Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: In Full Velvet
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.jennyjohnsonpoet.com/
CITY: Pittsburgh
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.jennyjohnsonpoet.com/about/ * https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jenny-johnson * http://www.whiting.org/awards/winners/jenny-johnson#/ * http://www.writing.pitt.edu/people/faculty/jenny-johnson * http://therumpus.net/2015/11/the-rumpus-interview-with-jenny-johnson/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016031210
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3610.O3564
Personal name heading:
Johnson, Jenny, 1979-
Variant(s): Johnson, Jenny Anne, 1979-
Birth date: 1979-10-26
Found in: In full velvet, 2017: CIP t.p. (Jenny Johnson) publisher's
summary ("Johnson's debut collection is one of
resounding generosity and grace. Jenny Johnson is a
recipient of the 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, and the
2016 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. She lives in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania")
2016-06-08 e-mail fr. K. Radtke, Sarabande Books: (Jenny
Anne Johnson . . . her birthdate is 10/26/1979)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born 1979.
EDUCATION:University of Virginia, B.A., M.F.A. (teaching); Warren Wilson College, M.F.A. (poetry).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, and educator. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, lecturer in the Writing Program; also teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, Rainer Writing Workshop, Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Previously taught public school in the San Francisco Bay Area in California and spent ten summers on the staff of the University of Virginia Young Writer’s Workshop.
AWARDS:Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, 2011, for the poem “Aria”; Whiting Writers’ Award, 2015; Hodder Fellowship, Princeton University, 2016-17.
WRITINGS
Contributor to the anthology Best American Poetry 2012, and to Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Contributor to literary journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, the Collagist, the Southern Review, and Blackbird.
SIDELIGHTS
An award winning poet, Jenny Johnson grew up in rural Virginia and went on to teach public school in the San Francisco Bay area in California. She also worked on the staff of the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop over ten summers. With master’s degrees in teaching and poetry, Johnson is a university lecturer in writing and poetry. In an interview for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College website, Johnson commented on her own poetry, noting: “When writing in a fixed form I work first to establish a pattern. So when drafting, I might begin by setting rules. Such as, when writing in blank verse, no more than two substitutions per line — rules to help me hear and feel the pattern in the writing.” Johnson went on to note in the interview “that at some point I find that the poem starts singing to its own tune.”
In her debut collection of poetry, In Full Velvet: Poems, Johnson ponders the vagaries and nuances of love and queer culture. For example, in the poem “In the Dream,” Johnson reveals the psychological impact of a homophobic society in which sometimes the only refuge found is in the persecuted community. Drawing from her own youth growing up in rural Virginia, Johnson also features nature in much of the poetry, such as the title poem “In Full Velvet.” The poem starts out as a lesson in taxidermy: “Before the horns fall away, here’s what / the taxidermist teaches: / Because the velvet grows onto the hide we have to skin it and cut it, / so nothing rips up and causes damage.” The poem goes on to talk of love and the speaker notes: “Some days I am rich / as the common garter snake / with more testosterone / than you can handle / and the sweetest stench / of pheromones.”
In a poem titled “Summoning the Body That Is Mine When I Shut My Eyes,” Johnson also returns to the imagery and realities of nature to remind herself to live in the present. “Once I became conscious that animals and birds were showing up in my poems, I became interested in what that might mean,” Johnson noted in her interview for the RWW Soundings website, adding: “I started thinking about how animal humans are, and then I started having fun playfully resisting phobic assumptions about what kinds of bodies are ‘natural’ and what kinds of acts are ‘natural’ for any species.”
“Johnson has written a decidedly apolitical book while still acknowledging and engaging with the inevitable politicization of queer identities, relationships and sex,” wrote an Autostraddle website contributor. A Publishers Weekly contributor called In Full Velvet a “stunningly lyrical debut” in which Johnson creates “a melodic and thought-provoking symphony on queer identity.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Johnson, Jenny, In Full Velvet: Poems, Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY, 2017.
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 16, 2017, review of In Full Velvet, p. 36.
New England Review, fall-winter, 2013, Jenny Johnson, the poem “In Full Velvet,” p. 356.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets, https://www.poets.org/ (October 25, 2017), brief author profile.
Autostraddle, https://www.poets.org (February 21, 2017), review of In Full Velvet.
Bind, https://www.thebind.net/ (July 20, 2017), Madeleine Wattenberg, “Queer Ecology: a Review and Field Guide to Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet.”
Blue Flower Arts website, http://blueflowerarts.com/ (October 25, 2017), brief author profile.
Blueshift Journal, https://www.theblueshiftjournal.com (Marh 19, 2017), Roy Guzmán, “A Guardian to Others’ Solitude: Review of Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet.”
Jenny Johnson Website, https://www.jennyjohnsonpoet.com (October 25, 2017).
MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College Website, http://www.wwcmfa.org/ (June 3, 2016), “An Interview With Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend Recipient Jenny Johnson.”
Pittsburgh City Paper, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/ (July 26, 2017), Madeleine Wattenberg, review of In Full Velvet.
Ploughshares Blog, http://blog.pshares.org/ (October 1, 2017), Annalia Luna, review of In Full Velvet.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net (May 10, 2017), Julie Marie Wade, “The Queer Valentine of the Century: Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet.”
RWW Soundings, http://rwwsoundings.com/ (October 25, 2017), “The Poem at Hand: A Profile of Jenny Johnson.”
University of Pittsburgh website, http://www.pitt.edu/ (October 25, 2017), author faculty profile.
Jenny Johnson is a recipient of the 2015 Whiting Writers' Award, and the 2016 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Jenny Johnson received an MA in teaching from the University of Virginia and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). She has received numerous awards and scholarships, including a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016–2017 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A 2015 Whiting Award recipient, Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). In its starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote of the collection: “In this stunningly lyrical debut, Johnson probes issues of queer culture and love from an array of existential perspectives, creating a melodic and thought-provoking symphony on queer identity…. A miniature opus, alternately joyful and heartrending, achingly bittersweet.” The Judges Citation for the Whiting Award states: “The rigor and formal poise of Jenny Johnson’s work creates an astounding emotional tension. There’s a sinuous, shape-shifting quality to this work that makes her poetic explorations of sex and selfhood all the more resonant. That subtle mastery of line and rhyme is a powerful complement to the poems’ organic commemorating, interrogating, searching. The judges were reminded of the virtuosity that characterizes a master like Elizabeth Bishop; of the profound and active depths, and how her poems ripple with need, and the desire for unity, communion, transformation.” In an interview Johnson offers this more personal understanding: “A poem is a liminal space that can offer a sensation of belonging. A poem won’t bring you a cold beer, but it may offer you a stool where you can sit down and feel momentarily at home.”
Johnson’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, 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, Johnson 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. In 2016-2017 she was a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.
She currently teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program, and the University of Pittsburgh.
Jenny Johnson’s website
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books 2017). She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, 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 teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet, published by Sarabande Books in 2017. Her honors include a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. 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 Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, 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 a Contributing Editor at Waxwing Literary Journal. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.
