It is not easy to make interesting poems, yet How to Catch a Falling Knife is full of them. Part of the interest is apparent in the work the title performs: instead of shying from danger, these poems surprise by imagining their way fearlessly toward it.
Two epigraphs announce Daniel Johnson’s first book’s approach: “After what one isn’t is taken away is what one is,” wrote Diane Arbus in her notebook in 1959. “I’m easy to define,” Fernando Pessoa proclaimed, adding: “Seeing devoured me.” To borrow from the photographer of the strange and the Portuguese inventor of “heteronymns” is to carve out a certain aesthetic and artistic territory, one concerned with sharpness and clarity of vision, with differentness and danger. This is a book preoccupied with seeing deeply what one is. One of its important discoveries is that when we practice this kind of perceiving, we find we are always becoming; another is that what we take away—what we refuse to be or to imagine being—is just as important to who we are as what we embrace or accept.
In “A Dirty Pair of Glasses,” we look through a pair of glasses resting on a table and realize “the end won’t come, it seems, into focus exactly.” This problem of focus becomes an opportunity for vision: opacity yields clarity, the impossibility of seeing becomes the possibility of imagining:
Inches
from the glasses, an ashtray blurs. Or is ita dead man’s wallet? The lenses, I forgot to mention,
are milky almost and I don’t see anythingexcept for a plastic tree in the corner and under it
a shape cowering, knees drawn up, face unwashed,but I can’t make out these things for sure
so I make them up—like the great bright squares of sunlightopening slowly now on the ceiling above me.
In many of Johnson’s poems, what obscures one way of looking (smudges, dust, grime, and in one memorable phrase, a “filthy nimbus”—the messy evidence of having lived) frees us to see and to experience what we see in other ways. The problem of knowing, to put it another way, becomes the opportunity of not knowing.
I wonder if with Arbus and Johnson in mind we might be able to believe that after the unsayable and the unsaid of one’s life are taken away one is left with what one is. The unsayable and the unsaid exert tremendous power in these poems. “A Dirty Pair of Glasses” doesn’t refuse the disturbing image of that destitute human shape trembling beneath a plastic tree. That figure isn’t lost on us or cancelled; it remains in the generous undue sunlight, like a part of the truth, another possible version of what one is or might become, deserving of attention.
A significant part of the power of Johnson’s poems derives from the feeling of loss and grief that resonates within them: What if we could say what we wanted to say, rightly, to those who are most important to us? What if we could hear, listen, respond, change? What if we could be other than we are? What have we lost of who we could have become?
Yet “all we have lost is brightly lost,” one wavering line assures us. Paradoxically, often what in Johnson’s poems is brightly lost is what is brightly named: the two actions, in fact, are one and the same. “One Hand Knows Not What the Other Does,” for instance, asks: “Who named the bones / of the hand // triquetrum, scaphoid— / as if he were ranking, // late at night, / his mistakes as a man—// Spiritus Sancti?” Triquetrum: three-cornered. Scaphoid: from the Greek meaning “boat” and “form”. Spiritus Sancti: holy spirit. The hand, made for work, love, prayer, made of bones, blood, flesh, and nerve, is also made of names, which are the palpable evidence of mistakes, and “mistakes,” Joyce claimed, “are portals of discovery.” Like the dirt on the glasses, mistake becomes opportunity in Johnson’s hands, a vessel capable of grace and possibility, “a map / of ruins already / open, soft.”
To name a thing rightly is a way to see and be seen; it’s an act not of seizing power but of surrendering to it. Each name—each relinquishment—acknowledges a mistake, since every name—for a poet, at least—is a mistake, an approximation. And what is the power of a name, weighing, as “When it’s Time”, the collection’s final poem, observes, “no more than sunlight”?
“I’m not these words, though / you think I am,” Johnson writes in “After Words.” By itself, this declaration might be too easy or too knowing—do we really tend to think what we say is who we are?—but in context, this declaration appears between a dizzying series of transformations—first the speaker becomes a hatchet, then the person he addresses becomes a gasp, then damp smoke, then crying, then whiskey; and by the end the speaker has become “taillights disappearing” and, finally, in the same sentence, mysteriously, “what’s hanging still / from a tree in brown light.” To find out what’s hanging from that tree in sepia, you’ll have to read the poem. I promise you’ll be surprised and gratified by what you discover.
It is not easy to make interesting poems, yet How to Catch a Falling Knife is full of them. Part of the interest is apparent in the work the title performs: instead of shying from danger, these poems surprise by imagining their way fearlessly toward it. They continually establish and upend our expectations in delightful, humorous, and often moving ways: “Do Unto Others,” perhaps Johnson’s most well known poem—it appeared in Best American Poetry 2007—flips the golden rule on its head: “How many rocks would I stack / on my brother’s chest?” it begins, and starts counting. Another poem, “Description of a Badly Drawn Horse,” invites us to imagine a child’s crooked drawing (not a Hopper or a Picasso). Characteristically, Johnson writes: “This was a horse to shoot, but I sharpened my pencil instead, / and returned to my seat.” And that is what Johnson’s poems do so marvelously: they refuse the easy kill. They return. They move closer. They look again, as if for the first time. And what they discover in their compassionate, big-hearted regard is our reward.
