VOLCANIC RESENTMENT
Ithink Denis Johnson wrote with two oppositional impulses. First, he seems to believe the world is corrupted by human fallaciousness — by dishonesty and avarice. Second, he also seems to think the world just may be imbued with some kind of animating light, and that the world is a place into which we can pioneer ourselves for risky adventure, pursuing love or other dangers. But I think that, in his mind, such adventuring will not provide anything but escape from the present moment. We’re not struck by any lasting divine light, though it may help to know it’s there.
In “You,” as in much of his other work, Johnson believes that you can’t count on anyone to remain wholly good or uncorrupted, including yourself. I like how the title of the poem can refer to a prospective partner. But is the speaker male, or female, or other? And, even before getting into the poem, one might wonder if the “you” is the reader, the speaker of the poem, or all of us. Does the poem indict us all?
“You” was published 40 years ago, and I don’t think Johnson, who was heterosexual, was ahead of his time when it came to patriarchal notions of grammatical reference, let alone gender fluidity. So I’ll speculate
quite provisionally that the speaker is a man who is in love with a woman who has spurned or hurt him.
But there is at least one alternative possibility: “You” may be a persona poem written in the voice of a woman who has been rejected by a man. If we step away from the author’s likely intent, the poem can also be understood as a persona poem spoken by a person of any gender identity.
No matter the identity, the world never improves for the speaker. There’s no light. There’s only the pain of rejection and a kind of volcanic resentment. Love deprived becomes a kind of fury. Maybe we don’t often admit to the kind of vengeance impulse that’s at the end of this poem. Does the poem carry added dramatic weight because it admits what we may not wish to?
My own take on the world is more forgiving. I think Johnson may have held an unrealistically rigid ideal about love, but I like the poem for its frank revelation and the way it gets there. Denis Johnson (1949-2017) was the author of 10 novels, six books of poetry, and the short-fiction collection Jesus’ Son (1992).
Kevin Clark teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency master of fine arts program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Clark is the poet laureate of San Luis Obispo County, California. His new book of poems, The Consecrations, is forthcoming this spring from Stephen F. Austin University Press.