Peter Johnson, Excerpts from Observations from the Edge of the Abyss

The following fragments/prose poems are from my new book called Observations from the Edge of the Abyss, which Plume has graciously offered to launch by providing the URL at the end of this little intro. Perhaps the best way to explain what I am up to is to blame it on Bill Knott.

In 1999, the eccentric Knott sent me thoughtfully inscribed cheap, staple-bound pamphlets of his poems, sometimes quoting from my own prose poems in the inscriptions. On the inside covers of these pamphlets, in very large type, was written: “It should be obvious that if I could have found a real publisher for this book, I wouldn’t be doing it myself; no one wants the HUMILIATION of being a vanity author.” At the time, it seemed absurd that a publisher would reject a Bill Knott manuscript, but since then, I have witnessed even dumber editorial decisions.

Unlike Knott, I have a loyal publisher (Marc Vincenz at MadHat Press) for Observations at the Edge of the Abyss, so you might wonder why I would offer it for free. First, with the recent publication of my While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems (my life’s work with a certain kind of prose poem), I feel a bit liberated to make an eccentric Knott-like gesture. Also, because I am so fond of this strange book, I want the maximum number of people to read it and to pass it along to others. What better way to accomplish this feat than to give it away? After all, poets rarely buy each other’s books, and when gifted a new collection, they often sell it to a used bookstore for enough cash to buy one of those unpronounceable specialty Starbucks drinks.

Concerning the fragments themselves, after reading them months later, I can see that the book is really an interrogation of the grand narratives we currently live by and of the possibilities and limits of language to explore those narratives. In terms of the improvisational genesis of the book, my “Introduction” in the manuscript itself does a good job describing that.

So, I hope you enjoy these little boxes, download the book, and pass it along to others.

After all, it’s for free, which, in a perfect world, would be how poetry should be received.

Excerpts from Observations from the Edge of the Abyss

The mice are tearing up the walls again, in search of the Legendary Cheeseball. And me? Just a diaspora of aches and pains. Time for the scalpel. Time for the holy water and incense. A mouse’s tiny heart beats 632 times per minute, so when they get together all hell can break loose. “An existential infestation,” is what the exterminator called it—a guy with a nose ring and two black beady eyes. We were discussing whether Jesus spoke Hebrew or Aramaic. “Beats me,” he said, “but I sure like those sandals. Bet He had perfect feet, just like in the paintings.” He was a stickler for details, this one. He’d stare endlessly into his handkerchief after blowing his nose. What did he see? One of those mysteries that kept me up all night. “I’d grow my hair long like Jesus if I could,” he said, before taking a hammer to the wall. “I’d put it in a bun.”

****

The woman digging in the garden hoping to unearth her dead husband. Hands that talk, hands that can really rile people up. And tulips opening as effortlessly as a woman’s legs. All related by addition and subtraction, proving (once and for all) that reality is merely a child who will sing like a bird, if we’d only take the time to listen.

****

It was 1982, if I remember correctly, but then memory is as unreliable as my brother Billy, who was named after my mother’s gynecologist, a doctor as ill-fitted for his job as a lead singer with laryngitis and bad teeth. I was living with a woman who would wake in the middle of the night and scribble her dreams on my back with chocolate syrup, then make life decisions based on her Jungian therapist’s deciphering of them. “Deer equals hatred,” her therapist said. “Poison ivy, love.” All this happening a few years before the notorious Tongues of Fires Incident would cause our relationship to become a disaster movie with no known villains, except a Jungian symbol hunter with an American-flag bowtie and a fairly substantial bank account.

****

I was almost in a porno movie–this long before I became woke and ceased to be the Man-I-Preferred-Not-To-Be-But-Couldn’t-Help-Myself-From-Being, except in an occasional dream, whose contents now reside in an obscure brain fold in the back of my head.  The two women in question were beautiful, shapely, and sad. The guy peddling them, blond and lanky, a seedy specimen famous for stirring his martinis with large unripe bananas. Subtlety, as you can imagine, was not a virtue in those days. But that didn’t matter. I was too young to read the symbolism of it all, happy to be sitting at a bar at the other end of a country that was about to fall out of love with itself.

