This is from a hybrid mini memoir I wrote called, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet. I’m Old, Not Dead

It combines very short prose pieces from many different genres (prose poetry, mini fictions, snippets of autobiography, facts, and quotations from other works). I think the juxtaposition of these short pieces mirrors the fragmented way I processed experience back then, and probably still do today.

Buffalo Boy Does Good: Courtesy of Republic Steel

Railroad cars vexing the night with their abundance of steel. Linked like sausages. Follow it through memory. The rumbling, like a noisy, half-broken sewing machine taking over a room. “I am turning to stone,” I said to Jimmy, as he passed me the loco weed. Above us, in the night sky, an old lady was wrestling with the moon. A new constellation? Or just another entry from God’s illustrated dictionary?

* * *

In spite of its tough, often unforgiving male culture, the plant was also a place where guys—black and white, and from many different ethnic backgrounds—could hang out. My mother once said that the best way for people to get along was to eat together. Similarly, there was nothing like doing the same lousy Truscon jobs to create a certain camaraderie, so if you saw a coworker on the street, you always gave him a smile or shook his hand. Still, old feuds from outside the plant sometimes resurfaced during the working hours. New feuds could also arise. Lenny was a skinny Italian, one of those guys who could eat anything and never put on weight. Though skinny, he was strong, his arms veined and sinewed. If there was such a thing as a dandy in the steel plants, Lenny was it. After work, most of us dragged our sorry asses to our cars and went home, but Lenny would take a shower and change into his street clothes, consisting of brightly colored shirts, and ridiculously tight black polyester pants, whose hems always broke over a pair of black pointy shoes. “Spic” shoes, as one guy called them. Lenny was hung, and he knew it, which was why he bought pants so tight his member bulged—an invitation and a warning to the local unmarried young women and their parents. He had a Roman nose an anteater might envy, and a head of wavy black hair slicked back with Brylcreem. He always talked about the girls he slept with. I didn’t like that. It was not only uncool, but I had a younger sister who was blossoming into a woman, which put me on alert to predatory guys. I had already decided upon a few tortures for Lenny if he came snooping around my house. One cold night, the break horn sounded, and everyone headed to their lockers to grab a snack. I decided to finish wire-wrapping a load of thirty-foot #9 bars. After that, on my way to the lockers, I saw a fight break out—a lot of dust and a few rows of lockers toppling over. When I got there, an Irish guy named Mike had Lenny pinned on a row of fallen lockers and was beating the hell out of him, until a couple of the tougher guys dragged him off. “What the fuck?” was all Lenny kept repeating, and then, “How the fuck could I have known?” After the tough guys calmed Mike down, I noticed a bunch of Polaroid prints on the dust-covered concrete. It seemed Lenny had come armed that day with trophies from his conquests—Polaroids of naked girls he’d slept with. Why a normal girl would agree to pose like that was unfathomable to me. Why they’d do it for a jerk like Lenny was even more baffling. But they did, and it turned out that one of the girls was Mike’s daughter. I was eighteen at the time, my view of relationships formed by the innocent sexuality of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, so I wasn’t prepared for these photos or the look on Mike’s face. Someone might as well have told him his daughter had been found in a sewer with her throat cut. Not knowing what to do, we all fell silent. We stood the lockers up, then arranged them into their rightful places. No one said anything to Lenny that night, but he must have realized he’d crossed a line. He didn’t show up for work the next day, and a few weeks later, we heard he was working at the Bethlehem plant in Lackawanna.

* * *

I like to think I was thoughtful kid in high school. I was also a Greek Honors student, smart and fairly popular—this altar boy image tempered by certain wise-guy tendencies, sometimes bordering on blasphemy, as when, on a certain Ash Wednesday, I showed up in my Latin class with an ashen question mark spotting my forehead. “You obviously think that’s funny, Johnson,” my favorite Jesuit priest said, right before delving into the intricacies of Ovid’s Amores. “Well, Father,” I said, “you always say that ‘questioning one’s faith is the sine qua non of becoming an authentic person.’” He just smiled. After all, being a Jesuit, he had no choice. A few years later, at the plant, I transformed my peculiar habit of marking my forehead into an art form, the plant providing me with an endless supply of dust and cigarette ash for the arcane symbols I favored, some of which amused my coworkers, others making the old guys worry I had a satanic streak.

* * *

My grandfather died of black lung. He was born in Scranton, and on his sixteenth birthday, he quit school to work in the coal mines. At eighteen he married my grandmother, who was two years younger. Shortly after, they moved to Buffalo for a better life. A “better life” was slaving at the coke ovens at the Donner Hanna plant in South Buffalo. It was a dirty job, and between the coke dust and asbestos-containing materials and clothing, a worker’s lungs didn’t have a chance, especially if those workers chain-smoked Camels like my grandfather did. My grandfather worked hard, so hard that he eventually became a popular supervisor, and, at his wake, grown men, black and white, cried. It was painful to visit him at the end, to see him hooked up to oxygen, periodically sneaking out of his room to have one of the smokes my grandmother would smuggle in. It was hard to witness this avid hunter and fisherman—a man I’d spent nights with yanking night crawlers out of a perfectly manicured lawn—reduced to a pale anorexic skeleton. The Donner Hanna plant closed in 1982. By the late 1990’s, it became clear that the neighborhood was contaminated with carcinogenic and other hazardous industrial wastes, including coke waste, arsenic and lead. According to the New York State Cancer Registry, the “zip code where the plant was located had 51 percent more instances of lung cancer than expected among men, and 42 percent more instances than expected among women.”

* * *

Even before my grandfather’s death, it was clear to me what the price of being a steelworker would be, and I knew I wouldn’t work there long. When, with my 1-A draft status hanging over my head, I decided to leave for California in October of 1970 to “find myself,” I didn’t expect a big sendoff, and I didn’t get one. Just a few pats on the back and whacks on top of my silver work helmet, a few guys making attempts at affection by shouldering me as they passed by, some envying me the “pussy” awaiting me in L.A. In fact, my reasons for going west had nothing to do with girls. There were enough beautiful girls in Buffalo. But I had always been fascinated by California, especially by its geography. I had never seen the ocean, or played beach volleyball, or tried surfing, and I was immersed in the music coming out of Laurel Canyon, Venice Beach, and up the coast to Monterey and San Francisco. I was looking for a new education. I didn’t want to be a lifer at the plant and blow off the classical education my father had worked so hard to give me, but I also wasn’t ready for the college grind. I still enjoyed manual labor, and in the following years, I would work as a carpenter in Colorado, and as a drywall subcontractor back in Buffalo. The steel plant prepared me for those jobs, taught me how to navigate the landscape of working-class men—what virtues to take from those experiences, what vices to avoid.

* * *

When my father was in his late seventies, he came to one of my poetry readings. For weeks before the event, I’d wake up in the night sweating. Would my father be embarrassed of me? Would he think me unmanly? Would he laugh at my zany comic prose poems, or, conversely, think them stupid? Night after night, I’d toss and turn, feeling as if someone had crapped in my stomach. It was a good reading, funny, and afterwards he put his arm around me. He didn’t say anything, but then he didn’t have to. Later, alone with him at his house, he asked me how I had managed to publish so many books. “It’s the same as working with steel bars and nails,” I said, “only now I work with words.” I cringed as I invoked such a lame metaphor, knowing that, over the centuries, it had become a cliché of a cliché. But it seemed to resonate with him. We talked a little about the reading, and then I asked him what he had learned from being a steelworker and a mailman. “I learned the importance of hard work,” he said. “Same as you.” In response, I mentioned all the guys at the plant who had been slackers, morally reprehensible, or complete assholes. “So what?” he said. “It’s not about them. It’s about waking up every morning and doing the job, then going to bed and doing the same thing over again the next day. You bust your ass and try to be decent. At some point, you look behind and you’ve accomplished something. You’ve made a difference.”

He stared at me as if perplexed, then leaned over and smiled. “I mean, what more do you want?”

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of essays is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

About three years ago, my first YA novel, really a novella, What Happened, went out-of-print. Fortunately, Geoffrey Gatza, publisher of BlazeVOX [Books] and a fine author of children’s books himself, asked if he could redesign the book and then publish it as a sort of 20th Anniversary Issue—a request my first publisher agreed to.

The book, when first published, did very well, winning many awards while also being translated into German. It was also used in many high schools, and it was fun making those visits. Probably the best praise I have ever received from a reader for any of my books came from a “reluctant reader," who, after finishing What Happened wrote me a one-sentence email, simply stating, “Finally, a book that doesn’t suck.”

You can find a substantial sample of the book at What happenedSample It has often been called a novel-in-prose poems, but then it’s become fashionable to call every novel written in short sections that.

You can purchase the paperback from the BlazeVOX [books] site blazewh or from Amazon at amazonwh or the Kindle Store at KindleWH

Here is my short “Introduction” to the new edition. Please consider purchasing it for yourself or your favorite young adult.

Introduction

In 2001, my book of prose poems, Miracles & Mortifications, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. The award honors what the Academy considers to be the best “second” book by an American poet. I was of course pleased, especially because I had always prided myself on being a bit of an “outsider,” so I didn’t think the book had a chance to win.

Five years later, I met one of the three judges, Marilyn Nelson, when one of my colleagues at Providence College asked her to read in our Poetry Series. Marilyn, besides being a fine poet, had begun to publish young adult literature, and she thought the “voice” in my prose poetry made her believe I might do well in the YA field. “Have you ever written fiction?” she asked. I told her that I had published short stories and had finished the first chapter of a novel narrated from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old teenager living in Buffalo, NY. He was a kid who, besides dealing with the death of his mother and abandonment by his father, was trying to manage, often unsuccessfully, severe anxiety. Marilyn thought the idea was interesting and she gave me the name and email address of her publisher. As it turned out, that publisher, Stephen Roxburgh, was excited about what I sent him, and he committed to offering me a contract if he liked the finished manuscript.

What resulted was What Happened, and what followed surprised me as much as winning the James Laughlin Award. The book received Starred Reviews, won some awards, and the head YA book reviewer for Booklist placed it on his top ten list, calling it the “most gorgeously written YA of 2007.”

I don’t know if that’s true, but reading it twenty years later, I do believe it holds up nicely, Even I was impressed by the book’s poetic language, wondering just who was this Peter Johnson who wrote such a novel? He was of course the first-person narrator of the book. Like him, as a teenager, I was plagued by anxiety and a difficult relationship with a father, who, like many WWII veterans, was often emotionally absent. Consequently, it wasn’t hard to inhabit this narrator’s consciousness and participate in his poetic vision of a world gone awry—a vison that, obviously, many teens embraced as their own over the years. Perhaps the best part of my early “What Happened Years” was visiting classes and seeing the excitement the book generated, not to mention reading and responding to emails from students, one from a “reluctant reader,” who proudly stated, “Finally a book that doesn’t suck.”

What higher praise can an author receive than that?

Even better, I am now fortunate to have Geoffrey Gatza of BlazeVOX [books] decide to republish a sort of 20^th anniversary edition.

We hope you enjoy this reincarnation as much as the readers who first bought What Happened in 2007.

Peter Johnson

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of essays is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet I’m Old, Not Dead

His most recent YA novel is the 20th Anniversary edition of his What Happened (2026), called by Booklist the “most gorgeously written YA of 2007.” Paperback from the BlazeVOX [books] site blazewh or from Amazon at amazonwh or the Kindle Store at KindleWH

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

This is from a hybrid mini memoir I wrote called, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet. I’m Old, Not Dead

It combines very short prose pieces from many different genres (prose poetry, mini fictions, snippets of autobiography, facts, and quotations from other works). I think the juxtaposition of these short pieces mirrors the fragmented way I processed experience back then, and probably still do today.

Race, Social Disparity, and Memory: Courtesy of Republic Steel

In summers, college kids came to work at the plant. They were mostly the sons of the supervisors, who wanted their kids to experience hard work before becoming supervisors themselves, or maybe doctors or lawyers. I was lumped in with them. I had just graduated from Canisius High School, a prestigious Jesuit college preparatory school. I was a Greek Honors student, which meant that I carried seven courses per semester for my final two years, not one of them being gym or shop. But I was, in fact, an imposter. In 1969 I had been accepted to Fordham and other premier Catholic colleges but had decided not to go. With the Vietnam War at full speed, that choice was considered suicidal, but I couldn’t have cared less. I was making great money at the plant, and I wanted to go to California. I was living from day to day and enjoying the unpredictability of that life. My choice put me in an interesting position. Both the rich kids and the steelworkers confided in me. The rich kids thought I was rich, and the steelworkers knew I wasn’t. Some of the rich kids were good guys, but most of them held the steelworkers in contempt, thinking them grotesque in appearance and manners. Some of the steelworkers teased the rich kids, calling them pussies, but, surprisingly, many of them were impressed, mistaking wealth and power for something magical. Something they might “get” someday, like you could “get” college. Or maybe they thought the rich kids had somehow cracked the code and might share the “Secret” with them. I wanted to tell my fellow laborers that the college kids called them “dumb fucks.” I wanted to punch out a few of those kids, because, according to their views, my father and grandfather were also “dumb fucks.” But I did neither. Back then I fashioned myself a writer, an observer of human nature, unlike in high school where I could be aggressive. Early during my freshman year, a rich kid made fun of my tie. At the time I would have been more open to the idea of Mick Jagger being the Pope’s son than of the possibility that one human male might poke fun at another human male’s tie. I ignored his comment the first time, but when he came back for seconds, I slammed him into his locker five or six times until I was sure I had his attention. It’s not something I’m proud of, but, after that, the kid did leave me alone.

* * *

Some Things I learned at the Plant:

That a handkerchief was useless against the constant assault of swirling ore dust.

That, after an hour, that same handkerchief looked like a piece of tar paper.

That you could shoot snot a yard away by pressing one finger against a nostril, then blowing hard out of the other nostril.

That such an emission was called a snot rocket.

That you never brought your lunch in a paper bag, and if you did, you made sure your locker was closed unless you wanted to find a well-fed rat in it.

That a heated butter-soaked sandwich roll from the snack truck at 3 a.m. tasted as good as a crème brûlée prepared by a four-star chef.

That little joys like the one above made the rest of your shift bearable.

That grown men could page through magazines of naked and half-naked women staring back at them with sad post-coital expressions, while these same men shoved bologna sandwiches into their mouths and sipped coffee as nonchalantly as if they were eating breakfast while reading the Sunday funnies.

That these same men, mostly churchgoers, were fiercely loyal to their wives and daughters, especially to their daughters.

That I would make a conscious decision not to date one of their daughters unless I planned on marrying them.

That during a slow period I had an obligation to “look” busy, not to be busy, or I’d be accused of “killing the job.”

That if I killed the job, physical and/or verbal abuse would be inflicted on me.

That a discussion of the fine points of bowling could be every bit as interesting as an article on the symbolism of the whale in Moby Dick.

