John Philip Johnson
is a poet & writer.
.
December 2009:
Current Issues of Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, Chicago Literary Quarterly have John's poems, as well as upcoming issues of Whistling Shade (a great urban free paper from the Twin Cities (hello Thor Eisentrager, and thanks for finally reading something, please email me)) and Dreams & Nightmares (one of the oldest and most respected venues of the sci fi/fantasy genre, which is an exciting, almost anything goes genre) plus a little zombie anthology which was called Poems of the Dead and now has the ultra-respectable, resume-ready title of "Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poems for the Undead Head" which pays genuine federal money for poems, wow, imagine that. Re-printable, too.
The summer 2009 issue of Ruminate has a poem called "The Ascension" which was, sadly, also accepted by The Cresset because I had a hard drive crash and lost my records of (blah blah blah) where I had sent it. It is my hope a good Crhistian magazine like The Cresset will forgive me, but in this cutthroat world of contemporary poetry, who knows?... Hope is what we have, unless we prefer worry.
Euphony has recently printed a poem sort of about Barney Rubble's disappoinments called "Mea Lithos" and I wrote it.
The Paris Review has not printed any of my stuff yet, but we are just and only decades away from 80, so, in the meantime, while we wait to turn 80 and for all their fervor for Saul Bellow to die down...
New poems with enticing titles, currently circulating amongst the editors:
"Star-Eyed Orca", "My Favorite Flavor Cherry Red", " Voodoo Zombies "(my other zombie poem) and "
Springtime for Hitler".
I have sent 4 poems to MARGIE because I really want to be there, "Daphne Grows Up" and "My Favorite Word" (in English, French and German), as well as "from Birds of North America" and "Peeve." Daphne could be in any mag, if they have any heart at all and aren't run by a bunch of stiff lipped government workers. But I want it in MARGIE, dang it!
NEW: Pretty solid poetics blog, with some charm, at
www.johnphilipjohnson.blogspot.com
Vocab, grammar, art, science games .... Do Good – Play! Below picture will be reposted as soon as I figure out how I screwed up and lost it.
excerpts from a novel
from Hard Lights of Eden:
What was it? It was to awaken a little, then sometime later, to be awakening again. It was like waves breaking on a shore, waves of light, of dark, breaking on a shore that didn't quite exist yet. Waves of on breaking on a shore of off.
And then there was light and dark, now clear and distinct. Not waves. Now it was more like a river. A river of shapes. They were changing, passing by. There were other things, too, in the background, but those things were barely over the threshold of what was noticeable. For the most part, it was shapes. And wonder. Wonder that there was anything at all. The shapes themselves, the light and dark, it hadn't occurred to her to wonder yet what they were. It was just a wonder that they were, that they were at all. It was amazing.
How long this went on is hard to say, because she was not counting time, or marking time, nor did she know yet that there was time. Increments to the pace of change. It was just change. In a way it was a static thing; a thing of changing.
And then, later, the other things began to be noticed over the threshold. Sound. It was like static, or rain, or applause from the unseen hands of angels. It, too, was like a river, and it, too, was moving, though it seemed not to move.
The all-at-onceness of things, rushing and immediate.
She began to discern more and more things. The two rivers, light and sound, were separate things, but they were related. She could think of one and forget the other; and yet, as she forgot it, it was not lost. For she could turn to it again, and - such wonder - there it was. And if she kept them both in mind, it was a strange harmony. Two separate things, yet related.
After a while it became a moment. After a while she began to notice that here and now changed a little from here and then. There was no holding it. It just moved. And she noticed differences in the shapes. Some were long and thin, some were round and bulky. Some moved yet were the same; they were the same even though they changed.
Some of the shapes she began to think of as things. Some of the shapes were the background.
Then she began to notice colors.
Then she began to notice textures of light, and textures of sound.
And so it went for a long while, of noticing things, noticing sounds, colors, shapes, and the way things were connected. Noticing, not noticing, noticing again, and accumulating in memory.
And then something very strange happened. She noticed she was noticing.
She noticed herself.
This was the strangest thing of all. You might say it was like discovering a huge, empty door behind you. A door you couldn't see. A door you didn't know. And to notice with strangeness that the door was you, and yet it wasn't quite there, and all the beautiful things you had been exploring, they were no longer quite you. It was kind of like falling. It was the first shadow, the first bit of separation.
And that took some getting used to.