****

This is not the place to look for answers, though I have certainly enjoyed my life. I’ve also had “minor” visions that came perilously close to the realm of ecstasy. It was as if someone had poured honey over me, thinking I might soften overnight. I say this, hoping for the good luck of my friend whose expected diagnosis of “bipolar” ended up being “just incredibly fucked-up.” Yet even now I see him standing on the edge of the pier, snow stinging his face. “The icebergs have melted,” he yells to me, “the water is rising. No Frankenstein’s Monster in sight.”

****

The carnival has come to town. Let us praise the hirsute men of the carnival! The obese and emaciated men of the carnival! The fake philosophers and poets, bragging about the women they’ve beaten, the children they’ve abandoned. Oh, the men of the carnival, circling a blazing oil drum and sharing a joint, while methodical waves pound a nearby beach. Oh, the carnival men, and the children—the sleeping children squeezing admission tickets between their moist fingers, lost in their carnival dreams.

****

She said I was “loco,” “plumb loco.” By which she meant, I had a tendency toward exaggerated responses to both mundane and eschatological events, which, recently, had been occurring simultaneously. An example: I once gave CPR to a run-down raccoon twitching on the side of the road. This would have impressed most women, but not her. She was a creature aroused by gold-plated ab rollers and first-edition curling iron manuals. Still, I loved her, even when she called me Mr. Monkey Glands, Mr. Ouija Board. Even when she dubbed me Señor Loco.

****

Antonio was visiting Montenegro when he stumbled into a garden of dead orchids. There was a toothless old man playing “Crossroads” on a cheap harmonica. The mythic resonances of this experience were not lost on Antonio, perhaps even magnified when the ghosts of ancient aliens began to rise from the clammy slate pavement, completely unaware of the sad centuries that awaited them.  An agent of annihilation. That was to be my calling. A kind of minus 007 without the cool suits and rock-hard abs. Some long-haired blond saint who could talk to animals and silence TVs with his steely-eyed glare . . . Once upon a time, a man, a city, a country ordered that all missiles should be destroyed. But, like all movements without a motto, the order went unnoticed, except by Larry, the local car mechanic, famous for stuffing scraps of philosophical aphorisms down the G-strings of local strippers. So it is with us all, Larry—caught in a world of good intentions gone bad.

****

This morning found me in a more contemplative, even melancholic, mood.  Last night a poet with a red handlebar moustache read a poem about his penis that made my eyeballs pop out and refuse to return to their sockets. Still, like the rest of the dopes, I listened politely until the reading ended. Then off to the wine-soaked reception, where the black limousine never showed up, which was the only part of this lunatic ritual that made any sense.

****

The dancing instructor who swears he is my brother. Who pretends to have read my translations of Catullus and walked my pug in a rainstorm that was so violent it forced the words “cyclone” and “bomb” to be used together. The guy who could argue about the length of Freud’s beard, and who once said, “What choices would you make if you lived your life hovering above the earth in a hot air balloon?” The dancing instructor who right now hands me a pair of shiny winged toe shoes and a coin guaranteed to grant me only half of what I might wish for.

****

Saved yet again by the Christians in a strange country where the coming of dawn and dusk is considered a burden. I was looking for a bird with a white head and a damaged leg, whose glance was guaranteed to heal what ailed me. A bird capable of revealing the hard-to-swallow News of the World without depending on language. In short, I needed an ending. Not some Vicodin moment, but something as real as a garbage truck ripping a car door off its hinges—the Abyss beckoning only three feet away.

Free download of Observations at the Edge of the Abyss is available here:  “Observations from the Edge of the Abyss” by Peter Johnson (bepress.com)

Author: Peter Johnson

Peter Johnson has published seven books of prose poems, six novels, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on the prose poem, and three anthologies of prose poetry. His poetry and fiction have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Rhode Island Council on the Arts, and his second book of prose poems was awarded the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His most recent book is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems. More information can be found at peterjohnsonauthor.com and on his Substack site at johnsonp.substack.com.

Plume: Issue #146 October 2023