PERCEPTION, OBSESSIONS, QUEER EXCESS: AN INTERVIEW WITH JENNY JOHNSON

I first read Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet in Toby Wray’s MFA class on contemporary queer poetry at the University of Idaho, and I fell immediately into very queer love with its poems. Johnson uses sound as a primary engine: sound powers these poems as they move with care through the many different bodies in the collection—bodies who grow tails and lose them, who look out into the world with deliberate and patient gazes, who expand to hold entire ecosystems. Bodies who sing.

When I reached out to Jenny with questions and obsessions, she brought her full self to the table (read: Zoom meeting) the same way she does to the page. Johnson is a poet with many well-deserved honors including a Whiting Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, and awards and scholarships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and Yaddo, among others. She is brilliant and warm, funny and deeply present. The conversation that follows ranged from grief to the rabbits in her garden, to gender and its dissonances, to poetic form and its opportunities, and it included a healthy amount of laughter.

—Gianna Stoddard, Nonfiction Editor

Gianna Stoddard: I am really interested in the ecologies in In Full Velvet. You’ve spoken in other interviews about the prevalence of animals in these poems and about taking a playful resistance to what bodies are considered natural or what behaviors are considered natural in those bodies. And because I’ve been thinking so much about queer kinship and ecosystems and what they mean, I do see this collection as a building of its own ecosystem—it creates its own world. Also, in your essay “Troubling Forms,” you write about the relationship between troubling forms and pushing back against the bounds of the natural, and I really see both of those things happening in this collection with so much joy. So I wonder if you could speak a bit to the relationship between form and ecology and joy in this collection: what is it like to build a queer ecology and a queer ecosystem, and what role does joy play in that?

Jenny Johnson: Well, I love that joy is something that you’re interested in in your work, too. As a queer person, and because I think of queerness also as a politicized identity—queerness as being against the state, that kind of thing—I feel like joy is sometimes found in the pockets. It doesn’t always feel ubiquitous to me. The moments of arriving at it, or stumbling upon it, whether it be in a gesture between lovers or in an observation of what’s happening in the backyard, never stop feeling radical to me or important and energizing as a sensation of possibility.

 In terms of ecology, it feels a little more fraught to me. Halfway through writing [the poem] “Dappled Things,” it was like, “Alright I’m having a lot of fun praising difference in the natural world, but I am part of the Anthropocene... I am a human who’s leaving my own stamp and mark on this world, and that hurts other beings.” So, it didn’t feel like I could just celebrate. And I do find it interesting to let the two collide: grief and joy. I’m interested in what happens when they come up against each other, and I think I’ve noticed that they often run side by side in my work. Sometimes I have to ask, “Is this an ode, or is this a lament? I’m not really sure.” And maybe when we’re feeling joy it’s because we also know that on the other side of that joy is the potential for loss, and that’s what heightens the joy. I am interested in that tension, and I don’t think you can even enter into an ethical ecopoetics without feeling the two running concurrently.

GS: Yes, that makes a lot of sense. And I think there’s something you’re getting at here: that joy—or holding onto joy—can give us access to a politics of caring or a practice of caring that maybe keeps us from deadening. Because grief can be really deadening.

JJ: I think about—because I am a gardener—that as I plant one thing, I pull up something else. I’m constantly making choices where I have to acknowledge my own dominance in my own little backyard. And then I have to say, “Well, what if I just...leave everything be? Why am I getting so involved?” [laughs]

So sometimes I say to myself, “Just let the clover grow! Don’t cut the grass. Let the rabbit eat it!” [both laugh]

I just learned that there’s a name for a kind of garden called a “distraction garden.” In my yard, it’s a small distractive space that I’ve let be for a rabbit friend. With rabbits, if you don’t mow a lawn as much, then they often choose to eat the clover over the lettuce that’s in a raised bed. I like to think about, “What are the ways that we can create—even in a small space, and even on the page—ecologies of care, ecologies of possibility?” And in these interdependent situations, I don’t think of myself as the protagonist.

