The Incognito Loungeby Denis Johnson
Random House (1982)
If anything, Denis Johnson's reputation as a poet suffers, if one can call it suffering, from the popularity of his cult classic Jesus' Son. There's no doubt that Jesus' Son is a modern masterpiece of lyrical fiction, and there's no doubt that it deserves all the attention it continues to garner. Furthermore, there's no doubt that Jesus' Son could have been written by anyone but a poet with the desire to fuse the mystical realm of image and abstraction to the empirical realm of storied people and places.
The Incognito Lounge, Johnson's first full-length poetry collection, was selected by Mark Strand for the 1982 National Poetry Series. From cover to cover, Johnson takes us deep inside a psyche near the edge of ruin, and surrounds us with a landscape with the contours to match. As the cover art suggests, Johnson's is a cruel world of late rent, cheap booze, stale breath, and lacquer-thick hairspray. But these images suggest something grounded and narrative, and what Johnson delivers is something altogether more dense, lyrical, and kinetic. Like the characters in so much of Johnson's writing, the voice is this book has one eye on redemption and one eye on oblivion.
VESPERS
The towels rot and disgust me on this damp
peninsula where they invented mist
and drug abuse and taught the light to fade,
where my top-quality and rock-bottom heart
cries because I'll never get to kiss
your famous knees again in a room made
vague by throwing a scarf over a lamp.
Things get pretty radical in the dark:
the sailboats on the inlet sail away;
the provinces of actuality
crawl on the sea; the dusk now tenderly
ministers to the fallen parking lots--
the sunset instantaneous on the fenders,
memory and peace....the grip of chaos...
NOW
Whatever the foghorns are
the voices of feels terrible
tonight, just terrible, and here
by the window that looks out
on the waters but is blind, I
have been sleeping,
but I am awake now.
In the night I watch
how the little lights
of boats come out
to us and are lost again
in the fog wallowing on the sea:
it is as if in that absence not many
but a single light gestures
and diminishes like meaning
through speech, negligently
adance to the calling
of the foghorns like the one
note they lend from voice
to voice. And so does my life tremble,
and when I turn from the window
and from the sea's grief, the room
fills with a dark
lushness and foliage nobody
will ever be plucked from,
and the feelings I have
must never be given speech.
Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,
and I am almost ready to
confess it is not some awful
misunderstanding that has carried
me here, my arms full of the ghosts
of flowers, to kneel at your feet;
almost ready to see
how at each turning I chose
this way, this place and this verging
of ocean on earth with the horns claiming
I can keep on if only I step
where I cannot breathe. My coat
is leprosy and my dagger
is a lie; must I
shed them? Do I have
to end my life in order
to begin? Music, you are light.
Agony, you are only what tips
me from moment to moment, light
to light and word to word,
and I am here at the waters
because in this space between spaces
where nothing speaks,
I am what it says.
To seek out all of Denis Johnson's poetry look for The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (Harper Perennial, 1996). Or drop by Carnegie-Mellon University Press, who dutifully keeps The Incognito Lounge in print in an affordable paperback edition through its incredible Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporaries Series. As always, consult your local bookseller first--both of these titles are easy to find on the cheap.
And if you're looking to drop some serious coins on Johnson's limited-edition poetry collections, Man Among the Seals and Inner Weather, follow the links listed at The Olives of Oblivion Bookseller Hall of Fame.
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