RECENT HONORS
2016-2017 Hodder Fellowship
2015 Whiting Writing Award
SELECTED POEMS
"Ladies' Arm Wrestling Match at the Blue Moon Diner," The New York Times.
"In the Dream," Poem-a-Day, Academy of American Poets.
"Spaces," Poem-a-Day, Academy of American Poets.
"Late Bloom," Verse Daily.
"Little Apophat," Waxwing.
“Aria,” Beloit Poetry Journal.
“Severe,” Blackbird.
"Altitudes," SF Chronicle.
ANTHOLOGIES
Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Nightboat Books, 2013.
The Best American Poetry 2012. Scribner, 2012.
Another and Another: An Anthology from the Poem-a-Day Grind. Bull City Press, 2012.
REVIEWS & NEWS FOR IN FULL VELVET
Publishers Weekly: Starred Review
Books Noted, Spring-Summer 2017 edition of American Poets, Review by Jennifer Michael Hecht
Virginia Quarterly Review, Review by Lisa Russ Spaar, "Selvages"
The Rumpus, Review by Julie Marie Wade, "The Queer Valentine of the Century"
The Blueshift Journal: Review by roy guzmán
Autostraddle: 45 Queer and Feminist Books You Need to Read in Early 2017
Bustle: 7 Unconventional Books to Give as Valentine's Gifts
ESSAYS & INTERVIEWS
The Rumpus Interview. In conversation with Olivia Kate Cerrone.
Interview for Friends of Writers with Chantal Aida Gordon.
Queer Poets on the Poets Who Changed Their Lives. Poets.org
Tracking the Muse: Contributors on Process. Blackbird: An Online Journal.
Essay on “Aria”. Beloit Poetry Journal Poet’s Forum.
WHERE I TEACH
The Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh
Rainier Writer's Workshop, Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University
Jenny Johnson
Lecturer
jaj80@pitt.edu
412-624-4282
CL 501-L
Jenny Johnson teaches in the Writing program and serves as a faculty consultant in the Writing Center. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Collagist, The Southern Review, Blackbird, and Best New Poets 2008. She was the recipient of the 2011 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize for her poem “Aria.” After earning a Master of Teaching degree from the University of Virginia, Jenny taught public school for several years in the Bay Area, and she spent ten summers on the staff of the University of Virginia Young Writer’s Workshop. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers. At the University of PIttsburgh, Jenny has taught Introduction to Creative Writing and Seminar in Composition: Gender Studies
An Interview With Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend Recipient Jenny Johnson
Posted on Jun 3, 2016
johnson_photo1Jenny Johnson (poetry 2011) was the recipient of a Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend in 2014. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, among others. Jenny received a Whiting Award in 2015, a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and won Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Poetry Prize for her poem “Aria.” She currently lives in Pittsburgh and is a Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. Her debut collection of poems, In Full Velvet, will be published in 2017 by Sarabande Books.
In your discussion of “Aria” on Beloit Poetry Journal’s Poetry Forum, you said, “as a poet with queer and feminist sensibilities writing a blank verse sonnet, my impulses err on the side of disruption. I want to break a meter much more than I want to write within it. However valuable this impulse, I found that I had to first fool around with what’s ‘normal’ before I could effectively trouble my metrics.” At what point in the revision process do you decide to depart from the “normal”? And what do those first steps in the direction of disruption look like, as your drafts progress?
Such a great question! When I said that I have to “fool around with what’s ‘normal,’” I meant that when writing in a fixed form I work first to establish a pattern. So when drafting, I might begin by setting rules. Such as, when writing in blank verse, no more than two substitutions per line — rules to help me hear and feel the pattern in the writing, whether I’m working within a pattern that’s part of a poetic tradition or a pattern of my own devising. As for the disruption, I’m not sure how to describe that part of the process, except that at some point I find that the poem starts singing to its own tune. I think learning how to listen — realizing when to trust a poem’s sudden sense of authority — is key. But I find listening in this way to be such difficult work. It’s like a whole other muscle you have to build, a kind of intuition about knowing when to trust the poem’s autonomous intelligence.
Your first collection of poems, In Full Velvet, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2017. Exciting! Did anything surprise you during the process of collecting, writing and revising your poetry for In Full Velvet? Were there any new lessons in craft that creating your book has taught you?
I didn’t know it was a “book” until the spring of 2014. Rick Barot had given me the following advice during my MFA, “All you have to do is focus on the poem at hand.” And so after graduating from WW in 2011, I took his advice to heart. Rather than trying to write poems for a first book, I worked instead for about three years on just trying to write good poems — one by one. A hard enough feat! When the book comes out in 2017, it will have taken 8 years to write. So, here’s what I learned: If I’d been too focused on making a book, working in a macro sense, I know I would have written poems with less range that took fewer risks. I would have tried too consciously to write poems about certain obsessions, instead of letting the poems arrive at their own slow-poke pace, teaching me how and what I needed to say in my first collection.
In “Souvenirs,” people who are no longer alive (or no longer in a relationship with the speaker) are still very much here — through objects, via a request, and inside a casket. What inspired “Souvenirs”? For you in your writing process, what is essential when it comes to honestly and compellingly depicting an absence?
In 2010, I was at a Larry Levis Celebration in Richmond, VA, and Larry Levis’ black boots were there in the VCU library on display, slouched on a pedestal. His boots! The boots of a poet, whom I had been reading and feeling as if I was talking to — talking to in that way that when someone else’s poems start to impact your work you begin to feel as if you’re having a conversation whether they’re living or dead. The poem started there. Also, I had been reading On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection by Susan Stewart. And so, I was already interested in the strange, and, at times, distorted scale between grief and the souvenirs upon which we transpose feelings of longing and attachment for those who are absent.
How do you end up expressing that “strange, and, at times, distorted scale” through diction, syntax and/or rhythm?
What I was thinking about with regard to scale is expressed primarily in the poem’s images, the “souvenirs,” which embody longing or attachment, but have what Susan Stewart calls a kind of “failed magic” because they exist out-of-context, signifying a present that has passed. Something about the image of Levis’s empty boots not on the ground, instead at eye-level on a pedestal, seemed strange. As an object in the present tense the boots allowed me to feel as if I was paying witness for a moment to a poet’s life, but because the boots are empty, they are simultaneously incongruous with the life the poet lived. To capture this tension, I tried to describe the boots as objectively as I could, at first, but I also wanted to call attention to this private gazing — which is why Levis suddenly appears, halfway through the first section, nudging the speaker and the reader. I suppose this move was a way to play with perspective, so that we have another presence in the poem, catching us seeing and helping us see the out-of-scale, intense subjective attachment that’s involved in any act of looking that is also filled with longing. Later, the poem plays with scale more literally by juxtaposing the giant and the miniature in lines like: “after I’d moved / thousands of miles away, she called to ask if / she might build out of sugar cubes a replica of my house.” So we have a great distance being measured, a move of “thousands of miles,” positioned alongside a small yet painstaking way of quantifying loss, in which the unit of measure is sugar cubes.