* * *

Unlike most boys, who liked monster stories and fairy tales, while in the local grammar school that was located a stone’s throw from the plants, I read dumbed down hagiographies, especially the tales of martyrs. Out of Jesus’s twelve Apostles, St. Bartholomew really took it on the chin. According to one account, when he refused to worship pagan gods while spreading Jesus’s word in Armenia, the king’s brother, Astyages, had the court executioners slowly skin him alive, during which time Bartholomew continued to proclaim his faith in God. Pissed off by Bartholomew’s loquaciousness, Astyages had the apostle beheaded just to shut him up. Stories like these led me to purchase with my paperboy money a book called The Acts of the Apostles, which contained at least fifty large, laminated horrific photos that I immediately cut out to create my final sixth-grade project—a kind of collage of pictures and Scripture, along with my reflections on them. Today, this makes perfect sense to me—a kind of apprenticeship for a future prose poet whose entire oeuvre would be driven by collage, improvisation, and satiric irony. I mention irony because, even at twelve, I realized that by having Batholomew beheaded Astyages unintentionally cut short Bartholomew’s torture, thus short-circuiting his sadistic pleasure in watching it.

* * *

“The birth of a writer: a young man raised in the Catholic faith experiences a dazzling revelation. While praying, he suddenly realizes that he doesn’t have to repeat what’s printed in the missal. He can invent his own prayer. He can make up his own words.”—Adam Zagajewski

* * *

As dumb as it might sound, I felt privileged being a steelworker. After my rigorous classical high school Jesuit education, it was nice to work with my body. No thinking, just hard work. But I soon realized not everyone felt as I did about factory work. At that time, I was dating an extraordinarily beautiful wealthy girl I had met through my rich high school friends. At first, her father, a wholesaler of automotive products with one of those alcoholic tans I recognized from the plant, liked me. After all, I was good-looking, a good golfer, had gone to the best high school in Buffalo, and I was an interesting conversationalist. So imagine my surprise when, one fall afternoon, he summoned me to his study and said, “Peter, you’re a good guy, but I don’t think this will be a marriage made in heaven.”

“Right now, sir,” I responded, “I’m thinking more week-to-week.”

He grimaced. He squirmed. His jaw tightened, distorting his face as if every nerve ending of every tooth in his mouth had suddenly come alive. Meanwhile, the picture of Jack Nicholas hanging on the wall above his head seemed to shiver a bit. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I thought old Jack was enjoying this conversation.

Her father took a deep breath, “Son, why don’t we just put the rubber to the road. There’s probably a good future for you somewhere, but I had hoped for a better match for my daughter than someone with your current, let’s say, ‘goals.’” Then he implied that if I quietly bowed out, he might be able to pull a few strings to get me four new tires for my 1959 Rambler American.

It was an interesting proposition. I mean, I really needed new tires, and he wasn’t offering lousy retreads.

I have never forgotten the humiliation of this experience because I knew the real reason he wanted me to disappear: my father was a mailman and a steelworker, and he couldn’t wrap his head around that. My father’s choices didn’t suggest hard work to him; they symbolized laziness and lack of ambition. And here I was following in my father’s footsteps.

Looking back, I still get angry thinking about this incident. I also feel bad because I ended up dating his daughter for another year. And I often wonder if we stayed together more to spite him than because we were in love.

Probably worst of all, I never got those tires.

* * *

I haven’t talked about my brother. It would be impossible to find two guys who looked more different. He was black Irish, dark-skinned, with brown eyes and curly brown hair. I was blond Irish, fair, with my father’s blue eyes. My brother’s hair caused him trouble in the mid-60s, this before it became cool for white guys to wear Afros. Like a lot of black guys in the plant my brother would straighten his hair by going to bed at night with a woman’s stocking pulled over his head. This seemed perfectly normal to me, but it drove my father crazy, so my brother usually wore it only to bed. At the time, my father wasn’t around much. He’d deliver mail all day, come home to eat, then go to the plant where he worked in the office or filled in, if needed, as a crane operator. Two full-time jobs for thirteen years. He was considered an intellectual at the plant. He’d bring home various magazines that were orphaned at the post office, and during those busy years, when he was home, I remember him sitting in his La-Z-Boy and reading magazines like The Atlantic and Time and Life. When my brother and I got into trouble, my mother always said, “Wait until your father gets home,” but we knew he’d be too tired to do much, except under extraordinary circumstances. One of those occurred on a Saturday. My brother had fallen asleep on the couch curled in the fetal position with his ass visible. I saw my father checking him out, squinting. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to my brother’s ass. I was going to say, “Kevin’s ass,” but knew, unlike my brother and me, that my father’s sense of humor hadn’t been formed by Mad magazine. My father never hit us, but that day, he came close. He walked over to my brother and pulled a knife from the rear pocket of his jeans. This was during the era when teenagers didn’t shoot each other. It was all about knives and chains. Real messy stuff. I knew some gang had been threatening to jump my brother, and I guess this was his protection, though he and I had little knowledge of knives, and the lame one my father held in his hand would have been best for peeling a pear. My father wasn’t interested in explanations, so poor Kevin was tossed around the living room for a few minutes until my mother ran in to save him. By that time, both my father and brother were panting for very different reasons. Later, I said to my brother, “Think about how bad it would have been if you had forgotten to take the stocking off before you fell asleep.” “Yeah,” he said, smiling.

* * *

What I Learned from My Brother:

Not to join a gang, even if it had fancy fraternity names like Beta Tau or Beta Phi, which was what the white-boy gangs were doing at the time.

That no one played the blues harp better than Paul Butterfield.

That I was lucky I had straight hair.

The Blues Project, Nazz, the Byrds—all from my brother

How to make a fake ID.

Which bars served underaged kids (most of them).

That if I ever was close to getting jumped, I should mention our cousin, whom everyone called Irish.

That Irish, without killing anyone, had done something so crazy, even crazy guys were afraid of him.

Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Young Rascals, and Al Kooper—again, all from my brother.

* * *

Jigaboo, spear chucker, jungle bunny . . . I heard them all, and worse, while growing up, often spoken in private by normally decent men who worked side-by-side with blacks, sweating and joking with them. Even when I was a kid, I knew, on some very basic human level, that there was something obscene about those slurs. What was it like hearing them? It was like that cold, tight sickness in your stomach, like a fist, the first time you saw a parent slap their toddler’s face at the grocery store, or kick their dog, or, as a middle-grader, watched the school bully make a kid get on his hands and knees and drag his tongue along the school’s heat-soaked cinder track. Fortunately, I never heard those words at home. In 1969 and 1970 I was beginning to lean into the civil rights movement, and most of my friends at the plant were black, though when our shift ended, we usually went our separate ways. But one night a crane operator named Jimmy Washington said he’d take me to a “Negro bar” called the Governor’s Inn to see Buddy Guy, a blues guitarist I worshipped. “Just don’t stare at anyone,” he said, “and keep your hand over your beer. Stick by me and don’t mess with our women.” As Jimmy’s turquoise Impala approached the bar, we noticed a large rowdy crowd on the street, so Jimmy decided to rescind his invitation. Instead, he pulled over and we sat for a while, checking out the action. “Look at that,” Jimmy said, pointing to a wiry black man playing an electric guitar in the middle of the street. The long cord attached to his axe snaked its way back into the bar, as if the bar were a giant amplifier. “That’s Buddy Guy,” I said. “Damn right,” Jimmy replied, before peeling away.

* * *

Charles Dickens once wrote that “The factory is a place where the soul is crushed and the spirit broken.” Certainly an apt description of the Industrial Revolution during Dickens’ time, though I can’t say I ever felt beaten down or broken while working at Truscon. In fact, I felt weirdly impowered, even (adolescently you might say) manly and sexualized. I could also argue that in terms of steel mills, Truscon was a rose among the thorns. Sure, you could get hurt. Sure, some of the jobs were boring. But at least we weren’t involved in the backbreaking manufacturing of steel, like those guys across the street at Republic Steel, or in nearby Lackawanna at the Bethlehem plant. We cut and bent the steel and sent it on its way. We weren’t working in the coke ovens, coming home covered in soot, downing a few shots of whiskey to get the taste of it out of our mouths. We didn’t need to be protected from the blast furnaces by wearing jackets made with asbestos materials. We could focus on the job, trying to learn new skills. “Just like Louie teached me,” Tony Polack said to me on the first day of the job. “I teach you.” Months later, he asked me if I had a girlfriend, and when I said I most certainly did, he responded, “That’s good, because with that long hair and fancy education, some of the guys thought you was a fag.”

* * *

Memory is an odd thing. You think you know what happened, what was said, and then you discover that an event you think you witnessed actually happened in a movie, or the image or turn of phrase you think you created was unconsciously stolen from a Walt Whitman poem. Kind of like the rose-story surrounding my grandmother’s death. All memoir, in a sense, is fictional, which makes it more real. I lied at the plant every day. What better training for a writer? For example, I think this happened: A guy who only worked at the plant for a week told me he “put a guy in the hospital” in Cleveland. No details, and I wasn’t about to ask for any. No, a guy who worked at the plant told someone else who then told me that he had “put a guy in the hospital” in Cleveland. It was over a stripper. No, a guy from another plant told me he knew a guy who knew a guy who “had put another guy in the hospital” in Cleveland for drinking his shot of tequila when he went to the head to take a piss. All I really can be sure of was that someone had been “put in the hospital,” and that the event most likely happened in Cleveland. That’s what lunch at the plant was like: a convergence of real and imagined parallel stories.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of essays is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

This is from a hybrid mini memoir I wrote called, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet. I’m Old, Not Dead

It combines very short prose pieces from many different genres (prose poetry, mini fictions, snippets of autobiography, facts, and quotations from other works). I think the juxtaposition of these short pieces mirrors the fragmented way I processed experience back then, and probably still do today.

“Fucking-A” and “Goosing”

I was never involved in a strike during my time at the plant, which was too bad. What could be more appealing, no, more romantic, to a young man than guys bashing in each other’s heads because of low wages and poor working conditions. I was even more infatuated with strikes when I was a middle-grader, and whenever a strike was imminent, my ears would perk up. Most of the conversations were about greedy corporations, intent on screwing the steelworkers, but, in my family, it was more complex than that. By the time I was twelve, my grandfather had become one of the bosses. This put him in a difficult situation. If he walked out with his men, he’d get fired, and if he didn’t, he was a scab. There were many concepts that were confusing to me as a preteen, but being a scab wasn’t one of them. It was worse than cheating on your wife or embracing pedophilia. So imagine my shock when my grandfather decided to cross the picket line during one specific strike. Imagine my befuddlement upon hearing he then walked through a horde of tough, angry steelworkers, whose mass of muscle parted like the Red Sea to let him harmlessly pass through. As silly as it might seem, there was something Biblically epic about it to me, making my grandfather, from that point on, a bit godlike. Later, after that particular strike ended, I learned that his crew knew something I didn’t—that although he hated the superintendents more than they did, he felt obliged to keep the plant open and functioning for his men, even if that meant he had to crash in the locker room on a cot for two or three weeks.

* * *

One afternoon we had an “emergency” meeting on goosing. It seemed that in another plant a prankster was killed when he snuck up behind and goosed a coworker, who happened to be holding a hammer. Startled by the unexpected pinch in the ass, the guy swung his hammer back into the forehead of the prankster, who died almost instantly. Goosing was becoming a bit of an epidemic, we were told, which would have been funny if a guy hadn’t been killed. Our foreman, a man unfortunately named Dick, had the unwanted job of running a safety meeting on goosing. He showed up with a handful of red plastic hammers and spades, the kinds of tools you’d buy a kid for the beach, and he asked for volunteers to act out the tragedy. The guys on my shift, like a bunch of 8-year-olds being asked to test-taste banana splits, shouted over each other to participate. It was frigid that evening, so they probably wanted to prolong the meeting rather than go back to work. Dick chose only two volunteers: Tony Polak and a skinny fidgety guy named Eddie. Today Eddie would’ve been diagnosed with Tourette’s Syndrome, but back then, everyone just thought he was crazy. He was the happiest crazy guy I knew, and a real practical joker, capable of putting a cockroach in your lunch pail, or crooning “Silent Night” in the middle of July at four o’clock in the morning. Dick couldn’t have chosen two more unlike participants. Tony approached his part with the seriousness of executioner, swinging his oversize plastic hammer in sweeping rhythmic motions, as if he were a toy clock figure. Eddie was after authenticity. He didn’t wait for his cue. Instead, he smiled at us manically before sneaking up on Tony and goosing him. It must have been one hell of a goose, because Tony yelled, “Fucking-A,” as his right hand came backwards, his hammer smashing Eddie in the face. Eddie swooned, then pirouetted, his eyeballs going back into his head. He fell backward and stretched out on the dusty concrete in the position of a crucified Christ. Tony turned, at first mad, then concerned. Had he forgotten that his hammer was plastic? It didn’t matter, because Eddie twitched a couple of times before popping up like a Jack-in-the-box, forming his hands into one big fist and shaking it over his head like a prize fighter. Some guys laughed; others clapped. The unexpected success of this demonstration should have pleased Dick the Foreman, but all he said was, “What a bunch of fuckups.” Which, as I came to learn later, meant that he liked us.

* * *

My father’s mother died with him at childbirth. He was the last of eight children, and after her death, some of his brothers and sisters were temporarily split up among family. My grandfather couldn’t raise the seven of them and do his job. At the time, he was a cop. My father took the biggest hit, spending his first two years in an orphanage. How much do children remember from those early years? He spoke of looking through the bars of his crib when his older brothers and sisters came to visit. He never recounted this memory with sadness or anger. More with a sense of wonder, as if pondering whether he had done something wrong to have been abandoned.

* * *

“You know, in every town you have bad people,” Dick Hughes said, “but if you live in a small town, you have less bad, people, I guess.” To me, statements like these were pure poetry. That’s what guys thought I’d be: a poet. “A Fucking-A poet,” as one guy put it. I’m not sure how it got around I wanted to be a writer because it wasn’t something one shared in the steel plants. I often wondered if my fellow workers had ever read a contemporary poem. Some would snicker at the idea, but others seemed interested. We all grew up reading the Bible and hearing family stories that changed monthly, depending on how much alcohol had been drunk. There was the story of the red rose that shriveled the night my grandmother died; or did my uncle Eddie, the alcoholic test pilot, dream of a red rose dying, and, upon awakening, know that my grandmother had passed; or did a red rose mysteriously appear in my grandmother’s coffin on the night of the wake? What was the truth? No one cared. All that mattered was the story, and how poetically it was told, so that we could let it wash over us—transport us from death’s misery in an attempt to canonize the frail woman lying in the coffin.

* * *

“Fucking-A” was the choice expression at the plant. Some pundits have argued that it means “Fucking asshole”; others, that it’s a World War II military phrase, meaning “Fucking Affirmative.” Its etymology didn’t interest anyone at the plant. To us it was an all-purpose, Fucking-A functional phrase. “Fucking-A” could be used as an adjective, a noun, a helping verb, and most often, an interjection. “Did you see O.J. on that last kickoff? Fucking-A, can that dude run,” someone might say. “Or Fucking-A, Johnson, what’s that shit you’re eating?” But you also could employ it lyrically, as in “What a Fucking-A beautiful moon,” to which someone might respond in wonder, “Fucking-A right, Johnson.” Sometimes you could even double up on it, as when a guy said to me, “Just give me the Fucking-A broom, Johnson. Fucking-A.” I thought of this expression years later when I was coaching Babe Ruth baseball with an unusual guy. He was a tall Swede with a big gut and proud of his immense stash of pornography. He once told me, “I tend to say fuck a lot, so you better get used to it.” He often wore (though thankfully not at games) a T-shirt he purchased at a local strip joint. The shirt had Foxy Lady: Pulp Friction emblazoned on the front. I told him that swearing in front of the kids was a non-starter for me. Fortunately, shortly after practices began, someone at work stole his T-shirt, though I still had to battle him periodically about the swearing, which wasn’t as hard as you might think. You see, he could have easily been a character in my South Buffalo neighborhood, where, I assure you, the moms would have raised holy hell over that T-shirt.

