My dad and I share many things: love of the Yankees, prominent noses, blue eyes, useful charm, and a love of literature among them. We've both grown very fond of Denis Johnson's prose. If you want a masterpiece of short fiction, check out Jesus' Son. If you're looking for what will turn into the seminal novel about Vietnam, read Tree of Smoke. If you want an early work from a genius about a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the Florida keys, look into Fiskadoro.
Denis Johnson, before he was publishing fiction, built a reputation on poetry. In a post about Seattle I put up a picture of two books. One was The Veil, a collection of poetry from Denis Johnson. I've had a very hard time finding his poetry anywhere, but he lived in Seatts for a while, and this is a first edition book, so it makes some kind of sense I suppose.
I just want to share a sentence from this collection, mainly for my dad, but also for my other readers, just so we can all bask in the glow of someone's art. Just one set of four lines that compose a sentence.
This is the opening for the poem "Man Walking to Work""
The dawn is a quality laid across
the freeway like the visible
memory of the ocean that kept all this
a secret for a hundred million years.
My dad and I also both love The Simpsons.
For Pat and all:
ReplyDeleteI do indeed love Denis Johnson's "Tree of Smoke" (see my review here: http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/search/label/Denis%20Johnson). Also, I have "Nobody Move" waiting for me to pick it up at the library. And it looks like I may have to visit his poetry. That's a hell of a quatrain right there.
"Nobody Move" is fast and sugary like cotton candy. Denis Johnson is playing with the pulp genre.
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