So, how was your AWP? And your readings? What poems did you share and where, and why did you select what you chose to read?
AWP was a bit of a whirlwind. It was a pleasure to see friends and to meet new people. I had the honor of participating in the tremendous WWC MFA 40th Anniversary Reading. I read my poem, “In the Dream,” in part because I knew it was under the 3-minute time limit that Deb gave each of us! But also, I wanted to share a newer poem that friends and former teachers hadn’t heard before. Later that day, I read in the Trans and Genderqueer Poetry Offsite Reading at Pop Hop books. Another powerful event. I read “In Full Velvet,” the title poem of my book.
Your poetry has an extraordinary sense of movement. In “Late Bloom,” the speaker intends to name a spotted apple, but not before recalling the FM stereo and country station loved by a girl crush. Only then does the speaker circle back and name it (it’s a gall), before guiding us to experience, for example, an arctic fox becoming snow, the speaker’s muscles contracting like moth wings, the speaker prepared to say “...Tim, Charlie, Luke, Jason / every name but my own” when calling in a song request to the radio station. These recollections and assertions are vibrant, and we intuitively understand the connections between them. Can you tell us about the decisions (or, y’know, manna-from-the-sky strokes of creative guidance) that go into creating a sequence like this — one that combines a relentless flow with inclusiveness and close observation?
Thanks for the close consideration of “Late Bloom.” Because I was writing from memory, the images in this poem came rather quickly, but the movement between images came less fluently. The very first draft of this poem opened with a short halting sentence: “The name is gall.” Cringe! The longer, more suspensive sentence that now opens the poem is much more engaging. When I’m drafting and working through ideas, I often have to overwrite the relationship between images. Later, I am able to cut, rearrange, and experiment with syntax, striving to strike a balance between legibility and surprise.
At one point in “Little Apophat,” the speaker directly addresses the child of her ex-girlfriend. There are references to “the courting rituals of macaques / playing hide and seek / behind tree trunks” and seals that stay out in the water months after mating, causing a fertilized egg to remain undeveloped and in “suspended animation.” Biologist Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity” influenced your work, you told The Rumpus. When doing background reading, how do you typically let your research metabolize so that it can enter your poetry in an organic (so to speak) way?
I like how you use the word “metabolize” to talk about research, because being curious, reading, and learning from other disciplines can be wonderfully generative, but finding ways to integrate all sorts of new information into your own stream of thinking is an equally important part of the writing process.
I read much of Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity obsessively over a few weeks, taking notes by hand, so that I could remember phrases like “suspended animation” — though this phrase didn’t find its way into a poem for months. Often I write things down without knowing if I’ll make any use of what I’ve transcribed.
I used to teach public school, and I remember attending an unexpectedly riveting workshop about how to teach vocab to high school students. The presenter taught us that it was important to always have students repeat new words out loud, even if it felt silly, because doing so leaves an auditory imprint on our brains. And then she made all the adults in the room do it – repeat new vocab words out loud. Ever since, I love trying to picture a word sonically imprinting itself somewhere in my brain. And I love thinking about how sharing new information orally is a way of building a more complicated and lasting relationship with what I’m learning. So, to answer your question about ways I metabolize research: Apart from the note-taking and the poem-making, it’s important to me to talk about what I’m learning and thinking with the people in my life. And in doing so, I think I hold onto and engage with researched information in a new way.
As for the writing process: When I was writing “Little Apophat,” I got half way through the poem, and I thought — oh, no, I don’t know how I’m going to end this poem. So I didn’t. I waited about six months, forgot about the anxiety of trying to end the poem. And then — boom — one day, while I was walking, I suddenly remembered that phrase “suspended animation” and I could see my way to an ending. So I got back to work.
The Poem at Hand: A Profile of Jenny Johnson
Left-ArrowPage-Numbers-Sides-2Page-Numbers-Middle-3Page-Numbers-Sides-4Right-Arrow
I need to tell you about the seeing that goes on between two people,
around two people. Not the touching. The watchfulness.
____—“Vigil” by Jenny Johnson
in_full_velvetGetting to read a book or collection before its release feels like being let in on a secret, and when I received a galley proof of Jenny Johnson’s poetry collection In Full Velvet in the mail, I left it bubble wrapped until I got home, handling it as one would a glass slipper, a vial of blood, or stick of dynamite. When I opened the package with its cheerful note from the publisher, Sarabande Books, I paused to admire the artifact. Even the cover was luxurious, matte and soft, the pages delicate, textured, the negative white space holding the text motionless in a shared embrace.
I read the collection in a single held breath, one stormy afternoon at the Oregon coast. I thought of poets such as Elizabeth Bishop (I have since found out others have beat me to that connection already), Mary Oliver, and Jane Hirshfield. Jenny Johnson’s use of poetic form creates tension as the poems reveal themes of natural elements, time, the physical body, allusion, life, love, and death. Osprey. Whitetail. Apples. Joan of Arc. Guts. Dyke bars. Cacti. Skin.
Jenny Johnson
In Full Velvet is now available, and RWW warmly welcomes Jenny Johnson to its faculty this coming summer. Jenny is the winner of the 2015 Whiting Award in Poetry and the 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She earned a BA/MT in English Education from the University of Virginia and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College.
Her poems have appeared in such publications as The Best American Poetry 2013, New England Review, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Johnson’s poem “Aria” was selected as the recipient of the Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, and she has received awards from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. In addition to being an incoming faculty member at RWW, she teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
Although busy with the launch of her collection, Jenny graciously agreed to answer a couple of questions about her book and joining the RWW community.
.
Sydney Elliott: Could you say a few words about the book’s publication? Are you thrilled? Relieved? Both? How long was the process/journey?
Jenny Johnson: I am thrilled. The journey was long. During most of it, I wasn’t sure I was writing “a book.” I just knew I was slowly accruing a pile of finished poems. In Full Velvet took eight years to write. Rick Barot, who was my teacher some years back at Warren Wilson, said to me once when I was mid-manuscript, “All you have to do is focus on the poem at hand.” I still think about this statement when I’m feeling lost within a body of work.
SE: As someone who lives in a very rural, natural area, I was curious about the animals and birds that pepper the collection. Where does your interest in nature spring from? How does it inform you as a poet?
JJ: I grew up in rural Virginia. So, spending time in the woods encountering other creatures was a part of my childhood. I think images that are formative have a way of showing up in our work, whether we intend for that to happen or not. It’s like a palette you’re not always conscious you’re painting with. Once I became conscious that animals and birds were showing up in my poems, I became interested in what that might mean. I started thinking about how animal humans are, and then I started having fun playfully resisting phobic assumptions about what kinds of bodies are “natural” and what kinds of acts are “natural” for any species.
SE: How does it feel to join the RWW faculty and community?
JJ: Joyful. Humbling. It’s such an honor to join such an extraordinary community of faculty and students. I can’t wait to meet everyone I’ve been hearing so much about this summer.