GS: I like that a lot. I also am really drawn to the music in this collection—both the music of the poems themselves and also the allusions to music. In an interview with LitHub, you spoke about using sound to find a way into difficult material in your class at Bread Loaf. I think grief and joy also are both very animal feelings, and there are ways that we can only access them through the animal body. Sound can also be a way into what’s animal about us; it can be a way into the very animal nature of our bodies. I was wondering whether you found that in writing this collection: if music was a way of exploring or addressing the animal?

JJ: Yeah, and I think I didn’t really answer your question about form. Form to me is like shapes or containers on the page. Form feels very bodily to me in the sense that our body is a form or a shape [laughs]. We’re making other shapes and bodies on a page that breathe different kinds of energies. There are the two sonnet sequences in the book— “Dappled Things” is a sequence of curtal sonnets that are sparked by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and in that series in particular, I just gave over to sound. [1] I had been memorizing a lot of Hopkins, so I decided that I was going to let the extra-alliterative, extra-assonant way that he invokes sprung rhythm inhabit my poem.[2] I wanted to see what would happen if I did my own riff on that rhythm without worrying over whether it sounded like too much.

And then I got really interested in the question of, “What is too much-ness?” because that feels like an aspect of queerness. I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking I was too much: I was too butch, I could be perceived as being too erotic, too this, too that. But what about leaning into the “too much-ness”? And for me, leaning into the “too much-ness” was also about leaning into sound. Just asking, “what if I let sound be in charge of some of these lines?” I’m still going to try to have the poem have a clear line of inquiry that a reader can follow to see what I’m wrestling with, or what the speaker is wrestling with [laughs]... but I tried to let sound lead to more of the engagement with language.

For example, there’s the part of “Dappled Things” where I get into the etymology of “dapple” and “apple.” I wrote that sequence of poems one-a-day while I was at a residency and I thought, I’m just going to write eleven lines today, and I’m just going to see what happens. It’s pretty loose, but I did try to follow the rhyme scheme of the curtal sonnets of Hopkins. Playing with Hopkin’s rhyme scheme made me write stuff that otherwise I wouldn’t have written if I was writing in a narrative free verse style, which is what I do in some of the other poems in the book.  

Certainly, the same thing was happening when I was writing “Aria,” which I wrote some years before “Dappled Things.” I wanted to write a sonnet crown. It began as an assignment for grad school. A professor told me to write a crown, and I was like, “Okay...” [both laugh] But I was reading a lot of Marylin Hacker, whom I love, and I thought, “How might I try to find pleasure in this?” When I was writing “Aria,” I collided with a lot of grief around gender dysphoria. It was an early poem for me in terms of exploring the body, so it felt like I was getting stuff on the page in a way I hadn’t ever before. I was definitely feeling the limitations of trying to play with blank verse and the fourteen lines, but then through that restraint also came some play.

There are other ways I like to let sound take over during the creative process. Often I will revise a poem using a sound exercise. The poem “Summoning the Body That Is Mine When I Shut My Eyes,” was lying around and I wanted it to go into the book as well, but I didn’t think it was done, so I pulled a consonant sound from a line that was working. Then, I experimented with that consonant sound in a separate notebook in order to generate more lines for that poem, and I found that that led, like you’re saying, to a more animal or intuitive excavation of language.

GS: I think that’s really beautiful. It feels important to think of leaning into the “too much-ness” of sound as a mirror for leaning into the “too much-ness” of a queer body, that both of those things happen in a body, in a very specific space, and can’t exist outside of that space. A really visceral way to frame all of this.

JJ: Yeah, queer excess!

GS: Yeah, and I mean, nature is so baroque. Nature is so excessive. And to use all of those things within a form as a way of being on the page feels so reflective of that excess.

JJ: When I think of that kind of queer excess, I’m aware of being in lineage with Mark Doty’s work. At least imagistically, and syntactically, his poems ride that line of feeling critically excessive. Some of his imagery is just so necessarily lush. I’m thinking of the poem “Homo Will Not Inherit” because so much of it is just description of a city, at least in the beginning of the poem. His descriptions of landscapes and cityscapes have given me permission to be imagistically lush and accumulative in poems. Meanwhile, Hopkins taught me about excess with sound. And Marilyn Hacker has taught me about excess in diction -- she can write the most simultaneously intellectual and bawdy of sonnets, and you’re like, “How did she pull this off? How did she think to juxtapose the most dazzling image next to an image of body fluids, before throwing in a little French?” All of that feels queer to me, just letting all of sorts of juxtapositions come into a poem and intersect.

