(inter)playing with poetry and Place

An interview with L.A. Johnson

Eras of literature have oscillated between themes of landscape as partner, subject, and spirit. In L.A. Johnson’s work, she explores the interplay of all these identities and how they’ve framed her own—landscape becomes both material and subject for her memories and dreams. Of leaving her childhood home of California, she writes, “That expulsion allowed me to see my home landscape more clearly and it also enhanced its otherworldly qualities: the landscape that I wrote toward, because I was no longer there, ceased to exist and was subject to the whims of my own imagination.”

Still, like the reality of mud, rocks, and trees, her writing process itself has a grounded-ness: starting with words, she shapes them, like a sculptor, into a poem. 

First off, many congrats on completing your PhD in literature and creative writing! A doctorate in poetry is rare and beautiful, and we’d love to learn more about your work and research focuses.

Thank you for your good wishes! My dissertation included both a critical manuscript and a creative manuscript. My scholarship focused on book-length poems by American women poets in the twentieth century, including reframing what might be considered a book-length work. I primarily looked at texts by Anne Carson, Rita Dove, and Louise Glück. I'd like to adapt some of these chapters into essays, but that's a work in progress! And my creative manuscript was my debut poetry manuscript-in-progress. It was really gratifying to work on both projects simultaneously, as my work a poet informed my interpretations of texts and my scholarship made me change how I thought about my own manuscript! I'm immensely grateful for the opportunity to learn to study poetry from a critical perspective, as well as for the time the degree allowed me to write and experiment with poems.

In your poem “Letter with Missing Parts,” you say, "I have waited too long / to write / and, for that, I am sorry.” These lines evoke the loss—but also perspective—that comes with distance from our subject matters. How would you describe your typical writing process? 

I love writing! It's the way I orient myself to the world, the way I figure out what I believe and who I am. My poems are born in revision—revision is an intrinsic part of how I write, as I start writing freely without any preconceived ideas for the poem. I kind of liken it to sculpture: I need material (words) to work with to shape something into a poem. I do a lot of initial writing that has no form or narrative; I keep the initial writing very loose, jotting things down in notebooks or on yellow pads or other scraps of paper. This keeps the initial writing playful for me, mimicking the sort of approach I had when I was a teenager, the sort of teenager that wrote poems in the margins of my notes when I was bored in class. Keeping things loose allows me to be free and takes the pressure out of writing. I lose a decent amount of what I write or I never go back to the majority of it; neither of those statements bother me because I believe that if the writing is good, the image or the idea or the sentence is good, it will come back at some point. I only end up typing up a limited number of my initial drafts and I only develop into a complete poem even fewer of those initial writings.  

From there, I shape that initial writing slowly into its final form. Usually, the poem has no initial focus or stakes, and those things emerge over time. I have no idea what is going on with a poem for a very long time and I find the process largely mysterious. I try to let the poem speak and feel like my work is to help it become what it wants to say. I work on drafts over many months or years, and this drafting process is my favorite part. I recently typed out a piece of writing I found that I did more than two years ago initially and developed it into poem. I've reworked abandoned drafts from much longer than that, too. I think this helps to give me some of the perspective you mentioned, or at least I hope it does. I feel my emotions very deeply, and I rarely write a poem about something important to me close to when it happened. Right now, for example, I'm able to write about my father's sudden death which happened a few years ago; I didn't write a poem for more than a year after he died.  

This process of revision-as-writing also allows me to really play with the form of the poems—because they're not conceived in any one form, a lot of my revision process is trying them with different length or size stanzas, line breaks, etc. I don't always achieve it, but I try to do something different with each poem that I've never done before formally. I'm always looking to attempt something new. This practice keeps me excited about writing and excited by new poems!

Another process I use which might be unusual, but which I learned from my MFA mentor, Lucie Brock-Broido, which is to keep a boneyard of abandoned lines, images, bits of language, titles. I keep a word document labeled "BONEYARD" on my desktop and it has all the stuff that failed to work its way into a poem, but didn't fail as experiments in language. When I'm stuck with a poem, I like to wander the boneyard, trying to collect the bones into the work at hand. That rarely works, but it often sparks new ideas within me. It also honors all of the writing I do as being a critical part of the overall process.