SE: What are one or two things (outside of being a writer) that reflect who you are? Are you a dog person? Have an unusual hobby? Food favorite?
JJ: You should all know that I am a cat person. My partner and I have two sister cats—Minnow and Shrimp. I confess I stole the name “Minnow” from Elizabeth Bishop, who had a cat by the same name.
I also love to cook, especially breakfast, because making brunch always feels so indulgent. I love the precision involved in poaching an egg or perfectly guesstimating when it’s time to flip a pancake.
RWW is thrilled to have this talented poet in our midst at this summer’s residency. I personally can’t wait to get pancake tips as well as a signature on my new treasure. Welcome to the RWW family, Jenny!
In Full Velvet
264.3 (Jan. 16, 2017): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
In Full Velvet
Jenny Johnson. Sarabande, $16.95 (72p) ISBN 978-1-941411-37-7
In this stunningly lyrical debut, Johnson probes issues of queer culture and love from an array of existential perspectives, creating a melodic and thought-provoking symphony on queer identity. This enchanting display features gay bonobos; "a streaming metropolis of// masculinities vested in/ tweed, plaid, velvet, seersucker"; and nods to the queer literary canon, such as references to The Price of Salt, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gertrude Stein. A friend performing karaoke is described as "gleaming like a gem on Liberace's finger." In "In the Dream," Johnson powerfully captures the psychic scars that manifest from living in a homophobic culture, while celebrating the spirit of community that flourishes only among the persecuted. In "Aria," she crafts a sonnet crown about music, gender, solidarity, and suffering that is almost impossibly elegant. Johnson is a romantic, and she exhibits this without a hint of self-consciousness, declaring "I long to be leaf-whelmed,/ lit by fire pinks and wild sweet Williams," or even more ornately, describing how the "lanceolate leaves/ of the flame azaleas along/ the shoreline shiver in the/ wind." At one moment, Johnson muses on the potential pleasure of having a tail, romping "in a midnight alley, flashing my snowy underside like a switchblade." The metaphor perfectly epitomizes the beauty of this miniature opus, alternately joyful and heartrending, achingly bittersweet. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"In Full Velvet." Publishers Weekly, 16 Jan. 2017, p. 36. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478405242&it=r&asid=bd1336d64929c2cf1f8d8ad76f6a0f47. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A478405242
In Full Velvet
Poem, 2014
Johnson, Jenny (American educator)
American Educator ( 20th Century -)
34.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2013): p356.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Middlebury College
http://www.nereview.com/
Text:
In Full Velvet
Before the horns fall away, here's what
the taxidermist teaches:
Because the velvet grows onto the hide we have to skin it and cut
it,
so nothing rips up and causes damage.
Being cautious that we don't give it a big yank,
use your knife and just kind of pull gently.
Go on--tap the skin away from the bur.
See we boned it out.
For hard boned deer we usually just kind of
but we can't do that when it's in full velvet or it will, you know.
Now we're going to put a puncture in the tip.
So, we're not just hitting the one vein.
That's what we want to see.
When Aristotle dissected the embryos in bird eggs,
he mistook the spinal cord for the heart.
Anaximander of Miletus wrote that the first humans burst out of the
mouths of
fish
and that we took form there and were held prisoners there until
puberty.
At its root, taxidermy means to arrange skin.
O love, how precise is any vision?
It's also true that some whitetails never lose their velvet.
Hunters raise their eyebrows calling them atypical,
antlered does, cactus bucks, monsters, shirkers,
ghosts, raggedy-horn freaks, because they lead
long solitary lives, unweathered
by the rutting season, because their antlers
are covered permanently in a skin
that most bucks shed in late summer,
because their velvet horns spike and slope
backwards, never hardening to pure bone,
growing ever more askew. A recent one slayed
at thirty points was described as having
stickers, kickers, and a whole lot of extra junk
full of blood, hot to the human touch.
Gut a body and we're nothing left but pipes whistling in the
breeze.
That's all the cassowary is when you slit her open:
She's lungs wrapped in dark fur. She's a full baritone with a soft
wattle.
There's nothing in her casque but soft tissue.
Because it makes me want to turn away,
I watch film footage of scientists
poking through the pink tendons,
the reptilian claw of the euthanized casuarius.
When they fondle the sweet spot, a talon shoots out and stabs a
melon
the same as it would the appendix of a lazy zookeeper.
I had to cover my eyes when they severed the ancestral wing.
Love, we are more than utility, I think.
Love, I know my body's here when the turkey vulture comes out of
the thicket,
wings spread wide, smelling all of it.
When talking about how the brain imagines the body, neurologists
use the word
"schema" to describe the little map that lies across the cortex,
sensing all our visible and invisible parts.
Some phantasms about our bodies in relationship to gender and
sexuality
are idealized, some degrading, some compulsory, some transgressive.
I am using this embrace, Love, to keep us here in this perceptual
field.
When I focus my binoculars, Love, I am as careful as a raccoon
working its way
through trash. A soda can passes as the skull of a bird, an eyehole
where somebody
drank some sugar down. Love, come close. Love, lie back. Love, lie
with me here
beneath a bridge where the light falling on the water shimmers
upward casting
shadows on the slats beneath. When you are here, Love, I am beside
myself.
If secrets are prayers
then maybe bodies
are worth revealing
worth repeating
How much plumage
dare I show How much down
Some days I am rich
as the common garter snake
with more testosterone
than you can handle
and the sweetest stench
of pheromones
O small pouch O tiny nipple
O lactating man
Or as the French say cyprine
O Icelandic clam
And whales with lady hips
And dandelions in the thick grass
growing stamens growing pistils
O lion's tooth However the wind
rips each part apart However we
clone and clone and clone
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Johnson, Jenny (American educator). "In Full Velvet." New England Review, vol. 34, no. 3-4, 2013, p. 356+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA363188986&it=r&asid=01c7dc00f84b35c1e00d4d12346db797. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A363188986
Review: IN FULL VELVET by Jenny Johnson
Author: Guest Reviewer | Posted in Book Reviews, Poetry
IN FULL VELVET_jenny johnsonIn Full Velvet
Jenny Johnson
Sarabande Books; February 14, 2017
72 pp; $14.95
Buy: paperback
Reviewed by Annalia Luna
The trope with invoking the muses is that it is always a request. Whether it is pleading or demanding, pedantic or indignant, the epic tale is something owed. For her debut collection In Full Velvet, poet Jenny Johnson’s address begins with “Thank you,” and it is radical, as if a muse might peer over the edge of her throne and say, “My, those are words I have not heard for some time.”
“Dappled Things” spans eight pages, each with two stanzas. In a meditation too specific to be anything but genuine, Johnson names gratitude for everything that is “still somehow / counter, original, spare, and strange,” like “the alien markings on my girlfriend’s cheek and how / they form a perfect triangle.” She comments on the weirdness of “[generating] a realm / where we can always see, never see” and the optimism that remains relentless despite all: “Where’s Hope? Hope’s a weed, obscene / on my head, springing white hairs.”