GS: I really want to talk about “Little Apophat” before we run out of time. There are a lot of the intersections that we’ve been talking about in that poem: there’s the intersection of the animal, the aural, and then the divine. I think for me that poem was key to the rest of the collection in some ways.

JJ: Very interesting.

GS: I was moving through the lushness of the poems, and then I got to the line in that poem where the speaker feels “inexplicably like a father though I am nothing other than an ex-girlfriend falling in and out of touch.” And the way that the body shifts and moves in that poem, and the idea of the apophatic address was fascinating to me, and I was reading it very much in connection with the Hopkins line you quote in “Dappled Things,” “What you look hard at seems/to look hard at you.” [3]

JJ: How were you reading it next to the Hopkins?

GS: That there’s an attention to detail in an apophatic address. That driving so much attention toward what isn’t drives a lot of attention toward what is.

JJ: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

GS: I was reading that attention in relation to the mutual gazing in a poem like “Vigil,” both between the speaker and animals in the ecosystem and, again, the speaker and a child—this time in a mirror. I’m very curious how you see the apophatic in relation to gender and queerness or queer bodies, and how this kind of practice of mutual gazing impacts or shapes that relationship?

JJ: I do think in some ways that, like when we talk about joy and grief, presence and absence go together, too. My friend, the poet, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, once gave me an exercise to write a poem that was both an ode to a part of the body and a lament. That was where the poem “Tail” came from in the book. I’ve had the experience as a gender-nonconforming person where my material body doesn’t always line up with my felt sense of my body. There’s just a dissonance between the two. There’s also sometimes a dissonance between absence and presence when I’m having sex with a lover. And there’s joy in that tension, and sometimes there’s grief in that, too.

I think the longer I’m alive, it’s mostly joyful. I’m like, “Huh...I don’t know...we make things work.” But there have been parts of my life where I wished for a different kind of embodiment. These days I’m interested in the many kinds of embodiment that we can feel in our lives alone or with others. So, that’s where I go when I think of absence and presence and the body and queerness.

In “Little Apophat,” I was thinking about all of this in relationship to how queer folks often have many loves that go unseen. Then I had this vision: what if there are all of these apophatic children that we’ve each left a trail of? [both laugh] Because straight people in heterosexual relationships can just say, “Oh, we made a kid. This shows we were legit. Look, this is the product of our lovemaking.” If there’s not a product, or if there’s not a reproductive being [both laugh] that springs forth from all the loving that goes on, then where’s the evidence of what was made? So, yeah, I was interested in the poem as a place to honor all the making, or all the not-making making [laughs].

GS: I’m always so grateful for the fact that there’s no accident of nature as a product of queer sex [both laugh]

JJ: Right, right, I’m often relieved that that doesn’t happen!

GS: Yes! But I think—perhaps not for me at this point in my life, but for other queers—I think there’s often also longing, or just curiosity, as to what kind of making could happen if our bodies operated that way—if it were possible to conceive with our partners. And I think I certainly read a playfulness in the way this poem approaches that curiosity. I think it was for me a way into a deeper understanding of the collection.

JJ: Through the stuff about absence and presence?

GS: Yeah, that absence can be a way of approaching the presence of something divinely queer or uniquely and beautifully, just…really gay [both laugh]. I loved that there was this moment in which the speaker says (referring to the child in the poem), “I like to study/not her features exactly/but all her small perfect shadows…” and addresses her directly as “Little Nothing” to ask, “dare I tell you/what your mother and I made?” I read these lines maybe in contrast to or in companionship with some of the baroqueness and lushness of the rest of the collection, a place to stand still and consider what that kind of making means: how it comes into being, how it’s shaped by our bodies.