Your chapbook Little Climates plays with the potency of single poems, each with their own weather systems, without forgetting their place grander schemes. This strikes us as a metaphor for presence in a crowded world. As media blurs the lines between here and there, now and then, how have your literary practices functioned in relation to the noise?

Growing up in the age of social media, I think my literary practices have always existed alongside the noise of the digital world. This is part of why I love reading and writing: it's a way for me to slow down and to center myself. Something a wise friend, Amy Silverberg, told me once is that reading and writing expands time, whereas other activities like social media, shorten it. On the other hand, part of what I love about social media is the ability to connect with other poets and read poems I otherwise wouldn't be exposed to, which I often find very inspiring. Every day there is a conversation about poems and poetry that I love being a part of. Especially on my busiest and least writing-focused days, it's so nice to open up my phone and see a poem someone loves. I do think it can also breed comparative feelings: sometimes when it feels like all you see on social media is other people's high moments, it can make rejections harder. That's why I ultimately try to separate my brain in terms of engaging with social media: I think of social media as a space for me to share myself as a reader of poetry, and I try to keep my creative self, myself as a writer of poetry, offline. It's a tough balance to strike.

I greatly appreciate the value of the single poem; sometimes I think the literary culture gets very caught up in the book of it all, when ultimately I've been most changed, most moved, by individual poems, regardless of what was around them in a book. I have multiple poems memorized, a practice I find personal comfort in. I looked at my chapbook as a united whole, but I also tried to work on each poem as its own thing, and I hope that the poems are able to be enjoyed both with and without the context of the chapbook.

My active reading practice also helps to keep me grounded in a busy world—I love to read and try to read as much and as widely as possible. I love getting books from the library or reading from the selections offered by used bookstores, to try to add some randomness into what I'm reading. I think it's easy to read only popular books or new books, and mixing up my book acquisition process has been helpful to expose me to things I wouldn't typically pick up. Some of my favorite writers I discovered in used bookstores! I like to read in the bath, in particular, as it makes it easier for me that way to keep a distance from notifications on my phone. My reading practice I would say also extends to going to literary readings, which I frequent. Seeing a writer or a poet read their work in person enhances my later individual reading experience and generally invigorates me to want to write. It also allows me to be a part of the poetry community in a tangible way and connect in person with other writers and readers, which I find invaluable.

In Jenny Odell’s How to Do nothing—also rooted in California—she says “the physical world is our last common reference point.” Place—in terms of both location and temporality—feels omnipresent in your work. How does your poetry relate to your landscape and origins?

I'm from California's Bay Area and currently live in Los Angeles, and I didn't realize until I left for my MFA in New York City how important the California landscape was to me. I'd never lived anywhere cold before and had no deep experience with a landscape outside of California at that point, and I really missed the surroundings I knew. And I realized that as soon as I left California, the place became wrapped up in part of the dream, the oasis from which I was exiled. That expulsion allowed me to see my home landscape more clearly and it also enhanced its otherworldly qualities: the landscape that I wrote toward, because I was no longer there, ceased to exist and was subject to the whims of my own imagination. Even now that I'm back in California, I think I'm always writing out of a landscape that I can never return to, a childhood half real and half imagined. I think that's reflected in my poems, which I hope have a sense of realness to them, but also capture that dream. That's part of why I'm drawn toward some level of beauty in my poems, or at least beautiful images, because in this dream of the place of my childhood even something ugly becomes part of what's illusory.  

As a writer and scholar, what themes and projects are you hoping to explore next?

Related to what we're talking about, I'm hoping to enhance my own community by starting a poetry reading series with my friend, Elizabeth Metzger, and we just had our first event in January. I figured what would be better than asking poets I admire to read work I love? I'm also hoping to write more critical work and craft essays on poetry. There aren't many craft essays easily accessible online, and I want to contribute more to that discussion about poetry. I'm also of course, working on completing my manuscript for my first book of poems. I recently wrote a new sequence of poems loosely on the topic of graves, which I hope is what will finally tie it all together. I have many loved ones that have died which has given me more experience in graveyards than might be typical, and it struck me that the graveyard is the place of both public and private mourning, where when I go to honor my loved ones, I also see the graves of others and encounter other people I do not know in their grief. It became a ripe area for exploration, to think about how the graveyard is an accepted place to explore one's grief but is also a zone kept separate from the rest of the world.