When Johnson does ask for something, it is from herself, rather than the universe. With “Summoning the Body That Is Mine When I Shut My Eyes,” she employs the oddities of nature to remind her that she is here now, sentient and present:
Come belted kingfisher flapping
Come lavender asters wheeling
Come loose, a sapling lengthening
Come honeysuckle Come glistening
Each image has a sense tied to it, perhaps with the hope that conjuring these things can remind what a privilege it is to witness them.
The title poem, as the cover implies, explores the vascular skin that grows on deer antlers during their development. Here, again, is a fascination with the body: “Gut a body and we’re nothing left but pipes whistling in the breeze.” Johnson describes watching a scientist severing the wing of a cassowary (“Because it made me want to turn away”) and quotes a taxidermist giving instructions about deer:
Now we’re going to put a puncture in the tip.
So, we’re not just hitting the one vein.
That’s what we want to see.
It is gruesome but Johnson is reaching for something, trying to understand the oddity of being alive. “Love, we are more than utility, I think,” she writes, and it is both a declaration and a question. “I know my body’s here,” she writes, “when the turkey vulture comes out of the thicket, wings spread wide, smelling all of it.”
However, it would be wrong to categorize this book as a collection of “nature poems,” as it were. “The Bus Ride” is Johnson’s joy of looking at her girlfriend as the light comes through the window, making her glow. “In The Dream” is the transcription of a nightmare that begins with her “alone in a dyke bar.”
In “Souvenirs,” the last stanza is about an ex-girlfriend calling years after a bad breakup. Now living a thousand miles apart, the ex-girlfriend asks Johnson’s permission to build a model of her new home. The ex-girlfriend is a sculptor and wants to use sugar cubes but does not know the measurements. Johnson does the work with grace:
I cannot explain my consent
that evening, alone, at home,
the yellow tape unspooling, I measured closet widths,
calculated the feet between hedges—
I wanted her to craft it perfectly to scale.
If In Full Velvet is a map of Johnson’s mind and memory, it is one worth saving. Johnson is precise with herself, patient with others. These poems celebrate the feeling of spinning in tight circles until all that is left the spiral, rushing from the inside out.
The Queer Valentine of the Century: Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet
Reviewed By Julie Marie Wade
May 10th, 2017
A sticker on the back of my advanced review copy of Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet notes, “On sale February 14, 2017 from Sarabande Books.” And here it is, February 14, 2017, and I am reading this book for the third time with a brand-new kitten curled on my lap, a long-time beloved on her way home from work.
Why this book? Why today? That’s easy. Today is Valentine’s Day, and In Full Velvet is, above all else, a valentine.
Perhaps I should begin by saying that I’m a long-time reader of the Sarabande poetry debuts. I treasure in particular Kiki Petrosino’s Fort Red Border, Lauren Shapiro’s Easy Math, and Rick Barot’s The Darker Fall. I treasure them so much I teach them. Now, as I read and re-read Jenny Johnson’s debut, I know I will have to place it soon before my students’ eyes because how long can you keep something you love all to yourself? As I read and re-read, I am also thinking about the valentine boxes we made in elementary school, the mandate from the teacher that “everyone be included,” everyone receive a valentine from everyone else.
Still, girls and boys were encouraged to make “special valentines” for their “special friends” and deliver them outside of class. As early as second grade, we were being groomed—tacitly, but groomed nonetheless—for our romantic futures. In fourth grade, a likeable boy named Lee Bennett kissed me in the stairwell, gave me a special card and chocolate heart filled with peanut butter. That year I made a special card for Mandie Salazar, complete with small sachet of Hershey’s kisses, but when I saw her standing in the foursquare line at recess, I lost my nerve. I knew, without even knowing the words, that my affections would not be received in the way that I intended.
Nearly thirty years later, I’m reading the queer valentine of the century, a book so firm and unwavering in its commitment to Love (writ large!) that it is bound with a hard cover. To my knowledge, In Full Velvet is the only Sarabande poetry hardback of its kind. I have an urge to wear this book as a breast plate, to keep it always close to my heart. As Johnson writes, “Love, come close. Love, lie back. Love lie with me here/ beneath a bridge where the light falling on the water shimmers upward casting/ shadows on the slats beneath.” See—I told you. Valentine.
To whom is this valentine addressed, you may be wondering? Oh, so many sentient beings, human and non-human alike!
To begin, there is the valentine of homage, the way Johnson pays formal and thematic tribute to Gerard Manley Hopkins, placing herself firmly in his lineage with the opening poem, “Dappled Things.” In this remarkable ode, Johnson’s speaker sings: “Thank you for all that’s still somehow counter, original, spare, and strange.” Yes! Like a credo, a queer rallying cry—acknowledging the vital force of Hopkins’ canon so long after his death and pointing toward the queer power it still conveys.
Johnson later goes on to name and praise Hopkins directly: “And because I’m minion this morning to gay old music/ Thanks Gentle Hop for this this-ness, for teaching attention/ How to mark hard word-bodies with stress,/ acute glyphs, blue scores.” Here we find a valentine to sprung rhythm, to incisive imagery, and also (and always) to the natural world: “Our days are charged by so much nature—/ The succulents we carry to Alexis in a plastic bag after her surgery/ A cat pawing at a mantis behind a windowpane/ What we didn’t wash from the lettuce, dirt that’s good danger.”
I should like to love the world as well as Johnson does, to understand my animal nature better, to find my place in the family of beings:
Anaximander of Miletus wrote that the first humans
burst out of the mouths of fish
and that we took form there
and were held prisoners until puberty.
At its root, taxidermy means to arrange skin.
O Love, how precise is any vision?
Because of these poems, I see and more than see—they cause a wild trilling in my veins—the many quiet wonders of the world:
Like an extinct frog who brought life by opening her mouth,/many froglets bursting out
and
whales with lady hips
And dandelions in the thick grass
growing stamens growing pistils
and
logs
dripping with effervescent
moss, tannins in the soil
beneath the hemlocks
seeping into runnels
Also: the bank teller with those long lashes
Also: my lover with a look of mischief walking closer
In Full Velvet is valentine-as-testament to the mysteries and mandates of human love.
If you love someone, you must be the guardian of their solitude.
Valentine-as-testament to queer human love, trying:
Firsts and fights
that left the kitchen
whitened by a fine silt of flour
and bras twisted into
the untidy nests of lyrebirds
and closety love
at the drunken end of straight parties,
in cemeteries
and in shower stalls.
Valentine-as-testament to queer human love, failed but also learned from:
I’ll tell you what the girls who never love
us back taught me: The strain within will tune
the torqued pitch.
This book is further a valentine to perfect unrequited love, trenchant in memory:
Let this be a ballet without intermission: the grace of this ride beside her
on the green vinyl, soft thunderclaps in the quarry.
Let me be her afternoon jay,
hot silo, red shale crumbling—
A valentine to imperfect requited love, more trenchant in memory still:
Rolled together in the night
you weren’t sure how to speak at first of
your body’s position to mine
but then you could.
