New Poetry

This is a bit of literary criticism I wrote as the publisher's review for a new book of poetry.

The Anvil's Children by Jason W. Johnson is a collection of poetry which represents one of the first works of Noumenism, an ideology based on the fully artificed exploitation of what is essentially psychic automatism. Johnson's youthful brilliance is evident in this innovative book in which painterly scenes are depicted, revealing religious imagery hidden in the poet's subconscious, yet deliberately expressed as conscious metaphorical thought. It continues the esthetic of Surrealism: the surprising meaningfulness of chance occurrence, making the poetry analogically reminiscent of the visual art of Antonio Muñiz. Like Muñiz' fumage paintings, The Anvil's Children is full of images which portray the irrational, yet show a profound spirituality. The poet's search for the sacred in The Anvil's Children may reveal a reluctant Catholicism, with moments that parallel the role of woman as preternatural mediatrix in André Breton's Nadja (1928). Johnson's writing therefore shows a real understanding of the esthetics of contemporary art, with mental pictures that express the current transition in poetics from deconstructive to reconstructive postmodernism. This awareness, which is nothing less than an extraordinary sense of Jacques Derrida's plus-prèsent, takes the form of a paranoiac-critical self-portrait that operates according to a transcendental law by which visionary experiences are systematized as independently varying parameters. Close reading reveals a sophisticated intertextuality in which each part of the text is a transformation of some previous element, resulting in intensely recursive poems that bear a remarkable resemblance to serial poetry: a highly concentrated narrative remains incomplete by design. Serial poetry is a unique product of 20th-century postmodernism, but, in Johnson's hands, the genre has been revitalized. The use of automatism reveals the truth of the unconscious, and with the techniques of Noumenism, this truth is put into combinatorial, often paratactic, poetic form in which repetition plus synonymy subjects the written word to virtually infinite qualification. With The Anvil's Children, Jason W. Johnson has created something of illimitable literary relevance.

Author's Note

You can find The Anvil's Children at either Amazon or Vox Press. The image below is of me with the poet when he received his Doctorate in Victorian Literature.