* * *

Reasons I Should Be Dead

The fine layer of ore dust my mother would wipe off our Formica dinner table on warm

summer afternoons.

The hour after work when I’d purge dust from my nasal passages by snuffling warm tap water,

then snorting it out.

The two packs of Camel non-filters I chain-smoked for four years.

The swirling sheetrock dust when I was subcontractor as a diesel torpedo heater’s giant red

eye expelled its poison into the air.

My part-time job in a Formica factory, where I’d lather kitchen counter forms with glue, mold

sheets of Formica to them, then trim them with a router.

So why should I be surprised that my lungs bear the scars of the pleurisy I contracted three times

from the ages of fourteen to twenty?

Why should I be surprised I have COPD?

Why so astonished when diagnosed with Leukemia two years ago?

* * *

“Mogen David Concord wine is made from no less than 51% Concord grapes, an American grape variety, which is typically used for grape juices, jellies, and preserves, but also used for Kosher wines. This makes the wine less expensive, averaging $5 per bottle.” This is what my grandmother would offer us when we were sick. One night at the plant, after I decided to be a “serious” poet, I couldn’t seem to get anything down on paper until by happenstance I wound up, sore throat and all, drinking Mogen David Blackberry wine with my grandmother and eating reheated pigs in a blanket. Everything flowed easily after that. Terrible poetry for sure, but who cared, since no one except my long-suffering girlfriend would ever read it.

* * *

People offer two reasons why the plants closed. Some blame it on the steel executives, who fattened their paychecks by moving the plants abroad, paying foreigners obscene wages, and not having to worry about unions or safety regulations. Others blame the unions for not making concessions during hard times. I’m a union man. My father was a mailman and a steelworker, and my grandfather worked in the coke ovens. I knew it was insane to trust the bosses. In high school, I learned that our country was built on two opposing impulses: idealism and opportunism. For most of my life, I’ve only seen the second impulse at work. In America, when things get fucked up, follow the money.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of essays is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

My dear friend, Don Soucy, always insists that he’s not a “writer” according to the romanticized image we have of that occupation, and yet he proves the opposite whenever I strongarm him to write a post for this site. As an example, read his moving piece on fathers and sons, which appeared in June of 2024. Soucyfather&sons

I often wonder what make writers like Don so much better than many of us, and I’ve come to believe that it’s all about humility. Anyone can learn to write well. Everyone has interesting ideas and experiences. But the best writers leave their egos at the door and focus on their readers. They realize, as Twain said, that writers can afford to be anything but boring.

Enjoy this little gem by Don.

Book Burning by Don Soucy

My first try at a novel consumed more than 3 reams of paper, weighed about 4 lbs, and fit in a box that once held 12 pairs of woolen socks from LL Bean. In the end, the box, held together with duct tape, had traveled twice across the country and up and down the East coast from Orono, Maine to Jessup, Georgia. I had banged out most of these pages on a used Smith-Corona office typewriter with a legal-sized carriage return so loud and heavy that getting to the next line threatened to loosen the fillings in my back molars. I once submitted some pages to fulfill a requirement of an undergraduate creative writing course I had signed up for hoping to meet Stephen King, already a BMOC at the University of Maine. I was doubly disappointed; my writing earned a C, and King never showed up because he had submitted two completed novels before the class actually met.

I started writing my story when I was stationed in Sausalito, CA. The Bay Area then was the epicenter of the counterculture and charged with excitement. Mario Savio had just delivered his address at UC Berkeley that would spark the Free Speech movement. Some of those same students were already protesting in Oakland against the Vietnam War. The Grateful Dead was giving free concerts in and around San Francisco, and Haight-Ashbury was starting to fill up with flower children and pot smoke.

As a strait-laced Army soldier, I could experience these events only from a distance. This, however, also gave me the incentive to start writing. I used it all as backdrop for the novel I wanted to write: the tale of an angst-driven teenager at war with his peers, his parents, his teachers, and himself. I knew that material had already been superbly covered by James Joyce, Robert Cormier, John Knowles, and the blessed JD Salinger. Yes, familiar territory, but I had something new to say, that somehow my experiences were unique. I had, after all, been expelled from the seminary for stealing a bottle of altar wine and getting drunk. I had also run away to New York in the hopes of hustling chess on the street only to discover that almost everyone I met played better chess than I did.

I had enlisted in the US Army right when the War in Vietnam was heating up. I had taught English in a small southern town that successfully slowed down school integration until the early 70’s. I had also toured Europe with a good friend. From there, I wrote long chatty letters that people back home saved for me to add to the pile. You would think I had material for a lot of novels, but by graduate school, I had learned some uncomfortable truths about writing. First, making shit up was way harder than recounting my own life’s experiences. As Hemingway said, “Write about what you know,” so I did. Second, I found that writing exclusively in the first person was limiting in important ways.

For example, I met an interesting student in Bucharest who spoke good English and who wanted to know everything about growing up in the USA. It was a great interview, and up until then, I had been unable to contextualize my various adventures, to make the needed connections that lead to insight and meaning. That wasn’t happening and my transcription of that interview read as flat as a pancake.

Also, I learned that writing is easy but rewriting is damn hard. Polishing, reconstituting the prose, reexamining the writing in the cold light of day, simply wore me down. Granted, I had hundreds of pages of manuscript, but very few of them ready for prime time. I began to see the beat-up box with all its pages as a soul-crushing burden, much like novelist William Gaddis who once ranted about how difficult it was to finish a novel, comparing the manuscript to “living with a God-damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God-damned hand.” Jack Gibbs, the blocked writer in Gaddis’s JR, could have been modeled after me, “forever sifting through his boxes and boxes of paper” trying to write the definitive work.

Then, on the morning of February 13, 1979, the A-frame I rented with two other graduate students burned to the ground, along with our possessions, our clothes, and my beat-up LL Bean carton with 1700 pages of deadening prose. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Some of the material I had written about, my first, tentative sexual encounters, my questioning America’s place in the world after touring several communist countries, my experiences as a radicalized Vietnam-era GI, seeing racial segregation in my own classroom, all of this would have pissed off Moms for Liberty and other book-banning/burning groups. Taunting them would have been fun, but losing that opportunity only strengthened my perception that I wasn’t really a writer after all. I lacked the commitment, the discipline, and face it, the talent for turning a life’s adventure into something meaningful. It just wasn’t in me and I’m sorry it took all those pages to learn it.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of essays is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

Like most writers, I’m often asked at conferences or class visits who my “influences” are. Indeed, all writers begin by imitating a literary hero, then, later, try to distance themselves from that influence, in order to discover and develop their own voices.

But my influences were more cultural and socioeconomic than literary. Specifically, they were the physical and emotional geography of my working-class neighborhood around the steel plants in South Buffalo, NY, not to mention the time I spent working in those plants and at other similar manual labor jobs.

I wrote a hybrid mini memoir about this idea of influence, which I lengthened and rewrote for my new book of essays, called, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet. I'm Old, Not DeadThis memoir also questions the authenticity and reliability of memory (with a nod to Marcel Proust) when it comes to memoir.

For the next five weeks, I will republish parts of it on my Substack. I’ve made sure that each section can stand alone with its own ending and yet gain more resonance when read in the context of other sections.

The memoir itself is a hybrid—short short prose pieces from many different genres (prose poetry, mini fictions, snippets of autobiography, facts, and quotations from other works). I think the juxtaposition of these short pieces mirrors the fragmented way I processed experience back then, and probably still do today.

“Truscon, a Division of Republic Steel: A Prose Poem Sequence, Disguised as a Lyrical Essay, While Aspiring to Be a Fictional Memoir” Part 2

For most of my childhood and teens, my father worked two jobs. He’d deliver mail during the day, come home to eat, then head off to the plant where he’d ride the crane or work in the office. Sometimes, as he was rushing out the front door, my brother would say, “Who was that masked man?” It was a refrain we invoked at my father’s wake, as we knelt before the casket, with Andy Williams crooning “Danny Boy” behind us.

* * *

South Park Country Club was a short nine-hole course a stone’s throw from Bethlehem Steel Plant in Lackawanna, NY where steelworkers and other laborers would hang out even when they didn’t bring their clubs. If you look up the course today, you’ll read: “South Park Golf Course, offers a charming 9-hole experience nestled within a historic Olmsted-designed park. Golfers can enjoy the serene landscape, characterized by mature trees and open fairways, making it an ideal spot for a quick round or a leisurely game.” Sounds great, but during the sixties South Park was a dump, though one of those neighborhood dumps you’d later strangely cherish for the life lessons it taught you. The tee boxes were mounds of dirt, so my friends and I always had a few sixteen-penny nails in our bags along with a tiny hammer, that we’d use to make a little hole to keep our golf tee erect. Encircling the course and bordering the tee boxes was a circular macadam road. Not infrequently when you were in the middle of your backswing, punks might speed by yelling, “Fuck you, asshole”; other times, they were capable of throwing an empty beer bottle at you.

And then there was the fourth hole, where a 150-yard pond separated the tee box from the green. Ten yards short and your ball was in the drink; ten yards over the green, and your ball would careen off the road and disappear into bushes where sometimes, if you were lucky, you’d catch a glimpse of a women in her bra having just completed a mid-afternoon soiree with some muscled meathead before he got ready for his 3-11 shift. I saw many a golfer hit five or six balls into the water before giving up; twice I saw guys, humiliated and/or frustrated by the pond’s intimidating expanse, throw their eight- or nine-irons into its welcoming depths. I once even saw a massive enraged Italian guy toss his whole bag about fifteen feet from shore, as if it weighed only a few pounds. And none of these balls or clubs were retrievable. I mean, it was the 1960’s, the water chemically altered into sickening yellowish-green swirls, on top of which dead fish floated. As a budding liberal, I was horrified by such an insult to nature; as a writer, elated, as if the pond were some twisted Impressionistic painting my mind’s eye would be able to revisit any time I needed to recapture the zeitgeist of my youth.

* * *

There are a lot of things I wish I had kept: my high school baseball glove, some old Beatles and Stones albums, all those baseball cards (worth a fortune now) that I glued on the concrete wall of my basement to create a mosaic of my happy middle-grade years. There was also the metal lunch pail and thermos, made, not surprisingly, by a company named Thermos. My first pail was a much-abused one, gifted to me by my grandfather. The outside had a few dents, and the paint on the thermos was chipped off in places. I had always been a fan of Arthurian legends, so my grandfather might as well have passed down Excalibur to me. I felt cool walking into the plant swinging the lunch pail rhythmically back-and-forth, or, on cold nights, sipping from the open thermos as steam moistened my nose and forehead. You could customize a pail. One guy painted a map of South Vietnam on his, circling where he’d been stationed; another crafted a heart with an arrow through it, a woman’s name written beautifully below the heart. But I liked mine the way it was: beat-up, with some history. All the shine gone off it.

* * *

The plants could maim or kill you if you weren’t careful. My grandfather lost an index finger under the wheel of a railroad car, which put a damper on his bowling career and wedding saxophone gigs. This latter loss was significant. He was a good saxophonist, so good that he’d been offered a job in one of Guy Lombardo’s bands. But there was also something cool about losing a digit or occasionally getting busted up. My fractured thumb seemed to make me immediately legitimate, allowing me to join a club whose membership was growing day by day. It amazed me how one’s body could compensate after an injury, how one could rely on other fingers to pick up the slack, as my grandfather’s remaining digits bailed him out while bowling at Lucky Strike Lanes. But I don’t mean to glorify the dangers of the plant. There was a frightening fickleness about the place, as my uncle Larry discovered when he was killed by a crane one night. It was an event that stuck with guys, and for a few months, every time a crane passed overhead, we all felt the cold shudder of death just one fuckup away.

* * *

It was during my first winter at the plant that I learned it was possible to live in both the world of Reality and that of the Imagination. Bored, I decided to enroll at the University of Buffalo in a night-school class called “Contemporary American Poetry.” Once a week, for two hours we’d gather in a meat-freezer of a trailer, where fifteen desks awaited us. That’s where a teacher, a young bearded graduate student, introduced me to the poetry of Willian Carlos Williams and David Ignatow, two poets whose work proved you could write about the struggles of the working-class, thus convincing me my life was worthy of literature. To me, these two poets were giants, so imagine my surprise, twenty years later, when, sitting in my office, I received a call from David Ignatow, who had just become a contributing editor of my new literary journal, The Prose Poem: An International Journal. We talked about city life and shitty jobs, and how he and Stanley Kunitz, who was close to ninety at the time, were going to Cape Cod to see Kunitz’s girlfriend. It was moment when my all my working-class and poetic preoccupations, obsessions, and my hard work coalesced into some kind of art.

* * *

One day Tony Polak, or at least that’s what everyone called him, said, “Johnson, someone said you can help me with my taxes.” “Someone was wrong,” I said. “But you got college, right?” “Not yet,” I said. I had just graduated from high school. “Get college,” he said, “or you’ll end up like me. Fucking-A.” “There are worse fates,” I said. “Not really,” he replied, laughing.

* * *

Back in the late 1960s some bars were open 24-hours a day, especially the ones around the steel plants. It was not uncommon for workers to stop for an “eye-opener” at 6 a.m., right before the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift. The drink of choice was a boilermaker: a shot of whiskey and a beer. Some guys would down the shot first, then the beer. Others would make a depth charge by dropping a shot glass of whiskey into a mug of beer, then chugging it in one gulp. Esquire Magazine once wrote that drinking a boilermaker as a depth charge was uncool and diluted the whiskey. That analysis of getting hammered wouldn’t have registered with any steelworkers I knew. They couldn’t even have told you why they were drinking at 6 a.m., an hour before manning machines capable of crippling them. After a few months, I figured out who the heavy drinkers were. I always gave them a wide berth.

* * *

In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust describes an epiphany, a self-realization, that would eventually release a flood of memories responsible for his masterpiece. As he relates it, he returns home one day in winter where his mother, recognizing that he appears chilled, offers him some tea. “She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’” he writes, “which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.”