The small-town heat makes everything stick,
our skin pressing into one another,
the hair soft and light above your tailbone—
I won’t forget how you directed me there.
Perhaps most necessary and astonishing of all, this is a valentine to self-love and the elusive search for it, as epitomized by Johnson’s secular psalm, “Summoning the Body That is Mine When I Shut My Eyes.” Herein the speaker calls upon her body as a creature that will hearken at last to its own name:
Come second heartbeat sounding the breast […] Come familiar spirit Come bare-chested in the weeds
Come private imposter Come hidden ballast […] Come strumming an unspeakable power ballad
This book becomes that ballad. How I long to transcribe it for you word for word! How I long to sing you everything that has been sung to me here, including the sweet, poignant significance of the title! (I only resist so you will have the thrill of unearthing that treasure yourself…)
What I can tell you is that odes need elegies, just as the element of air requires the element of earth for balance. Johnson’s collection gives us the gauzy invocation but also the grounded rumination. Her “Elegy at Twice the Speed of Sound” begins:
At fifteen I was so willing to wait it out underground
I cut practice to disappear beneath the pavement, carrying only a flashlight
in the waistband of my nylon track shorts,
a red trace of graffiti beckoning me forward through a strange and drafty tunnel—
In fairy-tale terms, this is the katabasis, the hero’s essential descent into an underworld of reckoning.
As each car passed above, a sliver of light from a manhole would wink shut.
Was I vanishing?
The katabasis has now been queered, the reckoning turned toward reclamation:
Or I should name this ache, call it archive fever, reading a speech
given in 1992 by a man,
(Why haven’t I heard of him until now?)
a translator, a scholar, a poet, who warned before dying
of complications from AIDS,
“I will be somewhere listening for my name…”
Or should I go by what’s been said of my elders, however little?
Without a record, they were two “old maids.”
A valentine is also a promise. What else could it be, that offering of love?
The greatest promise Johnson makes to me as reader is the fixity of our queerness, the endurance and ineradicability of it. She has, after all, conjured glimpses of a childhood I recognize, one I can never lose completely, but never find completely either:
During recess, I remember
the parachute in my hands
an open shadow
breeze billowing through
when everyone pulled
the chute upward to run beneath
And:
Like how when I was shoved in grade school
on the blacktop in my boy jeans [the ones I wanted to wear but wasn’t allowed] the teacher asked me if I had a strawberry
because the wound was fresh as jam, glistening
like pulp does after the skin of a fruit is
peeled back clean with a knife.
And:
how good it felt to straddle the sawhorse [mine was a tree], out behind the shed, half tomboy,
half centaur,
How I clenched a two-by-four between my thighbones and it was a part of me.
Johnson promises me, and every reader, this most exceptional thing: “There Are New Worlds.” I know she speaks the truth because her book is one of them—counter, original, spare, and strange—a new world of queer and literary and queer-literary possibilities.
In this poem, which I don’t mind telling you is my favorite poem, Johnson’s speaker confides:
I first kissed a woman
after hours of silence and shared cherry Chap Stick
late at night on a bench
in a garden that was historical
Thomas Jefferson must have sat there, too
cross-legged in his wig
or Gertrude Stein, I hope, legs straddled wide
on a speaking tour
explaining, A rose is a rose is a rose
Of course a rose is a valentine, too—the most traditional, and in this case, also the most subversive kind.
Remember when Muriel Rukeyser famously asked, then answered: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
In Full Velvet offers the truth of a woman’s life—the queer truth, the queer rose, the queer valentine. And everything is different after that moment of initiation, instantiation. Not easier, of course, but newer and fresher and more possible than it has ever been before.
Behold our speaker after that kiss:
I strode home alone
cutting through
the icy November chill
like a cygnet paddling
suddenly
in a fresh, dark lake.
Early in the book, this speaker mused: “Do I look hard enough to receive?” The answer is yes. She might have asked, “Do I look hard enough to give?” The answer is also yes.
This is a speaker and a writer looking and loving hard enough to deserve this hardest cover. And when my beloved opens the door, and our new cat leaps from my lap, I put the book down and notice my fingerprints all over the cover.
Where there is
no lineage, no record,
no quantifiable
proof, there are
myths, and where
there are no myths,
there are traces:
This is not by accident, I suspect. In Full Velvet enfolds its reader. The best valentines are invitations, where the feelings are mutual. And thus: you, the reader, become one of these traces. This book rubs off on you, but it works the other way, too. Which is to say: no matter who you are, you can’t pick up this book without leaving your mark on its cover.
Read A F*cking Book: “In Full Velvet,” by Jenny Johnson
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Reading the right poem can pull you into yourself and gives you the magnifying glass you need to understand your own guts. It’s cheaper than therapy and calmer than journaling.
Reading Jenny Johnson’s debut poetry collection, In Full Velvet, is more like a wielding a telescope. From the barber shop, the bedroom, the dyke bar, the street and the quiet corners of the heart, Johnson’s poetry speaks into the story of queerness.
Photo by Brooke Wyatt
Johnson chooses her words carefully — she doesn’t walk, she strides; a strawberry wound torn open through boy jeans is “glistening like pulp does after the skin of a fruit is pealed back clean with a knife.” She wields precise language to probe gender, romance, nature and queer culture and to answer questions buried too deep to ask. It is full of pronouns, she/her pronouns, as Johnson describes the complexities of love, queer relationships, marriage and sex.
The poems in this work contain so much at once and transition fluidly between themes, scenes and stories. These marks of authenticity create intimacy with the author and blur the line between her story and our collective truth.
In “Vigil,” she writes:
I am a woman who sometimes forgets that she is a woman.
So I always slip my shoes off and knock, at least three times
before crossing a threshold, before presuming I’m welcome here.
*
Out the window of a speeding car, a man yells, Dyke. And a slience bristles between us,
Hot ash about to blow across a paper city.
If you love someone, you must be the guardian of their solitude
Not that she ever needed me to guide her. Her biceps are firm
when she folds me over in the dark.
The title, In Full Velvet, is a reference to deer antlers, and the cover sports a drawing of same, as if we needed further proof that Johnson is our people. (For those who don’t know, Klub Deer is the deer-branded, highly exclusive and exquisitely weird after-hours venue at A-Camp.) The book is an aesthetic delight, with a soft texture to the hard cover and embossing by the publisher, Sarabande; a pleasure to hold and read. Poetry is the only genre I refuse to read on an e-reader, and this book reminds me of exactly why. So many of these pages call for the pause you can take only when you start to flip the page and then catch your breath, glance at a line, and turn back to read again.
Johnson has written a decidedly apolitical book while still acknowledging and engaging with the inevitable politicization of queer identities, relationships and sex. It’s an antidote to all the tweets and yelling that become harder and harder to drown out in 2017. She mentions The Price of Salt and The Well of Loneliness, and it feels like she is writing exactly and only for us.
Art can be a powerful tool for both resistance and healing, and so can self-knowledge. Spend some time with these poems and see what you find. Immerse yourself and be prepared to come out raw and clean.
