MASTER CROUPIER OF FATES
review of Adam Johnsonâs White Paint Falling Through a Filtered Shaft
âWhere the generality are offenders, justice cometh to be cruelty.â âMarquess of Halifax
White Paint Falling Through a Filtered Shaft, the new book of poems from Minneapolis poet and novelist Adam Johnson and coming out from Anxiety Press, represents in some ways a shift from his earlier book What Are You Doing Out Here Alone, Away From Everyone?
That earlier book was a heartfelt, punishing flood of character portraits of people on the edge, soaking in alcohol, making bad choices, running afoul of the long arm of the law, or worse, afoul of their own consciences which are toothless to correct them. I have contemplated similarities between Johnsonâs Minneapolis suburbs and the multitude of Danteâs Malebolge of Hell where sinners writhe in damnation-vessels of their own construction. Maybe sin doesnât exist in Johnsonâs world, but there is a blistering moral vision at work which seems to be informed by Johnsonâs day-job as a criminal defense attorney. Police, lawyers, judges and their verdicts, terms of probation, legal punishmentsâall populate the poems like the totems of civilizationâs history: the Law, the external objective structure of justice that tides of humanity crash against repeatedly.
How this book is different: while the character portraits and the âthrown-nessâ of American lives are still there, and the inexorable consequences both in and out of the pervasive grip of the penal code are still outlined, Johnson has apparently gotten looser and more ornate in several of these poems, taking formal chances. All the poems are about characters in some way but the ones featuring âLarsonâ or âPrometheus Larsonâ are a touch jumpier, more abstract, jazzy and tinged with Berrymanesque linguistic flair. Itâs risky to change up the formula but all artists must do so at some point. The surfaces Johnson creates in this new book at times are perhaps harder to get a foothold in, more opaque and incantatory, than the earlier poems which were given to you straight. But how much more colorful are the facets! Poems such as âage spotsâ and âthe online orbiters of v-nisâ still have the skeleton of an Adam Johnson poem but the meat of them is more variegated and rarefied and pre-flavored with associational brine. Itâs the next stage of poetry.
About halfway through the book of poems, the secret mythography of Johnsonâs poetic world gets drawn with an obsessive eye for adolescent fashion, including JNCO jeans, Pac Sun, JanSport backpacks, and the seemingly ubiquitous tennis sneaker, the K-Swiss. This tennis sneaker must have been referenced so many times I wondered if Johnson was getting advertising dollars from the shoe manufacturer. The K-Swiss becomes a main character, just as the franc note was the main character of Balzacâs novels. The best I can make out, these clothing items, and the branding universes they are the signifier of, are a representation of a nostalgia, a past tribal identity that is as powerful as the modâs suit, the punkâs mohawk, the 1920s golferâs plus fours. Beyond that I could not work out the occult significance.
Not missing from the book of poems are the classic head-reaping funny stories that we saw before. A man and his wife for community service take meals to shut-ins and are warned about one who proves to be a handful. A man misjudges the Bluetooth capabilities of his smartphone at Thanksgiving to horrifying effect. A man buys a gun to take revenge on a cam girl who burnt him on a deal. The outrageous stories pile up and the accumulated comic effect is powerful. Beneath the laughter, the poems are as devastating as Cambodian landmines pulping hapless children.
Itâs hard to state what the next phase of development should be for a poet on their second collection. By then we have seen a good stroke of what they can do. I for one would like to see some of this formidable volcanic production of narratives form the magma flow of a novel, or collection of short stories. Either that or veer into poetry that is not hinged on the (granted, recognizable) arcs of individual lives but something higher, shared, collective, true, American. Walt Whitman in âSong of Myselfâ had extended passages where he outlined all the occupations of 19th century American life as if through hidden cameras set up throughout all the workplaces. But it added up to a single vision. Johnson is a master croupier of fates, raking in each individualâs sad stack of chips. He can work in detailed single portraiture, each grimace and hurt eyebrow passing off the pain as not that big a deal when we know it is. What if all the faces added up to more: a panoramic canvas, a Tolstoyan novelâs depth of foreground and background, an operaâs thick jungle of choral by-play?
But the reviewer shouldnât gig the writer for not doing in their book what they perhaps never intended to do. Itâs a fine collection of poems about a fine collection of lost souls, and it shows enough growth and lexical development that we can graph a line in space from the first book. The wildness of the graphâs eventual slope has yet to be fully seen.