Proust can have his spoonful of tea and madeleine cookie crumbs, but, for me, the smell and taste of my illiterate Polish grandmother’s hot-buttered rolls send me back to my youth. Sometimes I’d crash at her house after the late shift, and, in the morning, she’d slice and butter a few of her rolls, then Saran Wrap and pack them in my lunch box, sparing me from the stale food truck’s baked goods that were as tasteless my mother’s Hamburger Helper Swedish Meatballs. I can still see my grandmother (normally a stern-faced old battleaxe), leaning over an open stove, lovingly basting her rolls every five minutes. It’s an image that often appears in my work, an objective correlative for the collision between the cuisine of the Old Country and the realities of an industrial modern world. Studies of famous poets often discuss the author’s use of irony or ambiguity, but if I were writing a book on Peter Johnson’s work, I’d focus on the juxtaposition of the high and low—the cover of that book being an image of a huge roll dripping with butter, resting peacefully in the ore-stained hand of a steelworker.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of essays is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

How can you not love the duck-billed platypus. It’s a semi-aquatic, egg-laying mammal, who’s so paradoxically weird-looking that it’s cute, so proud to steal the body parts and biology of other animals that he’s a rebel of sorts.

So, too, is the new type of essay that depends on a number of short genres (the prose poem, the fragment, and the mini essay, not to mention flash fiction and memoir) for its very existence.

As examples, consider my last two books, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet (a book of hybrid essays) [Dispatches] and Observations from the Edge of the Abyss (a hybrid book of fragments/prose poems/fables), [In paperback, here: Observations, and in digital version, for free) Observations (digital)]

To read a great review/essay by Cassandra Atherton on these two books and hybrid forms, in general, go to Plume magazine here: PlumeReviewJohnson

You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of essays is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

Like most writers, I’m often asked at conferences or class visits who my “influences” are. Indeed, all writers begin by imitating a literary hero, then, later, try to distance themselves from that influence, in order to discover and develop their own voices.

But my influences were more cultural and socioeconomic than literary. Specifically, they were the physical and emotional geography of my working-class neighborhood around the steel plants in South Buffalo, NY, not to mention the time I spent working in those plants and at other similar manual labor jobs.

I wrote a hybrid mini memoir about this idea of influence, which I lengthened and rewrote for my new book of essays, called, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet. I’m Old, Not Dead This memoir also questions the authenticity and reliability of memory (with a nod to Marcel Proust) when it comes to memoir.

For the next five weeks, I will republish short parts of it on my Substack. I’ve made sure that each section can stand alone with its own ending and yet gain more resonance when read in the context of other sections.

The whole memoir itself is a hybrid—short short prose pieces from many different genres (prose poetry, mini fictions, snippets of autobiography, facts, and quotations from other works). I think the juxtaposition of these short pieces mirrors the fragmented way I processed experience back then, and probably still do today.

“Truscon, a Division of Republic Steel: A Prose Poem Sequence, Disguised as a Lyrical Essay, While Aspiring to Be a Fictional Memoir” Part 1

I was a hooker, which was a step up from being a bender’s helper. A bender’s helper, not surprisingly, was an assistant to the bender, whose job it was to train the helper to eventually run the bending machine. Although the training took fifteen minutes, the apprenticeship could go much longer if the bender didn’t push for a new assignment. The bars had different circumferences. There were #10 bars and #12 bars, but mostly #8 bars. They needed to be bent into different shapes to be used in heavy concrete construction. The bender’s helper would drag three or four twelve-foot-long reinforcing bars over to the bending machine. You had to make sure you held the bars firmly on top of each other. If you didn’t, when the bending machine caught the bars, their tails would snap together and could very easily break your thumb. Which was how I became a hooker. A steel worker with a broken thumb is about as useless as a ballerina with a broken toe, but if a thumb was tightly wrapped in a splint and taped to a forefinger, a worker could still wield two heavy metal hooks. And that’s what a hooker did. The crane would pass overhead, its two long metal chains swinging like tentacles, while the hooker followed it down aisles of bent and unbent steel rods. Nighttime was the best, the inside of the plant aglow with dust motes swirling like fireflies, the clanging of metal bars creating a strange and dangerous symphony. There was no talking when you were on your shift. Just hard work. We were all part of something. We were helping to build America. At the time, there was unlimited work. You could stay for two shifts, crash on a cot, and then work two more back-to-back shifts. Overtime. Double overtime. It was a lot of money. You could do that for a week, cash your check and disappear for a month, then get your job back after partying your money away. It was easier than training someone new. Now, the plants have been torn down now. Just fields of weeds and mounds of dirt. Not even the whiff of a time when an 18-year-old could make as much as his father if he could get through the year without being maimed.

* * *

Rudy Thompson hated rats. When he was an infant one crawled into his crib and tried to nibble on his ear lobes, or at least that’s what his parents had told him. Could something like that actually happen? All that mattered was that Rudy believed the story, so when a rat invaded our work area, Rudy would come running with his shovel. The plant was crawling with rats. We were told not to leave scraps of food around, and it didn’t hurt to make a lot of noise. One night I was unloading a gondola railroad car of steel bars. The crane operator lowered his chains, which I slid under a pile of bars held together by thick wires. I grabbed two hooks from the chains, fastened the load tight, and twirled my finger in the air, which was a signal for the crane operator to haul the load away. This went on for some time until I reached the lowest level of bars that sat on wooden pallets. When the last load was lifted and disappeared overhead, I began tossing the pallets over the side of the gondola. Sometimes the pallets were large and heavy and I had to wait for the crane to come back, but that night I could manage the job. I had about two or three pallets left when I noticed something large scurrying in the darkest corner of the car. It was a rat, a big one. He was checking me out, his menacing rat eyes shiny from the overhead lights. I jumped and grabbed onto the topmost side of the gondola, throwing my body over it. It’s a long drop from the top of a gondola car. At the very least, I should have broken an ankle, but for some reason—was it the adrenaline? —I landed safely onto the ground. Ten minutes later, a crowd of guys surrounded me, laughing and chanting, “Rudy, Rudy.” Rudy smiled, then climbed into the car, from where we heard yelling and swearing, the clang of shovel and metal, followed by a large hairy rat traveling through the air, as if trying to grow wings, before crashing to the ground. It lay there, twitching for a few moments. Then it went limp, as if smart enough to die before Rudy came crawling out of the car with his shovel. “Back to work,” the foreman said. And that’s what we did, a bit nervous every time we moved a pile of steel or entered the communal bathroom that didn’t have a door.

* * *

South Buffalo was an Irish Catholic neighborhood bordering a black inner-city neighborhood that was once called the First Ward. The streets in South Buffalo were lined with identical small box-like houses that were thrown up quickly after World War II. They were cheap and functional, so every working-class family could afford them, and they weren’t far from the coke ovens and steel plants where most of the men worked. I don’t remember any women working in those days. A single mom was unheard of. To file divorce papers on a drunk of a husband was the fastest way to get yourself ostracized. The guys would just defend each other, and many of the women didn’t want to be reminded of the numbskulls they lived with. But there were good men, too. Men you could trust. Men who had principles. It wasn’t as if my father and his friends were saints, but they had limits. You didn’t brag. You didn’t publicly make fun of someone’s physical disability. And you never, ever called a woman fat or said she looked like a dog, not only because it was unmanly, but because those women might be someone’s wife or daughter, and their husbands, brothers, or fathers (or maybe all of them together) would most certainly track you down. My father looked like Paul Newman and my mother like Elizabeth Taylor. At weddings people would clear the floor just to watch them dance. Everyone loved my father, and I never once heard him swear. After twenty-five years of marriage, my mother divorced him, the first of her friends to make that decision.

* * *

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,

--description of hell from John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Truscon: A Division of Republic Steel is where I worked, a huge, cavernous warehouse of steel bars and railroad cars situated next to the Buffalo River. In 1968, a report of the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration stated that the “Buffalo River is a repulsive holding basin for industrial and municipal wastes. It is devoid of oxygen and almost sterile. Oil, phenols, color, oxy­gen-demanding materials, iron, acid, sewage, and exotic organic compounds are present in large amounts. Resi­dents who live along its backwaters have vociferously complained of the odors emanating from the river and of the heavy oil films. In places, the river’s surface is a boundless mosaic of color and patterns resulting from the mixture of organic dyes, steel mill and oil refin­ery wastes, raw sewage, and garbage.” When the lunch horn would sound, we would go outside, spread out on a large grassy area about twenty yards from the river, and eat. On the other side of the river was National Aniline, a chemical plant that continuously spewed out toxic chemicals from a row of huge smokestacks. But who knew that then? To me it was beautiful, especially when I worked the 11-7 shift and had lunch at about three in the morning. No one spoke much on that break. Just quiet in the pitch-black summer night, except for the smokestacks watching over us, their occasional explosions lighting the night sky with fireworks. One morning, after our shift was over, we headed for our cars, only to discover their exteriors were riddled with metallic BB-size blemishes, eaten away by whatever the smokestacks had coughed up that night. The supervisors at the plant said they would compensate us for new paint jobs. They never did.

* * *

I was always scribbling at the plant, on scraps of paper, on an empty brown paper lunch bag, once on the back of a candy wrapper. If I didn’t have a pen or pencil, the guys in the office would lend me one, probably thinking I was keeping track of an order. If I could have articulated it back then, I would have said I was auditioning to chronicle a lifestyle and a certain kind of man. I had read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and something like that was in the air: the anticipation of books like Stud Terkel’s Working and Milton Rogovin’s hyperreal pictures of Buffalo steelworkers. But I was no visionary. I had the attention span of a new-born kitten and the discipline of a drunk. If I had said to a college-educated coworker (and there were some), “There’s a story to be told here, man. Something heroic and brave, an epic,” he would have known I was full of shit. I was a poet and fiction writer in name only. I had the drinking down, but nothing of worth was ending up on paper. Still, I was absorbing stuff—fact, fiction, but also a certain energy from the sights and sounds around me. Stuff that was reminding me of who I was. “Amidst confusion, a glimpse of possibility,” someone much smarter than me might have said. The plant, indeed, was the perfect apprenticeship for a future prose poet, providing a readymade museum of found materials: fragments of dialogue, remnants of old grudges, historical documents, latent socio-economic inconsistencies, and a history of bad behavior to be assembled by a postmodern consciousness comfortable with, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, “constantly amalgamating disparate experience.” I was just the man for the job.

* * *

Ernie Redenski ate like a pig. Never even washed up beforehand. Would sit down at a metal picnic table munching on chunks of garlic, halved tomatoes, and uncooked kielbasa that he’d dunk into a jar filled with something that looked like chopped-up pickles soaked in blood. “Fucking-A, Ernie, you’re disgusting,” Frank Esposito told him one day. “But how can you not honor such devotion to garlic,” I said, adding that Ernie was “our high priest of Polish cuisine.” “What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Johnson?” Frank said, shoving a whole meatball into his mouth. Ernie just smiled, his bald head as big and shiny as a brand-new basketball. He had the calm smile of a Buddha and never missed a day of work.

* * *

One source documents the human tragedy when the huge Bethlehem Steel complex in Lackawanna, just south of Buffalo, closed. “At its peak,” the source says, “Bethlehem had employed more than twenty thousand workers. Along with subsequent closings at Buffalo’s Republic Steel plant and a host of smaller facilities, the shutdown was part of a much broader change of immense proportion in America’s economy and the lives of its working people. By some estimates 2,700 plants were closed in the United States in the 1980s, costing some 1.3 million manufacturing jobs.” I was long gone by the time the plants closed, but I heard stories of guys who didn’t work the twenty necessary years to get a pension. They were told they’d be paid to retrain in other occupations, mostly menial office jobs. But to them those weren’t meaningful jobs. These guys weren’t stupid. They weren’t lazy. They just wanted to do what they considered real work. After the plants shut down, one guy painted his house every year and would park his car outside the empty steel plant and drink coffee all day, reading magazines. I wondered what these poor laid-off souls dreamed about at night: the whirr of gears, the clang of steel bars, the occasional rat darting past them, sometimes stopping to look up and smile, saying, “Now it’s your turn.” I imagined them working in offices or changing oil in cars for one-tenth of what they made in the plants, and without the protection of a union. I imagined the sweat crawling down their spines, the terror, almost Sisyphean, of spending eight hours a day doing something they hated.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of essays is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

Consider these two prose poems from my new book, Observations from the Edge of the Abyss: available on Amazon at Observations or for free at Observationsdigital

Spiritus Vitae

A man with ear plugs shoved up both nostrils and a mouth sewn shut by fear. It has something to do with Spiritus Vitae, but we have no clues to cling to, except that he is following a celestial fiat dictated by a deranged monk a millennium before he’d been born. “Like a frozen stream harboring little anxious sailboats,” is how the man describes himself, as he gazes into a starless sky, pressing a plastic statue of a beardless second-class saint close to his heart.

A Prayer

“The way a godly light can give meaning to a two-thousand-year-old chalice that had once been in the possession of a certain Friar Francis, who himself had a fondness for alliteration and stale bread. If he were alive today, he would most certainly have been burned at the stake, even as the congregation was trampling each other to place his holy wafer between their lips.”

This, a prayer accompanied by the murmur of sacred roadkill rising in the heat on this otherwise perfect night.

Amen.

You don’t have to be a literary scholar to see that in the above prose poems, and in much of my work, for that matter, I have a problematic, codependent, love/hate/skeptical relationship with religion. I’m often saddened by how its beautiful aspects get perverted by people and used to exclude and sometimes even physically and emotionally torture others. Torquemada in the past and certain fringe right-wing evangelicals today are perfect examples of this moral failure.

And yet some of the best parts of me were formed by a Vatican II Roman Catholicism that was almost visionary. Consequently, even when I’m satirizing religion and its ancillary grand narratives (note the mock heroic shenanigans in “Spiritus Vitae” and “Prayer”) I’m very aware that all satirists are really idealists. That is, my religious satires end up, ironically, as perverse homages that often result in humor—a dark humor that has kept me from jumping off a bridge for the last 75 years.

Who do I blame for my complicated approach to religion? Let’s start with my mother, who was the most saintlike creature I have ever known, except, perhaps, Jane Goodall and my black pug Winnie, who has given me unconditional love for the last nine years.

Which brings me to St. Jude. Here’s a pretty good description of St. Jude I’ve cobbled from the Internet, which makes clear he shouldn’t be confused with Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus:

St. Jude is believed to have written the Letter of Jude, one of the shortest books of the Bible, and is thought to have been martyred in Beirut around 65 A.D. He is typically depicted with a club or axe, symbolizing the way he died, as well as with a flame above his head, which refers to Pentecost.

Although Jude is not mentioned much in the Bible and only had one quote attributed to him, he became very popular, probably because of his patronage of lost causes.

According to the ancient Church historian Eusebius, while Jesus was still alive, the ruler Abgar V of Edessa was afflicted with an incurable and painful disease. He had heard of the miracles of Jesus and wrote him a letter requesting a visit. Jesus responded that he would send one of his disciples.

After Jesus’ ascension into heaven, Jude went to evangelize near the city of Edessa and went to visit Abgar. Jude laid his hands on the sick ruler, and he was reportedly instantly healed.

And here’s when my mother comes in. By the time I was born, St. Jude was generally referred to as the “Patron of Hopeless Cases.” For some reason (maybe she had a premonition of how dangerously impulsive I would be from the ages of 17-23) she decided to give me a St. Jude card, which I carried around from the age of eight to sixteen, memorizing the prayer that was printed on the card. And what was that prayer?