JJ: You brought up queer gazing. I’m still thinking about perception in my work. I mean our obsessions as poets don’t go away! Lately, I’ve been thinking about divergent queer experiences of seeing and being seen—there’s the hypervisibility of being masculine of center, my primary experience, versus the invisibility of different loves in my life who are femme-identified. Alongside of all this, I’ve been thinking about queer films, especially early lesbian films, which often have these iconic scenes that involve slow, loaded moments of reciprocal looking. And yet, the ability for queer folks to see each other—to share a reciprocal gaze—is often fraught, because we don’t all share one monolithic experience of seeing and feeling seen. We each have our own discrete experiences trying to navigate a heteronormative world, either because we feel so visible all the time, and that hypervisibility makes you not see yourself, or because you have felt like no one ever notices you, and so you have to constantly prove and reveal your desire. And what happens when these divergent experiences of subjectivity collide?

Afterword by Gianna: In her book, Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Imagination, Nicole Seymour attempts to bridge gaps between ecocriticism (and environmentalism more broadly) and inclusive, intersectional queer theory, as “much environmentalist discourse depends on, or even requires, a white-centric heterosexism, if not homophobia.” In the opening essay of the book, Seymour asks, “Can a defense of ‘nature’ or ‘the natural’ ever be queer? Can one redefine those terms such that they effectively, and empathetically, accommodate both the queer and the non-human? And are there ways of being ironic and playful, those qualities often associated with queerness, while also being earnest and dedicated, those qualities often associated with environmentalism?”

I cannot think of anything I’ve read that embodies a more earnest, dedicated approach to queer bodies, to nature and the natural world, to the possibilities and potential in liberating the natural from the constraints of cisheteronormativity—an approach that remains ironic, playful, curious, and genuinely joyful in these explorations—than Johnson’s poems. Reading In Full Velvet, I keep thinking about what “queer ecologies” mean, what they embody. Are they natural ecosystems in which the plants, animals, and landscapes are queer? Are they human ecologies composed of queer bodies? Are they a blend of these ideas? Do the poems even make a distinction between these questions?

Each time I return to these poems, I’m surprised at how much they contain. There is always a detail I passed over on an earlier read, a new creature or idea (if the poems even differentiate between the two). Johnson pushes against the edges of the forms she employs, asking them to hold complex feelings, queer excess, binaries and the tension between them. In our conversation, she said, “Form feels very bodily to me in the sense that our body is a form or a shape. We’re making other shapes and bodies on a page that breathe different kinds of energies.” I remember sitting forward in my chair, pushing my face forward toward the screen, thinking yes, thinking, there it is. We often speak of form as method or as vehicle—as something that drives or shapes the text—but to think of form as body, as living thing that breathes and evolves on the page—changes the terms of our conversations.

The poems in In Full Velvet act as bodies on the page. They embody multiplicities and simultaneities. They enact grief and joy and create spaces where the two run headlong into one another. These poems look hard at concepts and misconceptions of both the queer and the natural; they look hard at each other; they look hard at the reader. To read this collection is to be in bodied community with landscapes and lineages Johnson shapes— with her lover(s), with osprey, river otters, the speaker’s lesbian elders Peg and Dorothy, a damselfly, buttercups, “whales with lady hips,” “male bonobos making out in public”—to become another form that “breathe[s] different kinds of energies” alongside the poems on the page.

[1] The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which contains ten lines in iambic pentameter and a final eleventh line with a single spondee. Perhaps the most famous example of the curtal sonnet is his poem, “Pied Beauty,” which begins, “Glory be to God for dappled things…”

[2] “Sprung rhythm” is an irregular metrical system Hopkins devised to invoke the dynamic and variable patterns of common speech.

[3] Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology or apophatic mysticism, is a form of spirituality in which an understanding of God is accessed via negation. It emphasizes interiority and wordlessness and sketches the outer edges of God or the divine through defining what God is not or cannot be.

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. After earning a BA/MT in English Education from the University of Virginia, she taught public school for several years in San Francisco, and she spent ten summers on the staff of the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.

Gianna Stoddard is the nonfiction editor for Fugue and a second-year MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. They were raised on an avocado orchard in Southern California and studied at UC Santa Barbara’s College for Creative Studies. Gianna’s work engages with the semi-fluid boundaries between the body and its environments—between the natural and the unnatural, the human and the nonhuman—as well as quiet moments of queer intimacy, domesticity, and joy. Gianna is a dedicated cook and enjoys hiking, backpacking, and outdoor swimming.