Review of Jenny Johnson's In Full Velvet (Sarabande, 2017)
July 20, 2017
Queer Ecology: a Review and Field Guide to Jenny Johnson's In Full Velvet
by Madeleine Wattenberg
In one of his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that “all things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God, and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.” “Dappled Things,” the first poem in Jenny Johnson’s collection In Full Velvet, engages Hopkins’s reflections on the energies of nature, but, in a wonderfully simple declaration, Johnson releases God from her own studies:
Thanks Gentle Hop for this this-ness, for teaching attention
How to mark hard word-bodies with stress,
Acute glyphs, blue scores For reckoning the risks
in disciplines rod—between sheets of loose leafed linen—
You knew few might hear your coded address
Do I look hard enough to receive?
I am not moved by God, but I am moved by this
To experience the largesse: What you look hard at seems
to look hard at you O to be marked reciprocally, yes please
What is left without God in the picture? Love. And, of course, the poet’s tools—attention, language, possibility. A desire to be marked by what one marks. Like Hopkins, Johnson proposes an attunement to the surrounding environment and its agencies; it just so happens that to attune to Johnson’s world is to become aware of nature’s queer chords and cadences, the ever shifting possibilities of relation that the world’s individual parts form and reform. Where imposed binary systems perpetuate the reduction of relation, Johnson’s poetry embraces, even renders necessary, the multiplicities of a queer ecology. Instead of the double-sided coin—two faced and singular, the currency of a hetero-capitalist vision—queer ecology insists on infinite (re)combination. Johnson’s work enacts this possibility of relation—the possibility of relating. It enacts the possibility of love. Her poems achieve this in part by looking beyond the page in their address toward reader or history or (her) love, while simultaneously paying tribute to the arrangements of non-human and human bodies marked in stress and score across the whitespace:
I kiss my hand to male bonobos making out in public
in spite of Western science
trying to explain away The glorious kink
of spinner dolphins’ whistle-clicks
over-under rolling, belly-on-belly clasping by the soft tips
of flukes, riding dorsal rudders to the brink
Queer ecology requires us to consider non-human agencies, non-human modes of knowledge, and Johnson’s poems operate in the tension between this requirement and an inescapable embodied human subjectivity: “I’m breathing through my skin,” she writes. Here, Johnson positions her speaker’s material relation to the remaining world, isolated via the body, joined via the body. As we inhabit the world, the world inhabits us.
In drawing on Hopkins, Johnson moves to mark not only the ascents and descents in sound, but to develop a scansion of nature’s erased, ignored, and suppressed queer bodies. An unheard music. She addresses the othering of the queer body that occurs through language, when cultural codes mark these bodies apart from the socially accepted script in order to separate and reduce them. This is no more apparent than in the collection’s title poem “In Full Velvet,” which describes the deer that keep their velvet through the mating season. Johnson lists a number of coded names given to these stags, including antlered does, monsters, raggedy horned freaks, and leaves the parallel to the way we similarly mark human queer bodies as an echo throughout the book.
In Full Velvet explores violent consequences of the body deemed deviant, but also presents a glimpse at the alternative to scripted norms. One such glimpse occurs in the poem “Severe,” where Johnson writes:
As if to be butch is to be made of mythical perimeters,
and not the sky revealing itself between storms
in sudden naked flashes.
The normative body is a body of erasure, which obscures “A small pouch O tiny nipple / O lactating man” the “dandelions . . . growing stamens growing pistils” the wind that, “rips each part apart However we / clone and clone and clone”. The this-ness in the illuminated sky. There’s possibility contained in this separation into parts, there’s a multiplicity in how parts may join and function and be inhabited.
"Johnson’s poetry embraces, even renders necessary, the multiplicities of a queer ecology"
I’m fascinated with the way the word “part” evolves throughout Johnson’s collection—part, a part, apart. One poem even seems to form an invocation to multiplicity (“O Lord of Parts, O Holy Tool Shed!). While Johnson’s poems revel in the necessity of relation, her speaker also repeatedly questions the possibility of it: “When talking about how the brain imagines the body / neurologists use the word ‘schema’ to describe the little map // that lies across the cortex, sending / all our visible and invisible parts. // Love, we are more than utility, I think.” This reads as a resistance against the reduction of parts into symbols, genders, sexualities, use. The alternative lies in a naked encounter—“Love, I know my body’s here when the turkey vulture comes out of the thicket, wings spread wide, smelling all of it.” In “Vigil,” Johnson writes of “space and joy becoming one.” In Full Velvet is about the lived violence of those whose identities that lie outside the heteronormative script. It’s also an argument for the ways that a queer ecology can recognize joy and pleasure erased through heteronormativity’s hyperfocus on biological reproduction. Johnson details acts of joy and pleasure that occur in nature outside contrary to a reproductive drive in order to form this argument. Here lies the answer to the question “Out of a prohibited body why / long for melody?” and the wonderful oxymoronic resonance of the phrase “one crowd,” which holds the paradoxical containment of both one and many, the singular contributing to the multiple in order to establish chord and music. A body of parts and a number of possibilities held together by a breathing, singing skin.
As I read In Full Velvet, I referred frequently to a copy of A Guide to Field Identification: Birds of North America. I was struck by the attentive care to sound contained in the entries. Each birdcall and song is carefully (and often opinionatedly) noted. I also found the expected insistence on binary formulations (male this, female that) as I read about the birds that wheel in and out of Johnson’s collection. The following field guide “entries” are composed of lines taken from In Full Velvet (italicized) and A Guide to Field Identification: Birds of North America (not italicized).
Field Guide to Full Velvet Birds
Catbird (Dumetélla carolinénsis)
Common near dense cover.
No other bird between earth and air.
Song is of squeaky quality,
with little or no repetition;
However the wind
rips each part apart,
it is a poor imitator.
However we
clone and clone and clone
Grackle (Quiscalus major)
[The] perched grackle wrings its way
toward a branch, close enough that I can see
the feathers spiked roughly beneath the beak,
an iridescent weight making limbs sway.
Song of stick-breaking noises, whistles,
and rattles is long, loud, and varied.
Was I vanishing? Instead of returning?
Young have brown eyes until October.
Osprey (Pandion haliáetus)
Here she points across the river to an osprey nest.
The only prey are taken at or just below the surface.
While black-winged ospreys plummeted from above,
we were born beneath. You know what I mean?
Starling (Stúrnus vulgáris)
Short-tailed, dark, and fat-bodied.
Consider how gracefully I ascend,
gregarious and aggressive,
a starling with supernatural restraint.
Blue eggs (4-6) are laid in nest hole.
A monument to pieces.
Turkey Vulture (Cathártes áura)
How dare I speak of the marked when I am the diurnal creature damming the night
sky with engineered light,
a common carrion eater, scavenging in fields and along roadsides.
Love, I know my body’s here when the turkey vulture comes out of the thicket, wings
spread wide, smelling all of it.
Feeding vultures are soon joined by others flying in from beyond human vision.