Oh glorious apostle St. Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, the name of the traitor who delivered thy beloved Master into the hands of His enemies has caused thee to be forgotten by many, but the Church honors and invokes thee universally as the patron of hopeless cases--of things despaired of. Pray for me who am so miserable; make use, I implore thee, of that particular privilege accorded thee of bringing visible and speedy help where help is almost despaired of. Come to my assistance in this great need, that I may receive the consolations and succor of heaven in all my necessities, tribulations and sufferings, particularly [and then I would mention many of real and imagined troubles], and that I may bless God with thee and all the elect throughout eternity. I promise thee, O blessed St. Jude, to be ever mindful of this great favor, and I will never cease to honor thee as my special and powerful patron, and to do all in my power to encourage devotion to thee. Amen

I always appreciated the humility of such a prayer—even getting the card laminated at one point—until I turned twelve, when I subscribed to Mad magazine and officially became a cynic. True, I still recited the prayer when my world seemed to be falling apart, but I might as well have been intoning “Humpty Dumpty.” More than likely, it was probably the rhythm of the prayer that kept me returning to it, obviously in need of anything resembling an incantation that might assuage my pain.

I guess I should resent being designated a “hopeless case” at the age of eight, but I intuitively understood my mother’s motives. She probably had a vision of what was ahead for me and guessed I would need some protection. When I got my Ph.D. and my wife threw a party, I was told later by friends that when they suggested to her that she must be proud of me, she joked, “I’m just glad he isn’t in jail.”

What I understand now is that St. Jude was really a proxy for the real saint—my mother. Although very religious, she wasn’t one of those talking-in-tongues nutjobs you find in Stephen King novels. She was one beautiful, athletic, and cool lady. I can never remember her judging anyone and probably the greatest compliment I can give her is that whenever I broke up with a girlfriend, they would always say variations of “I won’t miss your sorry ass, but I will most certainly miss your mother’s kindness.” Worse than that, they usually stayed friends with her afterwards until moving on to someone more suitable.

I guess I’m thinking about all this today, because, after being diagnosed with two different incurable blood cancers, I could use a saint specializing in hopeless cases, instead of having to settle for upping my swimming and lifting until the inevitable treatment arrives.

But don’t expect me to feel sorry for myself. In fact, all my sympathy goes to my little sister, who, predictably, was given the name Judy by my well-meaning, protective mother. Imagine the psychic weight she’s had to carry around.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of essays is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

Poet/essayist Sally Ashton has worked hard to create and develop a wonderful literary online journal called DMQ Review. One offshoot of it is the DMQ Salon, where Sally asks three poets to read 5-7 minutes from their new books. It’s a great opportunity for readers to learn about new poetry releases, while also hearing the poets read. This month my new book and the books of Amanda Marie Chiado, Michael Garrigan are featured. If you keep click on the below link and continue to scroll down, you will find many more short videos. So think of subscribing to Sally’s journal. It’s free, and has recently become one of the best prose poem journals in the country.

The site can be found at DMQ Salon

Subscribe now

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in StoriesFind out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

It’s been about a month since the release of my new book of hybrid short essays, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet. I'm Old, Not Dead The book itself is a mix of short essays and short fiction, each one often introduced by a prose poem. And the collection ends with a memoir of how working in the steel plants influenced me as a writer. Lately, I’ve thought of what essay from the book is my favorite, and the below one just may be it. It’s a revision of an early Substack post, written when I didn’t have many subscribers. Enjoy!

“Talking’ ‘Bout My Generation”

[a prose poem]

“The end of a poem should sound like the click when a box closes.” 
     Whose box? 
     Not mine. 
     I don’t even own a box that clicks. 
     Just one of the many lies we’ve been told, or tell each other—about this current war, for instance. 
     Or that we’ll live to be eighty without drooling all over ourselves. 
     What fools and liars—all of us at Woodstock, stoned on drugs and sex, when in fact we were home cutting the front lawn or enrolled in Kaplan courses. 
     All of us protesting the war when in fact we were stretched out on couches, hungover, watching reruns of I Love Lucy while well-paid doctors swore we had twelve toes and four testicles. 
     And free love? 
     Invented by men, for men. 
     Even my father knew that. 
     We’re the ones who won’t say boo! to our children, who listen to rock and roll sell        SUVs, gold balls, tampons. 
     And let’s not forget my friend who dropped acid with his son, crooning “Yellow Submarine” into a camcorder. 
     Something meaningful to share while he’s dying of prostate cancer, saving up cash to freeze himself for the next century. 
     How’s that for The Big Chill. 
     How’s that for t-t-t-t-talkin’ ’bout my generation…?

“Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation,” a reference to the Who song, is, among other things, a not-so-subtle takedown of the all the myths surrounding the 1960s. Yeah, it was a cool, maybe even “groovy,” period at times, but it also was the most confusing and scary of years (especially 1968-70) that I have ever experienced, though 2024, with all the nutcases running around drunk on conspiracy theories and wielding automatic rifles, is almost as spooky. But what I really want to talk about is the Vietnam War allusion in this prose poem. More specifically, I want to riff on the Vietnam War Memorial. For being such an historic and formidable structure, this memorial doesn’t receive the attention it deserves, much like the veterans of that war, and, for that matter, all the wars that followed, which have been fought mostly by poor white kids or kids of color. It’s no secret that the Iraq War never would’ve happened if the sons and daughters of middle- and upper-class white people had made up most of the armed forces.   

I remember taking my oldest son to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore’s disturbing documentary on how and why we got into Iraq—a movie that made us all realize yet again that when old, grey-haired white politicians in blue suits and red ties, with prostatitis and hemorrhoids, gather in a room and decide to unsheathe their gold pens, unnecessary wars often follow. Think of all the dumb wars that have been started by old guys who have never carried a gun or even suffered the indignities of a draft physical. My son was twenty at the time we saw Moore’s flick, and halfway through it, I noticed him wiping tears from his cheeks. “They were all my age, poor or black or Hispanic,” he said later. “Boy, did they get screwed.”

They surely did, not to mention the parents whose children came back in body bags.

Much of the same can be said about the soldiers who fought in Vietnam, even though back then there was supposedly an equal opportunity draft—a point I’ll dispute later. When the War Memorial was proposed, it was like a magnet drawing to it all the controversies that swirled around the War itself. It probably didn’t help that its architect was a twenty-one-year-old Asian woman named Maya Lin. A woman? An Asian? That alone blew people’s minds.

The monument itself, located not far from the Lincoln Memorial, is composed of two 246-foot-9-inch long black granite walls that seem to shimmer even on the darkest of days. Like a mirror, the panels on the walls and the 58,320 names etched on them reflect back the faces of visitors, the transitory clouds above, and the surrounding foliage, so that what’s living and what’s dead must pay respect to each other.

An extraordinary testament to the lives and bravery of the fallen soldiers, you might say.

Yes, but I didn’t always feel that way.

When I was young, long-haired, and somewhat clueless, I had come to believe I could make sense of the world as no one had before me. I was reading existential books like The Divided Self by R. D. Laing, along with a lot of anthropology. In short, I was an ideologue with untested opinions on just about everything, often shocked and outraged when others failed to recognize my brilliance. So when I first heard about the proposed wall, I was offended. How could so many men of my generation be memorialized on a slabs of black granite as cold and impersonal as a coffin. For the next fifteen years, whenever the Vietnam War Memorial was mentioned, I was quick to point out its stupidity, even though I had never visited it.

Truth be known, my motives for attacking the Memorial’s existence were based more on guilt than on my obsession to right what I perceived to be a grotesque wrong. You see, besides never actually visiting the monument, I didn’t serve in Vietnam, although I’d had many experiences with veterans. One night I got into a confrontation at a bar with some rich hippies, whose dads had probably paid a hefty price to get them medical deferments. They were taunting a grunt who was on leave and sitting at the bar, just wanting to have his Carling Black Label in peace. The hippies called him a “baby killer,” and that was too crazy for me. There was some pushing, some shoving, until they eventually drove off in a cherry-red Corvette–no doubt an eighteenth birthday present from one of their dads.

I also had personally witnessed some of the human roadkill left behind by the war, which taught me that you could physically leave Vietnam behind but that it was much harder to exorcise its haunting images. For instance, there was the guy two years ahead of me in high school who’d get drunk every night at a bar called Brinks, then jump from the second floor onto a crowd so tightly packed it was hard to lift a drink to one’s lips. Inexplicably, the crowd would cheer him on, or sometimes create an open space and watch him crash onto the beer-soaked linoleum floor. This guy, with his long curly golden hair and angelic smile, eventually stumbled into a Catholic church one night and destroyed the chapel. I never saw him after that.

And then there was another veteran named Muny, who I met in Hermosa Beach, California in 1970. A slight Jewish guy with a mischievous smile and long, black curly hair, he’d been part of an elite Navy jet fighter squadron. The rumor was that he’d gotten a psych Section 8 discharge, though from what I could see, he wasn’t crazy–just an incredibly gentle soul. When we’d get drunk, he’d put his index finger to his lips as if silencing the world, and say, “Peter, listen.” I never knew what sounds his antennae was picking up (the crackling of gunfire, the screams of Vietnamese children running through rice paddies aflame from napalm dropped on them by air-borne engines of death), or maybe, back home and safe now, he had been transfigured.  Maybe it was the music of the spheres he was privileged, because he certainly looked as if he had seen the face of God. Rather than ask him, I just listened, which wasn’t easy to do with “Honky-Tonk Woman” blaring from the bar’s overhead speakers. I did see him cry once, though, when someone stole his leather flight jacket. That night my friends and I went on patrol to every bar in Hermosa, hoping the find the jerk who ripped it off.

I learned the most about Vietnam veterans when I was attending graduate school in the late 1970s and teaching a night school course at Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, NH. I had one student, a quiet, freckled, red-headed guy named Rusty, originally from Oklahoma, who seemed to struggle to sit still and concentrate. Another guy, Craig, was a medic who was as laid-back as Buddha. Because I had frequent conferences with students, I got to know both of them. One night, I asked the medic why the redhead was barely hanging on, while he, who had seen carnage up close, seemed almost unfazed by the War. “Hey, man, I’ve got my demons,” he said, “but Rusty’s problem is that he has one morality, and you gotta have two go to Vietnam and be able to tie your shoes when you come back. What I’m saying is that what happened there, what I saw and did, has nothing to do with my life here. Rusty can’t separate the two lives, and if he doesn’t learn how to, he’s fucked.” Later, when I got home, I wondered who was better off. Practically, Craig of course, but wasn’t this kind of compartmentalization also, in a way, unhealthy?

How did I fit into all of this in 1969 when I was eighteen?

After graduation, I took a job at the steel plants in Buffalo, NY, where I became friendly with a number of black veterans, who gladly shared their Vietnam stories, and, sometimes, their drugs. I wasn’t dodging the draft. In fact, by the time I left my prestigious Jesuit high school where 99% of the student body went to premier colleges, I was so confused and self-destructive that I decided to forgo college and take my chances with the draft. I thought Vietnam would be an “experience,” and back then, that was my reason for getting up in the morning. I wasn’t going to enlist, but if I got drafted, then so be it.  

Sitting here today, I’m holding my draft card and notices of classification. Peter Martin Johnson, Selective Service Number 308951273, classified 1-A on October 29, 1969, which meant I was a healthy All-American boy ready and even willing to carry a rifle for Uncle Sam. To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to the classification. Everything at that time was a blur of assassinations, rock star deaths, and manual labor jobs that usually ended each evening with me closing a local bar. Oh, how I envied the ability of my peers to tune out the noise and confusion of 1969 and 1970 and somehow get through four years of college. How could they concentrate, even for a nanosecond, on preparing themselves for law school while the world was going up in flames?

What baffles me is why I wasn’t drafted. Another notice of classification I have designates me 1-H on January 31, 1972 because I had pulled the number 271 in the draft lottery. It’s signed by someone named J.L. Nicely. 1-H means, “Registrant not currently subject to processing for induction or alternative service.” I used to stupidly joke that it was certainly “nice” of Mr. Nicely to spare me a possible one-way trip to Vietnam. But it wasn’t nice for the other kids who’d been drafted during that two-to-three-year period after I had turned eighteen. Although I have no proof, I’ve always thought that certain groups, especially blacks, were targeted by the Selective Service Commission. Perhaps just another conspiracy theory, but the fact is, I should have been drafted, and my name could have easily appeared on one of the panels of the Memorial. 

I was thinking about all this on an overcast, cool, March day in 1997 when my wife and I made our way to the Memorial.  I was about to break into my usual diatribe about the stupidity of the monument when the sight of the two walls of polished granite meeting at a 125-degree angle in the shape of an inverted V stopped me in my tracks. An overwhelming sense of dread came over me—my legs suddenly heavy as I trudged forward, everything but the wall seeming to disappear around me. I plodded on, trying not to step on memorabilia that people had left behind that day: flowers, a few medals, a can of beer, even an old toy truck. On the ground in front of a 1968 panel and eating from a can of beans was a full-bearded guy in dirty tan shorts and beat-up work boots. He wore an old Army jacket and had an American flag bandanna that kept his long greasy locks in place. There was also an old woman in a wheelchair staring blankly at one of the 1967 panels. But I had come for the panels of 1969, and it was taking too long to get there, the accumulation of names, starting on the first panel of 1956, beginning to take its toll.

Finally, I reached the 1969 panels. There were so many names you could spend half the day tracing them. I had always thought that etching the names of fallen soldiers on an impersonal black wall objectified and diminished those soldiers, so I was surprised by what followed. As I read the names it was impossible not to imagine what each soldier looked like, where they came from, and what the circumstances of their deaths were. I was proud of these guys, but also angry because by 1997 I knew how we had ended up in Vietnam, and how pointless that war had been. But most of all, I felt guilt, as if I had betrayed every one of them by not enlisting. I wanted to touch their names, run my finger slowly down the curves and spines of letters as if they were ancient runes. But I couldn’t.  That was cowardly, I know, but, in fairness, this was my first visit, so all I could do was go to one knee and sob, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop.  

It felt good.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss It is also now available in book form from BlazeVOX [Books] at Observations

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Enjoy this short video/comments on The Odyssey. Excuse my infrequent short coughs, which I blame on jogging this morning in this Canadian forest fire air. Oh, those Canadians! I think it’s time for all able-bodied men to inject their testosterone, wash down some speed with Red Bull, and kick some ass—after which we annex them. What times we live in! Or, as the Romans said, O tempora, O mores!

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“Our modern Empire of Desire manufactures endless appetite while simultaneously denying that anything is objectively good, beautiful, or desirable. The result is not great yearning or passion, but acedia or sloth, a pervasive ‘noonday demon.’”
― R.J. Snell, from Acedia and its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire.

                                                   The Heebie-Jeebies

   It’s early morning when it arrives. 
   Uninvited, as usual. 
   So why so surprised? 
   Why up so fast like a tripped mousetrap? 
   And what’s that thunder between his ears that others call thought? 
   I remember the first time, like finding myself in a huge walk-in clinic where everyone was wearing black leather masks. 
   I was never the same again, though I won’t tell him that. 
   Better to pass on the optimism of a young Buddha than this crummy gene. 
   No reason to hold out one’s arms and pretend to be a crucifix, or act like you’re stuck in an all-night bar with your legs chained to a barstool. 
   When I was his age, my mother said, “Speak to God. He’s always listening.” 
   But I left that heavy lifting to her. 
   Because sometimes you need help to yank up the rope ladder behind you. 
   That’s what I tell him as I read aloud from the third chapter of My Old-Guy’s Guide to Falling Apart, appropriately called, “How to Ward off Anxiety.” 
   Mostly useless advice, yet it gives us something to do while killing what’s left of darkness, hoping we might stumble upon the right spell. 

