#devin johnston

[godzilla-reads]

Another book from @the-forest-library and I’m starting it right this instant 🤩

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

In the North --Devin Johnston

A blast off the Atlantic snaps a flag in the Firth of Clyde, while thirty leagues away, the same synoptic wind surges across this hillside honeycombed with mineshafts, sounding the unstopped slots of a "G" harmonica left to dry on the kitchen sill. Snow charges a sky in which the sun swims and glimmers like a groat, a turbulent space where owls hunt by day but nothing stands for long—bereft of circumstance—beyond the standing stones of Long Meg and Her Daughters.

Through the night, like a stoker on a fast express—the Hyperion on its Edinburgh run— you hoy buckets of coal on the grate, only to see its flames drawn up the chimney, getting more heat from hoying the fuel than from its burning. As a barnacle goose swims against the dark, uttering its terse honk, you pull your favorite word, duvet, close about your head. Tomorrow, bailiffs may take everything not hammered down.

[anastasiaoftheironwood]

Poem for the New Year ~ Devin Johnston

Poem for the New Year ~ Devin Johnston

I’ve tracked myself from day to day how many steps through a field of snow how many hours have I slept what have I eaten what did I burn calories or cigarettes what birds have poured through Bellefontaine where mausoleums bear the names of Busch and Brown Lemp and Spink on marble white as winter endive when I can read my title clear to mansions in the skies what have I read how many words what facts statistics biometrics what data aggregation what news of wins and losses getting and spending each dawn a color wheel to gauge the shifting moods the daylight sunk in trees an index of attraction

According to the Tao Te Ching each day brings more and more of less less and still less with no end to nothing and nothing left undone

Even here in Bellefontaine along a winding street silence brings an interval of yet more distant sound trucks along the interstate a plane behind the clouds

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

Telephone --Devin Johnston

A mockingbird perched on the hood of a pay phone half-buried in a hedge of wild rose and heard it ring

The clapper ball trilled between brass gongs for two seconds then wind and then again

With head cocked the bird took note absorbed the ringing deep in its throat and frothed an ebullient song

The leitmotif of bright alarm recurred in a run from hawk to meadowlark from May to early June

The ringing spread from syrinx to syrinx from Kiowa to Comanche to Clark till someone finally picked up

and heard a voice on the other end say Konza or Consez or Kansa which the French trappers heard as Kaw

which is only the sound of a word for wind then only the sound of wind

[fsgbooks]

Like Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Christopher Logue’s “account” of the Iliad is an imagist epic. It is surely less various and original than its modernist precursors, but it can’t be matched for sheer pleasure. With plot and character given, Logue attends to local intensities and rhythmic development, offering us animated sequences of unfolding action. Moreover, he understands the mechanism of the simile as well as any other modern poet: the electric jolt of defamiliarization, followed, in a flicker, by our recognition of accuracy.

Read “Logue’s Iliad,” an essay by poet Devin Johnston on Christopher Logue’s epic adaptation of The Iliad, War Music.

[cultsoc]

From Devin Johnston: "Randolph Stow, 'Landfall' from A Counterfeit Silence (Angus & Robertson, 1969). I love the gesture of refusal, both wistful and absurd, a poem built on mystery and silence." #napomo #cultsoc15 #devinjohnston #randolphstow #poetspickpoems #poetry # books

[cultsoc]

Devin Johnston | Miniside No. 3, “Cat,” 2002.

[gooseandcaboose]

If the single starling is a wonder of melodic invention, a flock of them forms harmonic counterpoint. Melody against melody, their simultaneous lines of flight cross without crashing.

“Murmurations” by Devin Johnston