Yellow-Throated Warbler (Dendroica dominica)
A yellow-throated warbler measures your
schisms, fault lines, your taciturn vibrato.
Black streaks border breast.
We watch as all but the sheer black
underwire melts.
Song is loud and clear.
Tonight, as one crowd, we will bridge this choir.
Book Reviews + Features
July 26, 2017 Books » Book Reviews + Features
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A review of Jenny Johnson’s debut poetry collection In Full Velvet
Johnson is deft at capturing flashes of experience and spinning them into something more sublime
By Fred Shaw
Jenny Johnson
Photo courtesy of Brooke Wyatt
Jenny Johnson
In an essay on word-craft, “Meretricious Kisses,” poet Ann Townsend contends, “We read and write for contact; thus poetry seeks an audience, recipients who can be convinced to take our breath and touch for their very own. Poetry is a body.” It’s this level of awareness that permeates many of the well-balanced lyrical and narrative moments that bubble up throughout the 68 pages of Jenny Johnson’s anticipated debut collection, In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books).
Johnson, a Winchester, Va., native, holds a master-of-fine-arts degree from Warren Wilson College and has received both a Whiting Award and a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and while the ’Burgh doesn’t appear explicitly in poems here, Johnson is deft at capturing flashes of experience and spinning them into something more sublime.
One example, “The Bus Ride,” reads, in full: “When she turns from the window and sees me / she is as lovely as a thrush seeing for the first time all sides of the sky. / Let this be a ballet without intermission: the grace of this ride beside her / on the green vinyl, soft thunderclaps in the quarry. / let me be her afternoon jay, / hot silo, red shale crumbling —” The vividness of colors and implied calls of figurative birds combine with a sense of desire to capture the delight of a speaker basking in a seemingly mundane human encounter.
Johnson is also unafraid to explore gender roles and sexuality, as several poems plumb both the erotic and the quirky. There’s a sense of innocence in “There Are New Worlds,” where she writes, “I first kissed a woman / after hours of silence and shared cherry Chap Stick / late at night on a bench.” The poem “Altitudes” uses wordplay and runs steamier, as “a finger slips / down, down your blue button down / taps your chest. Granite cliff face, oh El / Capitan.” There’s also much to like in “Ladies Arm Wrestling Match at the Blue Moon Diner,” with its focus on the corporeal: “Clinking whiskey glasses we wipe away sweat and old flames /… Own this acreage, / this new ground rippling under rolled sleeves.”
While longer poems like “Dappled Things” and “Aria” might not jibe with readers seeking brevity, readers should give them a chance, as In Full Velvet beautifully presents Johnson as a poet fulfilling big expectations.
A Guardian to Others’ Solitude: Review of Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet
March 19, 2017
by roy guzmán, guest book reviewer
In the introduction to his book, Cruising Utopia, the late José Esteban Muñoz remarks on the relationship between queerness and time: “We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future,” adding, “The future is queerness’s domain.” Employing James Schuyler’s poem “A photograph” to justify this claim, Muñoz focuses on this section:
I really do believe
future generations can
live without the in-
tervals of anxious
fear we know between our
bouts and strolls of
ecstasy.
For Muñoz, “These future generations are…not an identitarian formulation but, instead, the invocation of a future collectivity, a queerness that registers as the illumination of a horizon of existence.” Given this framework, queerness becomes an ecstatic possibility, an affair with a future capable of giving rise to a utopian collective.
These concerns are also at the heart of poet Jenny Johnson’s debut collection. In Full Velvet is a restless exploration of how queerness manifests itself in shifting contexts, in the political forces that seek to suppress queer spaces, in the “nameless forms” that can’t be categorized (“Dappled Things”), for the “half tomboy, / half centaur” (“Tail”) that strives for survival, and for the entities that “alter / nothing…[yet] alter everything” (“Pine Street Barbershop”). Queerness in Johnson’s book is the Deleuzian “becoming-animal,” the thing that—echoing Gerard Manley Hopkins—is “counter, original, spare, and strange” (“Dappled Things”)—a celebration of the misfits, the in-betweenness, and what remains forever in transition without—here I’m thinking of Elizabeth Bishop—a home.
One of the moments in In Full Velvet where Johnson articulates one of the book’s main anxieties occurs in the title poem:
Love, we are more than utility, I think.
Some phantasms about our bodies in relationship to gender and sexuality
are idealized, some degrading, some compulsory, some transgressive.
The addressee, I suspect, is a “you” that reappears in other poems (perhaps, an ideal you). An unspeakable trepidation falls heavy on these poems, a preoccupation with ghosts that both originate from within our bodies and from external pressures and misconceptions about queerness. In this poem—a tour de force in seven sections—Johnson begins by mentioning dissection, taxidermy, evolution, form, and the future. “O Love, how precise is any vision?” it asks. Several negations set up the poem’s rhetoric of destabilization: “he mistook the spinal cord for the heart,” “and were held prisoners until puberty,” “how precise is any vision”; “gut a body and we’re nothing left but pipes whistling in the breeze,” “there’s nothing in her casque but soft tissue,” “because it makes me want to turn away”; “I had to cover my eyes when they severed the ancestral wing,” “but we can’t do that when it’s in full velvet,” and “atypical,…ghosts, raggedy-horn freaks.” What mistakes are made and irresponsibly overlooked in the narratives and structures that aim to (mis)define us? If the future is an imprecise vision of the present, how can we make certain the present remains honest to that vision?
“Where’s Hope?” Johnson asks in “Dappled Things,” following that stanza with a kind of sonnetic volta: “Will all things return—if I so choose to burp— / in nameless forms?” For a poem—and a book—that explores queer identity urgently and as an imperative, the word “burp” comes off as too colloquial, almost ungainly. However, that informality is exactly how this project draws its subversive geist. Another high point in this collection where the vernacular packs a great deal of wisdom is “In the Dream”:
I was alone in a dyke bar we’d traversed before
or maybe it was in a way all out dives
merging together suddenly as one intergalactic composite,
one glitter-spritzed black hole,
one cue stick burnished down to a soft blue nub.
Picture an open cluster of stars
managing to forever stabilize in space
without a landlord scheming to shut the place down.
In a time when the notion of sanctuaries is relentlessly adulterated by people who arguably have never had to seek refuge to protect and secure their basic needs, Johnson’s In Full Velvet is a reminder that massacres against our bodies, such as the one in Orlando, occur because the basic right to be queer and alive are two realities our government can’t reconcile. The dyke dive bar in “In the Dream” is the casual intimation of the queer in the unapologetic penumbra: the future. In Full Velvet is performative debauchery at its most informed, inclusive, political, loud, generous, and committed.
When Johnson writes at the end of this poem, “And with one finger I called our family forth / and out of the strobe lights, they came,” we are reminded of the power of chosen families, of intentional fuckeries, and of the crowd that “will bridge this choir” (“Aria”). By the end, the ghosts come in to order their beers. The tips they leave behind are in the very “traces” of our battle cries.