Not exactly the happiest quotation or poem, and yet, in America, I think we are living in a moment characterized by what the ancients called acedia.

A decent site called Science Insights describes it quite well:

Acedia is a state of deep spiritual and emotional listlessness, a weariness of the soul that combines restlessness, boredom, and an inability to care about things you know matter to you. The word has no clean equivalent in any modern language. It sits somewhere between depression, apathy, and existential fatigue, yet it isn’t quite any of those things. First described by desert monks in the fourth century, acedia has resurfaced in modern conversations as people search for language to describe a particular kind of inner paralysis that clinical terms don’t fully capture.

I don’t know about you, but, because of what I daily witness in the news and on the streets, this description scares the hell out of me. The current American brand of acedia has taken a long time to crystallize, though, recently, it’s been been exacerbated by social media and politics. We are beat to shit by one negative stimulus after another until we’re so worn out that we give up, caught somewhere between anxiety and depression, or maybe experiencing both at the same time.

Obviously, this is the whole modus operandi of the current administration. It’s as if we’re a whole country strapped to cheap, metal folding chairs, our heads duct-taped backwards, staring into the void of a white ceiling, while someone periodically releases a drop of water onto our foreheads. At first, the drops fall harmlessly every minute or so, but then, bored, the Grand Diabolical Perpetrator of this experiment speeds up the process, hoping we will become maddened by or immune to the horror of it all—both desirable states for authoritarians if you want your subjects to become complacent and look for a false prophet to save them.

The solution to all of this can be found in Scienceinsights.org’s summary of Thomas Aquinas’s description of acedia.

Thomas Aquinas’s argues that acedia is not simply laziness, though it can look that way from the outside. At its core, it is a turning away from something good that you know is good. Aquinas defined it as sadness in the face of spiritual good. He went further, describing it as “dislike, horror, and detestation” directed at goodness itself. In his framework, acedia is not sadness about God’s absence but sadness about the good that is already present in your life. You have something worth caring about and you recoil from it anyway.

Humor is one way out of this acedia.

And so, allow this glass-quarter-full Irish Catholic to leave you with a poem I may have posted before—one meant to give you hope and make you laugh. It’s appropriately called “Happy”:

“Happy”

“Happy”

Gentle Reader, 
   In spite of persistent rumors, let me assure you that I am happy. 
   Happy as the Brazilian beauty in a red thong cavorting half-naked on the Travel Channel. Happy as the local loony screaming at the same tree every morning, convinced it’s an enemy from a past life. 
   I’m happy I can say, “Don’t go away I’ve got the baddest poem right here in my back pocket,” and no one thinks I’m nuts. 
   Happy for artificial putting greens, yellow buses that swallow up children yet no one gets hurt. 
   Happy for tuna fish and the piano player at Nordstrom who asked me to sing along. Crusty sand dunes, orchids, a solitary grayish cloud frozen in the sky—I’m happy for 
them. 
   Happy for the rust-colored bottom of a rap diva, for the ant-sized beauty mark on my wife’s bum. 
   Happy a sixty-six-year-old man can dance and play air guitar in his boxer shorts while his teenage son laughs himself silly. 
   Even happy for Plan A, though I’ll never understand it, and for the chance—no, pleasure—to spend a few idle moments inside this here ellipsis … 

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of nonfiction is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Humanist I’m Old, Not Dead

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss

If you remember, a few years ago, I gave away a book of prose poems/fragments, Observations from the Edge of the Abyss. For a number of reasons, I think it’s my best book of prose poetry and will probably be my last. I will always write and champion my favorite genre, but my future prose poems will be part of a satiric hybrid series of short prose genres that I’m calling “Dispatches from Terra Incognita,” which will follow a first-person narrator navigating a post-post-modern intellectual, social, and political landscape barely recognizable to him. (See example at Dispatches1

So why would I give away my last book? I could say I wanted to shoot the poetry world the finger by doing something subversive, but my reason was simpler than that. I’ve always known that poets rarely buy each other’s books, and when when gifted those books, they often resell them at used bookstores, using the chump change to buy a unpronounceable Starbuck’s drinks. In short, I wanted this book to be READ, and I convinced myself the way to do that was to offer it for free. I didn’t want it to be, like so many books of poetry, a vanity project to assuage my ego.

So I had a friend design the book and asked Providence College to make it accessible on my faculty site Observations. I must admit that even I have been surprised that it’s been downloaded 1140 times so far, which for a book of poems is close to a bestseller.

So I decided to try another experiment and see if a press would publish it as a book, even if I insisted on continuing to offer it for free. Surprisingly yet again, a few publishers were intrigued by the idea, and thus, today, the book is available from BlazeVox books (publisher, Geoffrey Gatza) and on Amazon at Observationsamazon

It will be curious to see if people who have downloaded the free version will want to buy the book, thus supporting the prose poem, my lifelong work in the genre, and a small independent literary press. Geoffrey has a firm belief that readers, especially poets, will want to hold this little book in their hands. Personally, I have my doubts and have always felt that there is more publishing of poetry than the reading of it.

The print version of Observations has been slightly revised. Below is the revised introduction and some sample poems from the book.

Introduction

A couple of years ago, I edited an anthology called A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry. For submissions, I asked poets to choose one of their prose poems and write about it. In his commentary on “I was stolen by the gypsies …,” Charles Simic wrote that he never thought of the prose poems in The World Doesn’t End (a book that won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) as being “prose poems,” but that his agent insisted they had to call the book “something.” Simic eventually agreed to have “prose poems” printed on the cover. Considering Charlie’s life-long interest in the prose poem and in poets such as Max Jacob, Daniil Kharms, and Russell Edson, only to name a few, his comments have always seemed a bit disingenuous to me. That is, until I wrote Observations from the Edge of the Abyss and realized how pigeonholing anomalous works into a specific genre sometimes undermines the subversive nature of those works.

I wrote Observations during a period when unanticipated events disrupted the “life,” making it very difficult to focus for long periods on the “work.” I composed the first drafts of these poems in various local coffee shops, jotting down and juxtaposing images or phrases from my notebooks, newspapers, and magazines. Then I gave them space to breathe, hoping some narrative strategies might present themselves later.

As the pieces began to accumulate, I was simultaneously rereading some of my favorite works of short prose: Kafka’s aphorisms, Friedrich Schlegel’s and Emil Cioran’s fragments, Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces, Max Jacob’s shorter prose poems, Montaigne’s shorter essays, Nietzsche’s unpublished notebook fragments, and Pascal’s Pensées. I had no plan, instead trusting that my outside reading might bring a different kind of energy to the creative process described above.

Much to my surprise, over time and many revisions, each piece ended up being self-contained yet acquired more meaning and resonance when juxtaposed with other pieces with similar themes and preoccupations (especially my love/hate relationship with grand narratives), and this process kept repeating itself until individual sections developed, some with reappearing characters. Even the sections themselves eventually seemed to play off each other, as they continue to do today, so that, to me, upon multiple readings, Observations welcomes an inexhaustible number of interpretations—a goal that all books of poetry should strive for.

Here are the opening poems. There are three parts, three mini first-person picaresque journeys satirizing the many false grand narratives people have lived by in the past and continue to live by today.

Part 1

The mice are tearing up the walls again, in search of the Legendary Cheeseball. And me? Just a diaspora of aches and pains. Time for the scalpel. Time for the holy water and incense. A mouse’s tiny heart beats 632 times per minute, so when they get together all hell breaks loose. “An existential infestation,” is what the exterminator called it—a guy with a nose ring and two black beady eyes. We were discussing whether Jesus spoke Hebrew or Aramaic. “Beats me,” he said, “but I sure like those sandals. Bet He had perfect feet, just like in the paintings.” He was a stickler for details, this one. He’d stare endlessly into his handkerchief after blowing his nose. What did he see? One of those mysteries that kept me up all night. “I’d grow my hair long like Jesus if I could,” he said, before taking a hammer to the wall. “I’d put it in a bun.”

*****

The woman digging in the garden hoping to unearth her dead husband. Hands that talk, hands that rile people up. And tulips opening as effortlessly as a woman’s legs. All related by addition and subtraction, proving (once and for all) that reality is merely a child who will sing like a bird, if we’d only take the time to listen.

****

“Be the stubborn wrinkle left by a difficult screw.” By which he meant that true love stems from misery. All this while being felled by a toe-catching, rib-breaking tree root as he pondered the Darwinian differance between a heron and an egret. And let’s not forget the naked old man running through the woods, waving his arms as if doggy-paddling through a dense philosophical fog.

****

It was 1982, if I remember correctly, but then memory is as unreliable as my brother Billy, who was named after my mother’s gynecologist—a doctor as ill-fitted for his job as a lead singer with laryngitis and bad teeth. I was living with a woman who would wake in the middle of the night and scribble her dreams on my back with chocolate syrup, then make life decisions based on her Jungian therapist’s analyses of them. “Deer equals hatred,” he said. “Poison ivy, love.” All this happening a few years before the notorious Tongues of Fires Incident would cause our relationship to become a disaster movie with no known villains, except a Jungian symbol hunter with an American-flag bowtie and a fairly substantial bank account.

****

Every morning, at 3 a.m., I see his image beckoning me from the full-length mirror—an old dead guy who previously owned our house and lied about the leaky roof and faulty wiring. How did the house inspector miss that? Was he in on the scam too? I’m sure Milton tortured himself with similar questions while concocting his image of Satan, just as I am (possibly?) concocting the specter of this old man, who keeps asking me, unsuccessfully, to join him in the afterlife.

****

“The air tastes like dogshit,” he said. Whaaat? “My Jesus wears cowboy boots and sings old jazz standards,” she said, “and the stars are like-minded couples smooching in a Midwestern laundromat.” Whaaat? Anything goes on this damp night, the air tinged with the smell of smoke from 3000 miles away, tiny particles of dust coating the hyacinths, while the coyotes (the only ones left to save us) cough like cancer patients whose doctor (read God) is too drunk to service them.

****

I was almost in a porno movie—this long before I became woke and ceased to be the Man-I-Preferred-Not-To-Be-But-Couldn’t-Help-Myself-From-Being, except in an occasional dream, whose contents now reside in an obscure brain fold in the back of my head. The two women in question were beautiful, shapely, and sad. The guy peddling them, blond and lanky, a seedy specimen famous for stirring his martinis with large unripe bananas. Subtlety, as you can imagine, was not a virtue in those days. But that didn’t matter. I was too young to read the symbolism of it all, happy to be sitting at a bar at the other end of a country that was about to fall out of love with itself.

****

A solitary log cabin in the woods stained with moss and defaced by the sharp claws of hungry bears. This is where the Legendary Bachelor lives, and here are his spit-shined shoes, his exquisite ties, his solitary sad bed where he died as untouched as his cabin by centuries of sunshine and lust. “Kiss me on the mouth,” she said, “hard,” completely ignoring our guide as he rhapsodized about “Death’s Greatest Hits.”

****

Sometimes I overflow with something life changing but whose name is unnamable as a burned-out distant planet and probably designed to be so, because who wants to tell a mayfly it only has 24 hours to live? But what I really want to talk about is how in a past life I was a flea on the ass of Catherine the Great’s horse. I was what you might call “rough trade.” Boy, I could tell you stories, but mostly I remember the cold, and the sound of an agitated horse grinding its teeth, awaiting its inevitable humiliation.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of nonfiction is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Humanist I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF at Observations from the Edge of the Abyss or you can purchase the revised print version at ObservationsPrintCopy

[This is a revision of a piece I posted when I only had 43 subscribers, which means 500 of you have never read it. Also, after watching the president’s interview on Meet the Press, I thought it was time for humor.]

Many times I’ve heard old guys talk about the “one” that got away, that perfect person from their past, who, of course, was much more exciting than their boring spouse. So many of us old guys still believe we’ve got the looks and personality to seduce a stone when the reality of a good mirror suggests otherwise. It’s all a narrative that is every bit as duplicitous as the time you told your grandson you were at Woodstock like all the other people who have lied about being at Woodstock. And yet we old guys persist, or as my brother Kevin once said about the males in my extended family, “Vanity, Thy Name Is Johnson.”

If you recognize yourself in this description, here’s a poem, appropriately called, “The One That Got Away,” from While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems. While the Undertaker Sleeps It’s followed by a short, comic essay.

The One That Got Away

I was sixteen and had a crush on a Slovenian girl.

She’s probably dead by now or fat, though maybe she’s slim and classy and owns a Pilates studio.

Sometimes when I’m stressing a bicep at the goddam YMCA with its poor ventilation system and teenage goons, I expect to look up and see her winking at me as she punishes the hip adductor machine with deep scissor-like thrusts.

That’s how we carried on during those midnight rendezvous in a soot-covered city made famous after some poor bastard missed a field goal wide right.

If I saw her tomorrow sashaying in a pair of heart-thumping red yoga pants down the Boulevard of Old Guy Memories, I’d kneel and take her hand.

I’d kiss the pinkie I so often suckled, thinking I was being homeopathic or part of some great revolution that, like all revolutions, service only men.

“My apologies, Mademoiselle,” I’d say stupidly, pretending that the black hole between us wasn’t as vast as the distance between who I am and who I wanted to be.

Ah, yes, how often our narcissism distorts our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us.

For example: Yesterday at the fish market a woman patron announced that she put on weight “just thinking about food,” which was why she was there. She said she was going on a fish-and-broccoli diet for three weeks, and “by God, screw the mercury.” She was also convinced that such a diet would “unplug the pipes,” since she’d been struggling with constipation. She punctuated that last comment with a raucous growl as if she had just gargled with a Dixie Cup of Drano. She finished by pointing a forefinger at me and saying, with a certain admiration, “I wish I was skinny and fit like him.” “Yeah,” another voice behind me agreed, “he’s a hunk.”

A “hunk!” Wow, that would’ve been enough to make any 74-year-old guy’s head spin, except that the woman who said it, a short squat matron wearing something close to a potato sack, looked to be about a hundred-and-eighty-five. Still, it was nice to hear. Why? Because, like most aging men, I’ll take a compliment from any two-legged creature who calls herself a woman. Sometimes I even imagine I’m more attractive than I actually am. I mean, I’m in good shape. I could be a lead singer in a classic rock band, or maybe a stripper at an all-woman’s nightclub, whose first criterion for admission would be that you have to be over eighty. I can just see them sticking coupons for Metamucil down my baggy boxers, then watching as those coupons work their way down my thigh and drift harmlessly to the floor.

Over the years, I’ve witnessed this kind of silly self-absorption in others.

Just last month, my cousin, at the age of 72, started taking a boxing class, taught by a forty-year-old woman named Kathy. A “real knockout,” according to him. In fact, he often thought she was overly friendly to him. My cousin is good-looking, witty, and a good storyteller, so of course this accounted for Kathy’s interest in him and for asking very personal questions about his background, financial situation, and health. She would playfully punch and tease him, so he thought this vixen might be the one, his own private gift from God, some open-hearted nymphet who had no problems signing up for nursing duty in his dotage. “I’d even settle for a friend with benefits,” my cousin said, with just a little bit of swagger.

