"it becomes clear Johnston dreamed these words while riding on his horse.": Aaron Belz Reviews Devin Johnston

Aaron Belz reviews Devin Johnston's new collection Traveler for Cardus.

. . . Johnston's purpose is to explore this tension between the subjective and the objective, to keep these two realms of experience in balance. This is a very old-fashioned purpose, at least as old as Plato and much explored in early 19th century philosophy. Judging by this book's Louis Zukofsky epigraph, Zukofsky's debt to Wallace Stevens, Ashbery's debt to Stevens, and my personal familiarity with the poet, I'd say Devin Johnston is a 21st-century objectivist who's grown a little further down the branch than the New York School poets ever did (perhaps due to his academic pedigree) and is now developing a new shoot off to the side. It's like he missed the sixties. And the new shoot is bearing fruit that must taste musky, or at least strange, to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E folks.

The title poem is very Devin Johnston, in the more traditional sense—"From the foot of Cotopaxi / and across the Gulf / a Blackburnian warbler / follows a pulse"—as are poems like "Set Apart" ("A sapling in 1700, / it rose like smoke / from leaf litter"), "Burren" ("a bluff / arisen from the sea / compressed its lacy cuff / in fossil memory"), "Roget's Thesaurus" ("Peter Roget took up a list") and "The Young Pretender," which versifies a delightful bit of Scottish history. But here and there I'm detecting something more playful and, again, new in this poetry. After "Nothing Song" I see it again in "Nowhere," which begins:

Sifu John has left the dojo
and struck out on his own.
No more shit from Master Jong,
no endless adjudications
of single whip, no banquets,
belts, dues, or membership.

His only student—big dude
with the tight, slick ponytail
of Steven Seagal—
got lit and locked
a bartender in tiger claw,
then spent a night in jail.

Steven Seagal? When the poem eventually mentions a local St. Louis grocery chain (rather comically) named "Schnucks," it becomes clear Johnston dreamed these words while riding on his horse.

You've been teased. Go read the rest.