achilles tendon. As I was just getting back to walking, a best friend talked me into working for him at a professional cellaring company. That's how I caught the wine bug. Now I work at a couple of wineries in Okanagan Falls, where I’m a handyman, vineyard hand, tasting room host, and general wine geek. We moved to Penticton in 2013 after our son was born, and then along came our daughter last year, so our full-time jobs are mommy-daddy, then handyman-nurse, and then somewhere way at the back of the list is poet. The Okanagan is driven by tourism, so poetry falls near the bottom of most everyone’s priorities here. I love being a wine geek, and working around the wineries and vineyards, but unfortunately I run pretty far from any poetry circles. That’s life for now. I keep my head down and write when I can. I juggle our two little tornadoes and occasionally dip into a nice Chardonnay, for medicinal purposes.

Michael Johnson’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, PRISM International, Mid-American Review and Gargoyle. He was a finalist for Poetry Magazine’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and, in 2014, won the Dr. Sherwin W Howard Award for best poetry in Weber: The Contemporary West. He lives in Penticton, BC.