After a few weeks of this platonic courtship, another guy in the group told my cousin that Kathy had enquired if my cousin would feel comfortable going out for a coffee. So they met at the local Starbuck’s, while I waited patiently for the report, which came an hour later from my very despondent cousin. “She asked,” he said, his jowls quivering, “if I wanted to date her mother.”

“Well, maybe her mother’s a looker,” I said, trying to soften the blow.

“Peter, she’s 78. She’s a millionaire, but, geez, 78?”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said.

“I don’t need the money,” he said.

“Well, I do,” I said. “Did you tell Kathy you have a cousin?”

“But you’re happily married.”

“But that’s a lot of money,” I said.

And that’s how the conversation ended.

The lesson here is that my cousin never asked himself why it was perfectly normal for a forty-year-old woman to be interested in him, yet her mother, who was five years older than him, was a bit of an insult.

All I could do was to chalk his reaction up to a defect in the male chromosome passed down by some ancient hairy carnivore, a forerunner of a future Johnson homo sapiens.

Although all of this is funny, it also can be fatal if one isn’t careful.

When I was about sixty, a professor at a nearby college, an acquaintance (let’s call him Mark), who was sixty-five, had a thirty-year-old student (let’s call her Alice) become infatuated with him. I knew Alice well, because she had been in my night school class before transferring to Mark’s school. She was a brilliant troubled young redhead who often tried to confide her problems to me in my office, until I explained that, although sympathetic, I wasn’t equipped to counsel students, and I gave her the name of someone in the Counseling Center. Mark, lonely and suffering from a case of low self-esteem after being dumped by his third wife after cheating on her, took a different tack. He met Alice at a coffee shop, then for dinner, and now they were about to consummate the deal, and he wanted to discuss my feelings about his good fortune. “Isn’t it astonishing,” he said, “that someone her age and with her looks would pursue me. It looks like I still got it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “you’re irresistible, especially the receding hairline and the brown loafers you haven’t polished in twenty years.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look, man, there are two ways to look at this. First, maybe you are irresistible. You stay in shape, you say your students are fond of you, and even I find you interesting. But maybe there’s another reason for her infatuation. Maybe she’s just having a bad time right now and she’s confused. But consider this scenario: the initial glow of courtship wears off, and you find yourself barricaded in your office while a beautiful and very angry redhead prowls the corridor, periodically pounding on the door and screaming, ‘Open up, you asshole. You think you can treat me like garbage because you were my professor.’ And, dude, she isn’t going away. She plans to recreate this drama daily until she brings the house down, the ‘house’ being you. And quite frankly, dude, you will deserve it.”

I don’t mean to be hard on Mark (I’ll leave that to his ex-wives), but the older I get, the easier it becomes to understand why the female praying mantis and black widow spider tend to kill and eat males before, during, and after mating. What an apt trifecta to perform on a gender whose self-esteem is so easily bolstered and destroyed.

Which brings me to cargo shorts. Let’s agree to lose them, Gents, especially the ones with accordion folds on the front pockets. Or at least, wash them twice a year. Or throw them out when you can’t get the ketchup stains out, or when the fold that covers the zipper won’t do its job without ironing it fifteen times after soaking it with Spray and Starch. As far as the shin-length cargo shorts/pants/clam diggers go, well, just look at a few family photos if you ever want to wear them again. If this doesn’t convince you, Google Jonah Hill’s famous words from Superbad about cargo shorts, which I would love to repeat but I made the decision a long time ago to make this a PG-13 site.

So let it be written.

So let it be done.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of nonfiction is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Humanist I’m Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss

This post is part of a series which gives excerpts from an anthology I edited called A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry. A Cast-Iron Aeroplan That Can Actually Fly

In this anthology I asked 80 masters of the prose poem to choose one of their own poems and to write a commentary about the process of writing it. Not only are these prose poems and commentaries interesting in themselves, but they prove that there really is no one way to write a poem, or anything else for that matter. They also are wonderfully insightful mini essays on prose poetry, which is why the anthology has been used in classrooms. Students, and poets in general, are always interested in overhearing a conversation on how other poets compose.

What to say about Mary Koncel?

She was writing prose poems before it was cool, and she’s was one of few poets to be taught by Russell Edson when he was filling in for James Tate at the University of Massachusetts.

What I have always admired about Mary is her ability to transform the mundane into something mythic and to make the mythic seem commonplace, so that reality and fantasy are often indistinguishable.

Please enjoy her poem and commentary on it. Mary’s most recent book is The Last Blonde The Last Blonde

***************

AFTER THE WEATHER

Yesterday a man was sucked out of an airplane over the blue-tipped mountains of Bolivia. He didn’t cry “emergency.” He didn’t buzz the stewardess. He just dropped his fork, opened his mouth, and let the wind gather him inch by inch.

The other passengers agreed. This was real life, better than the movie or chicken salad. They leaned out of their seats, envying the man, arms and legs spread like a sheet, discovering raw air and the breath of migrating angels.

Below an old peasant woman beat her tortilla. She never dreamed that above her a man was losing his heart. Perhaps she was a barren woman, and when he landed, she’d say, “Yes, this is my son, a little old and a little late, but still my son.”

And the man, he thought of wind and flocks of severed wings, then closed his eyes and arched himself again. He didn’t understand. His head began to ache. He understood Buicks, red hair, the smell of day old beer. But not these clouds, this new, white sunlight, or the fate of a man from Sandusky, Ohio.

COMMENTARY

I wrote “After the Weather” a fairly long time ago. I had fallen asleep on the couch during the 11:00 news but woke up just after the weather report—hence the title of the poem—to a story about a man being sucked out of an airplane. Still in that semi-conscious sleep state, I sat up, trying to listen for more details that weren’t forthcoming. Instead a beleaguered fender for a body shop commercial danced across the TV screen, and exhausted, I dozed back to sleep.

The next day I was hooked. Who was the man? Where was the airplane headed? Did he float like a leaf or drop like a can of tomato juice? I searched the newspapers looking for the story, found nothing, then began to wonder if, perhaps, I hadn’t really heard the story but instead dreamt it, imposing dream on reality. Either way, so what! Such inviting ingredients for a prose poem—no beginning, no end, just the image of the man and all the possibilities.

“After the Weather” has modest ambitions—it doesn’t take on a whole event but instead tries to capture the essence of it—in this case, the last moment or two in this poor man’s life. For me, the tight contained box of the prose poem invites such focus. But what I find challenging about this form is how much I can fit into that box, how wide can I expand the lens, how I can rearrange and reconstruct the details. The prose poem encourages me to play, to surprise myself, to be impulsive and have fun. So even if the poem is intent on the man’s final moments, it opens up to include not just him but the major characters around him.

Looking back, I think this poem works off some quiet tensions. First, its structure. On the one hand, it moves quickly from the man to the other passengers to the old peasant woman then back to the man. On the other hand, it was important to suspend the moment, to explore both the horror and the humor of this man’s predicament. (How sad it would be if he just tumbles down to earth—The End!) So while the shifts from stanza to stanza provide momentum to the narrative, I also think they help to slow it down, to hold the man and the reader so that both can linger just a second or two longer.

Language, too, contributes to this tension. Yes, a man being sucked out of an airplane is not a lucky man—the inevitable is, of course, a dead man. Yet to soften the inevitable and, again, to suspend the moment, I wanted a mix of lines—short, direct reportage and longer, more luxurious ones—a juxtaposition that helps create the music which I think is so essential to the prose poem. Take the second stanza. The opening is reasonably straight-forward. But then comes, “They leaned out of their seats, envying the man, arms and legs spread like a sheet, discovering raw air and the breath of migrating angels.” There’s something pretty being said, almost as good as the lyrics from a John Denver song. Finally, that bit of dialogue—something I love to include in my prose poems because it so often has such natural cadence. In this poem, the four syllable units as well as the repetition of “son” and “little” provide this music. At the same time, the old woman’s words are both humorous and tender, giving life to the man at a point in the narrative when he should be meeting his end.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of nonfiction is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Humanist I'm Old, Not Dead

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss

It’s always interesting to reread one of your books after it’s published, trying to figure out why you especially like certain pieces, while friends fancy others. What follows is my favorite flash fiction from my new book of seriocomic, hybrid essays, titled, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet ($6.99 on Kindle; free if you have Kindle Unlimited; and $22 in paperback) I'm Old, Not Dead Although short essays make up most of the book, each of the first five “Parts” ends with a flash fiction.

I haven’t monetized this site for three years, so please support the troops. Believe it or not, we writers work hard at trying to make a living—or at least most of us do.

Whatever, I am very fond of the main character in this story, and truly hope he is doing well now, because, of course, all the characters we writers create do not die after a story is finished. In fact, I can hear one now in the table next to me, third-degreeing his girlfriend about the first time she had sex. He was an asshole when I first wrote the story ten years ago, and obviously has not evolved. Perhaps a sequel is necessary . . .

Judgment Day

Footprints in snow the size of a Hummer. God prowling the premises again, unable to let the virus work its slow magic and shepherd me to a pillowed place less humiliating than this one. Or maybe Mister Nosy is peeking into my upstairs window, hoping to catch me crying again. They say He’s all-knowing, but even He can ’t imagine the nutty images occupying my mind: refrigerated trucks filled with corpses; friends hooked up to ventilators, zombiefied by a particularly suspect virus. And then there’s the unmasked oaf at Home Depot who threw an old guy onto the floor before scurrying away on his Harley. He wanted two of everything, he said, convinced the next Biblical flood was on its way, that the vaccine would make his penis fall off. As for me, I’m not that easily translatable. Just ask the American Spirit doll bellowing in the spare room—a favorite of the daughter I never had. Instead, two sons still carrying the Cross of Confusion their great-grandfather brought all the way from Ireland.

Conspiracy Theories

Owen had been up most of the night distracting himself with any crazy thing he could find on TV. The crazier the better because he desperately needed to be distracted. His daughter Maura had begged him to stay with her, but he couldn’t stomach her husband, whose name was Quentin. He was a buffoon with a headful of conspiracy theories he couldn’t keep to himself, constantly amazed at the diabolical possibilities of an unsteady universe. Killer hornets genetically engineered by East Coast intellectuals. Bullets made in Tijuana by Muslims that exploded in your face. Alien mind control labs hidden in caves behind George Washington’s eyes at Mt. Rushmore. Add to this an upper body scarred with tattoos with no recognizable theme or pattern. It was the tattoos’ lack of design and imagination that disturbed Owen more than the tattoos themselves. Skulls, crossbones, dragons, a rose with barbed wire circling it, the names of three washed-up acid rock groups. The “same old, same old,” Owen thought, when he first had spied them—an expression that no doubt would end up on Quentin’s flat granite tombstone after he perished in some ignominious manner.

“We cultivated a rose,” Owen said to his wife when their daughter had moved in with Quentin. “We planted it, gave it room to bask in the sun and flourish as nature saw fit, only to have it severed in the middle of the night by a moronic, ink-stained burglar.” “Don’t worry,” his wife had said, “he’ll eventually disappear like a particularly bad cold. Maura’s too smart to stay with him.” Then she laughed, and kissed him on the forehead, adding, “But you really outdid yourself with the rose metaphor. Some real poetry there.”

She could be like that, playful yet sensible at the same time. He loved her for those traits, and for her stylishness, and for how, unlike his first wife, she was incapable of infidelity. Maybe she was upstairs right now, pulling down the shades, waiting for him with a glass of red wine on the bed stand, halfway through Wuthering Heights. That’s how she’d been spending her first few months of retirement—rereading nineteenth century novels.

Was it he who had brought the virus into the house? Their daughter? The refrigerator repair guy? Or had it clung, sinisterly, to a bottle of honey or a pickle jar brought in from the grocery store. Someone or something needed to be blamed.

Around three a.m. a program on snake charmers came on. It was, preposterously, a twelve-part series, as if snake charmers were as common as cab drivers or cops. This segment was about an Appalachian evangelist named Father Timothy, who died after being repeatedly bitten by three different snakes. Owen was being invited to watch the attack. He realized of course the stupidity of lying on the couch at 3 a.m., watching a man of God being pierced multiple times by snakes, but there was something intriguing about it that kept his attention. Was it the crazed people around the evangelist, gyrating and howling to banjo music as two unruly-haired obese women in what looked like nightgowns called upon the Lord Jesus Christ to raise up the chosen and to smite all sinners who had forsaken their divine birthrights? Or was it because Father Timothy looked somewhat like Quentin—heavily tattooed, with a fat sweaty face and a head shaved to the bone.

Father Timothy was chanting. He was leaping about like a leprechaun, sometimes breaking from his unholy hymns to talk in tongues, his way of priming his followers for a climax where he snatched three snakes from a cardboard box and began to whirl around the room. Sometimes he would pause, appearing to kiss their triangular heads. Or maybe he was taunting them.

Were the snakes messengers from God or the Devil? Owen didn’t know. He’d never been religious, but his common sense suggested these snakes were not inspired by Father Timothy’s shenanigans.

Owen focused more intently on the scene. It was as if he, too, were now in this log cabin waiting expectantly for some kind of celestial sign, which, like everyone else, he received when the snakes began to strike, their fangs drawing blood from Father Timothy’s cheeks. Owen had to give Father Timothy credit. The pastor never stopped chanting until he collapsed onto the floor, his eyes bulging with ecstasy and surprise. The camera shifted to the obese women, who were shrieking, until a worried, deep masculine voice—not the Lord God’s but instead a voice-over—explained that, after the attack, Father Timothy had been rushed to the hospital where he died a few hours later.

“Big surprise,” Owen said, which, for some reason, made him laugh. It wasn’t that he didn’t sympathize with Father Timothy. He was just angry at all the fools and conmen, the politicians and fake men of God, who were going to wake up tomorrow and go stupidly about their business, responsible for spreading lies and disease like big fat rats.

Why couldn’t one of them have died instead of her, he thought, because, in fact, his wife wasn’t waiting upstairs for him, ready to greet him with her mischievous, throaty laugh Tonight, all he had was her favorite red sweater, which he had draped over his knees. If there was an afterlife, what would she say to a fool like Father Timothy if she ran into him at a celestial cookout? “Got any snake oil?”

For the last two nights, Owen had been having bizarre thoughts like that. He shook his head, thinking he might wipe it clean of nonsense, but the crazy thoughts and imagery kept coming: one of Quentin wearing a miner’s cap while exploring alien caves tucked behind George Washington’s eyes; another of him opening a cigar box of Muslim bullets from Tijuana, which would then explode in his face.

He grasped his wife’s sweater to his chest. He had to go to bed eventually. He knew that. But, first, he wanted to finish his program. The next episode was about a defrocked priest who was going to charm an enormous rattle snake, which he swore was sexual predator from a previous life. The camera eye opened to a simple white church in Maine, then panned over a surprisingly large crowd just aching to go inside.

Owen hesitated, then took his place in line.

