Death is the ultimate form of going incognito and Denis Johnson, the author of The Incognito Lounge, died and left his legacy in May of 2017.
Johnson was a writer equally at home in poetry, short stories, novels, and plays. A down-and-outer who struggled with alcohol and drug abuse issues in his lifetime, he started with poetry but is probably best known for the short stories collected in Jesus’ Son. Read it and you will quickly see both the poetic lineage in is prose and his debt to Raymond Carver, who he studied under while earning his (what else?) MFA at (where else?) the University of Iowa.
For whatever reason, when a writer of note dies, there’s renewed interest in his or her work. I still have Jesus’ Son on my shelf and reread some of the stories, including the magnificent opener “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” which depicts one of the more surreal car accidents you’ll ever read about, but I also wanted to check out his poetry, remembering how richly rewarded I felt when I read short-story master Raymond Carver’s collection, All of Us.
Here, in honor of his life and his art, are a few of Johnson’s efforts, both from The Incognito Lounge and both included on poet.org’s website:
“Surreptitious Kissing” by Denis Johnson
I want to say that forgiveness keeps on dividing, that hope gives issue to hope, and more, but of course I am saying what is said when in this dark hallway one encounters you, and paws and assaults you—love affairs, fast lies—and you say it back and we blunder deeper, as would any pair of loosed marionettes, any couple of cadavers cut lately from the scaffold, in the secluded hallways of whatever is holding us up now.
The Incognito Lounge was part of the National Poetry Series edited by Mark Strand. Here is another signature poem that reflects the world Johnson brought art and sympathy to, a poem that includes the memorable “Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,” a Catholic saint of some renown. I hope, after reading it, you check out at least one of Johnson’s works. I will be reading one of his earliest novels, Angels.:
“Heat” by Denis Johnson
Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It’s beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
August,
you’re just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?