He was ready for almost anything.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of nonfiction is I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Humanist I’m Old, Not Dead

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss

                                         .l“The Worst Love Poem Ever Written”

I come to you like a coyote with one leg, wound tighter than Lady Gaga’s thong, while in the sky a hot-air balloon hisses, "The language of love is the language of love."
     And if I say, “Meet me at the golf simulator on Deck 13,” don’t affect ignorance, though love is like that, as I, like a rubber-soled elephant trainer, weep to see the dinghy of your love disappear. 
     Where? 
     Behind that cloud, that wave. 
     An argument would help, or a blind date with oneself. 
     Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Will you stop, Dave? I’m afraid. 
     That movie was great and always makes me think of you, which raises the question: “Who sunk the male boat?” 
     Yes, I said that, in spite of the condom stuck to the floor like a deflated raft. 
     In spite of our labial exercises, mostly arriving during sleep, like a posse of reporters awaiting a drive-by beheading. 
    Bestir! my love-brain cools in the wine cellar of your tornadic frown. 
    I’m talking about Valentine’s Day when you gave me morning glories that overtook the house. 
    You said you had a craving for glassware, for ebony canes, and flat screen TVs, while the frigid lovebirds sang all day in falsetto. 
    In return, I gave you the square root of possibility and a noun which could save the world if only I knew how to pronounce it. 
    A word that would replace the one called Love. 
    Love: an old man with a broken wrist, his white beard glimmering in the moonlight. 
    Oh, yeah.

In Charles Simic’s last interview with poet Chard deNiord, which was cut short by Charlie’s death, he spoke about poetry, specifically prose poetry, as “entertainment.”

INTERVIEWER (Chard deNiord)

You won the Pulitzer Prize for your book of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End. In an essay on the prose poem you wrote, “They look like prose and act like poems because, despite the odds, they make themselves into fly-traps for our imagination.”

SIMIC

Memory, too.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you stop writing prose poems?

SIMIC

Prose poetry was just something I tried. I always knew it couldn’t go on forever. I wanted to write something that was very entertaining. I think all of us prose poets—Russell Edson, James Tate, Peter Johnson—we all love to entertain the reader and to proceed without any knowledge of how it’s going to end. You start something and surprise, surprise, surprise.

INTERVIEWER

Was there something about prose as opposed to verse poetry that made that easier for you?

SIMIC

Lying, inventing things. That always attracted me. I like, for example, Emily Dickinson and other poets who were really just wonderful liars. Who knew how to make up something delicious.

I was, of course, pleased that Charlie included me in a small group of poets who were my literary heroes, but I was more intrigued about his comment about poets as entertainers. In my “The Worst Poem Ever Written,” the entertainment element is obvious because it’s a comic poem, and it actually mirrors what Charlie said about poetic composition. I created a lovelorn narrator who was improvising as he went along, making up lies, inventing wild metaphors and similes, and yet this prose poem, in a sense, is “serious,” because the narrator is working so hard to woo his lover with playful language—language that seduces both his beloved and the reader.

But I would argue that even a poem about death can be “entertaining” if we look at the broadest meaning of the word, “entertain.” In terms of its etymology, we discover “entertain” is from the 15th century French "to keep up, maintain, to keep (someone) in a certain frame of mind," from Old French entretenir "hold together, stick together, support" (12c.), from entre- "among" (from Latin inter; see inter-) + tenir "to hold" (from Latin tenere, from PIE root *ten- "to stretch").

The first meaning suggests the importance of the connection between the reader and author of any poem, and reminds us of D.H. Lawrence’s description of poetry as “an act of attention.” The secondary and tertiary meanings of “entertain” can also metaphorically be applied to writer/ reader dynamics.

And if we poets can manage this difficult balancing act, we just may make ourselves and readers see the world with new eyes, which, to me, is one of the purposes of poetry.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems in paperback ($24) and hardcover ($30). In the Kindle Store, it’s free on Kindle Limited, or, surprisingly, only $5 if you don’t have Kindle Limited KindleUndertaker (Publisher, MadHat Press).

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss

My new book of hybrid essays, I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet, has just been published by BlazeVOX books. A few of the essays and flash fictions have first appeared on this site, but most are new, along with a 30-page entertaining hybrid memoir on how working in the steel plants formed me as a writer. If you’re wondering what all this “hybrid” stuff means, read the below preface and the press release, the latter which mentions parts of the blurbs.

The book itself can be found at I'm Old, Not Dead

For the last three years, I have offered ALL my posts on this site for free, so I would appreciate you thinking about purchasing the book to support my work and Indie presses everywhere. Also, this book, my 20th, means a lot to me, because it represents my lifelong preoccupations and obsessions, both thematically and stylistically. The paperback is $22; the Kindle version is $6.99; and if you have Kindle Unlimited, it is, of course, free.

Again, it’s at I'm Old, Not Dead

“Preface”

If at first glance, the title I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet seems playfully antagonistic, that’s because I mean it to be. In a way, this whole book is my response to a thirty-something editor who, three years ago, rejected one of my novels without reading it, writing that her agency would wonder, in her words, “how many books you have left in you.” As dismissive as that comment was, I appreciated its brutal frankness. Even I had to laugh as I pointed out to her that “1) I’m old, not dead; 2) unlike UFC boxers, writers become better as they age; 3) I’m still surfing [could she do that?]; and 4) I think what you just said is illegal.”

But although it would be inaccurate to call I’m Old, Not Dead a “last book,” especially since I have a new collection of prose poems and a collaboration with an artist forthcoming, it is what you might call a “final reckoning,” in the same way that Of All That Ends by Gunter Grass and Roadside Dog by Czeslaw Milosz fit into that category. Both these collections involve aging writers examining their life-long thematic and stylistic obsessions and preoccupations. Also, like the above two books, mine is an omnibus of genres—a hybrid, combining memoir, essays, prose poetry, and short fiction—frequently, all in one essay.

But, as I delineate in the first essay of this collection, “The Care and Nurturing of One’s Masks,” the main difference between my “I” and those of Grass and Milosz, is that mine is a verbal construct, sometimes the real Peter Johnson, sometimes similar to the real Peter Johnson, and sometimes a complete fabrication used for comic effect. In this sense, my “I” often resembles the cynical and estranged “I’s” in Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country and Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

But the genesis of I’m Old, Not Dead is a bit more complicated than the above suggests.

In Greek mythology, if you remember the three Fates, Clotho spins the cloth of your life, Lachesis measures its length, and Atropos makes the final snip. After recently losing two members of my immediate family, having another one almost succumb to a fentanyl overdose, attending the funerals of two close friends, and living daily with the symptoms of a rare, progressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma, I now live with an odd anxiety that is, paradoxically, both troubling and exhilarating. It’s a kind of weird urgency that tends to peak on my obligatory early morning trips to the bathroom. That’s when I meet up with an aging Atropos. She’s standing by the bedroom window, silhouetted by the moon, smiling and waiting patiently as she sharpens her shears. She’s not angry or sad; she’s just doing what comes naturally.

What better way to manage this troubling apparition than to distract myself by writing book like I’m Old, Not Dead. Think of this collection as dispatches sent from the encampment of an aging humanist, who is baffled by, not to mention pissed off at, the unrecognizable intellectually and spiritually challenged world he’s living in—a world of conspiracy theorists and conmen, a world where the grand narratives he’s embraced and playfully satirized over a lifetime are beginning to vanish faster than the working-class values he grew up with, a world where even his beloved “Literature” seems threatened by “Influencers” and incessant self-promotion. All this disenchantment sounds dismal, but, in fact, it’s the natural response most introspective people have while living through an era when, to use Yeats’s words, “The best lack all conviction / While the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

The big decision is whether to ignore this collective failure of nerve, or to butt heads with it. I’ve decided to do the latter, and to do so with a sense of humor. It’s a cliché that literature can save oneself, but, in my case, the maxim has always held true, and I’m assuming the same goes for you.

* * * *

Press Release

BlazeVOX [books] Announces the Publication of I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet by Peter Johnson

Buffalo, NY, BlazeVOX [books] is proud to announce the publication of I’m Old, Not Dead: Dispatches from the Desk of an Aging Poet, a new collection of hybrid essays by acclaimed prose poet, fiction writer, and essayist Peter Johnson.

A singular voice in contemporary literature, Johnson has long been celebrated for his wit, formal inventiveness, and profound emotional range. In this latest work, he delivers a genre-defying collection that blends memoir, prose poetry, flash fiction, and cultural critique into what can only be described as a seriocomic reckoning with aging, art, and the bewildering realities of modern life.

Framed as “dispatches from the encampment of an aging humanist,” I’m Old, Not Dead confronts a world increasingly shaped by disinformation, vanishing cultural narratives, and the erosion of shared values. Yet even amid disillusionment, Johnson’s work remains animated by humor, compassion, and an enduring belief in literature as a vital force for understanding and survival.

As Johnson writes in the book’s preface: “Think of this collection as dispatches… from a world… where even ‘Literature’ seems threatened by ‘influencers’ and incessant self-promotion.” What emerges is not resignation, but a fierce, comic resilience, a commitment to confronting chaos with intelligence, irony, and heart.

The essays in I’m Old, Not Dead move fluidly between the autobiographical and the invented, guided by Johnson’s signature use of the shifting “I”, a literary mask that allows him to explore grief, memory, absurdity, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. Whether recounting personal loss, interrogating generational myths, or satirizing cultural anxieties, Johnson transforms the ordinary into moments of startling clarity and revelation.

Early praise for the book highlights its emotional depth and stylistic brilliance:

Nick Flynn calls Johnson “a playful visionary” who “creates the world anew,” while Nin Andrews describes the collection as “a profound book of seriocomic musings… marked by unmistakable clarity, tenderness, and insight.” Luke Russert notes Johnson’s “sharp wit” and “empathetic heart,” and Syd Lea emphasizes the work’s genre-bending brilliance, where “the recognizable and the uncategorizable… are in constant argument.” Tom Fontana, the three-time Emmy Award Winner, spotlights Johnson’s work as, “masterful.”

Peter Johnson is the author of numerous books of prose poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and the founding editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, a groundbreaking publication that helped spark a renaissance of the prose poem in the 1990s. His work has earned widespread recognition for its innovation and influence.

With I’m Old, Not Dead, Johnson offers readers a book that is at once intimate and expansive, irreverent and deeply humane, a late-career work that refuses quiet closure in favor of continued questioning, laughter, and engagement with the world.

Subscribe now

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems in paperback ($24) and hardcover ($30). In the Kindle Store, it’s free on Kindle Limited, or, surprisingly, only $5 if you don’t have Kindle Limited KindleUndertaker (Publisher, MadHat Press).

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss

“Tautology as Political Metaphor”

“Never use ‘you’ in a poem,” the professor said. “Never address the reader.” But how can you avoid “you” at this point in our inglorious human history when gold medals of valor no longer exist because rich guys have horded the damn stuff, or when nitwits wear Covid-busting laser helmets in an attempt to stay immune. Shouldn’t someone speak up? “Although it snows in Alaska / There’s gold in Alaska.” That’s Johnny Cash versifying in his Collected Poems. I was paging through the book while sitting in an auditorium peopled by anxious, masked undergraduates. Some were texting with their hands in their laps, looking as if they were playing with themselves; others were swearing allegiance to the flag, mesmerized by angry shades of red on a blackboard map. Then I heard wailing from an unhinged coed just outside the classroom door. “But I love him,” she said, referring to the professor, who was doing his best to ignore her. “Don’t ever address the reader,” he repeated. “Ever”—this followed by an unexplained trembling of desks, and the reasonable assumption that anything the professor would say afterwards would be a lie.

[The above poem is from my most recent book of prose poems, While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems in paperback ($24) and hardcover ($30). In the Kindle Store, it’s free on Kindle Limited, or, surprisingly, only $5 if you don’t have Kindle Limited KindleUndertaker (Publisher, MadHat Press).]

I’m sure that everyone has encountered a teacher like the one in “Tautology as Political Metaphor.” You know, the professor who thinks he has mainline to the TRUTH.

Concerning this Truth I once wrote:

People can’t accept that life is messy. And who can blame them? In a messy universe, your Truth can’t always be the “right” Truth, because acceptance of messiness means that other people have Truths, too. Which would mean that Real Life, which is of course messy, would involve everyone bringing their respective Truths to the table and, through mutual cooperation and respect, discovering a “truer” and more authentic Truth.

Unfortunately, this takes time, and there is so much to do: bingeing Netflix series, for example, trying out a new unpronounceable coffee drink.

In a similar vein, the poet Charles Simic writes of people’s love of Absolute Truth as follows: “First you simplify whatever is complex, you reduce reality to a single concept, and then you start a church of some kind. What surprises me endlessly is how every new absolutism, every one-sided world view is instantly attractive to seemingly so many intelligent people.”

Which brings me to certain professor I had in graduate school for my Yeats’s seminar.

I liked this guy. He was a brilliant professor and also seemed kind. He was in his late sixties and still of the generation who wore a sportscoat and tie to class. But he wasn’t stuffy, and, unlike others of his ilk, he seemed open to being challenged in class.

Or so it seemed.

So imagine my glee when, on our final exam, we had three topics/questions to choose from, one being: “Trace the tree as symbol in Yeats’s poetry.”

Wow, did that excite me. I knew Yeats’s well. Even Yeats would have been impressed with how deeply I had internalized his poetry. More important, I immediately realized I had an ingenious way to approach this topic—a way no one else but me would have been smart enough to arrive at.

Or so I believed.

Ha!, professor, I thought. You gave me a trick question, for of course it was impossible to definitively trace the symbol of the tree in a poet’s work, just as it would have been impossible to decode the dream symbol of one patient in one specific dream, and then apply that analysis to all other patients or to ALL of the other dreams of that patient. I mean, a door that symbolizes closure in your dream might signify an opening in mine. Likewise, an analysis of the tree in one Yeats’s poem could not then be applied to the trees in ALL of Yeats’s poetry. The best one could do was to trace its many manifestations, and by doing so, an astute reader (like myself of course) might look at Yeats’s work in a whole new way.

I nearly quivered with excitement when I opened my bluebook and dove into my theory, knowing my professor, a true Yeats’s scholar, would never look the same way at Yeats’s poetry again.

So imagine my surprise/hurt/anger when my professor handed back my graded bluebook, and it had a big C+ on the cover. I knew that getting a C+ in graduate school was like having your wife, after ten years of marriage, tell you that you are a good husband but that she can’t get past your small penis or the smell of you when you sweat.

But even worse than the C+ was what I saw in big red red letters and in perfect penmanship when I opened to the inside of cover of bluebook:

THIS IS NOT TRUE

Nothing about my argument. No comments in the margins. Just:

THIS IS NOT TRUE

There is much I could say about this experience, but allow me to leave you with a quotation from Kafka, which hints at the elusiveness and complexity of truth, and if you happen to be a teacher of literature and can’t live with Kafka’s kind of uncertainty, then go teach mathematics instead of the poetry of Yeats:

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.—Franz Kafka

What a dude!

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems in paperback ($24) and hardcover ($30). In the Kindle Store, it’s free on Kindle Limited, or, surprisingly, only $5 if you don’t have Kindle Limited KindleUndertaker (Publisher, MadHat Press).

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss