A Root that Reaches Deep: Gordon Johnston on Our Brief Human History, Holding your Breath, and Practicing Resurrection

by Michelle Meredith

Gordon Johnston appears on my screen for our Zoom interview. He’s sitting on his front porch in Macon, Georgia, rather than in his office, because, he explained later, “I’m always a little worried about pontificating, or that I’ll slip into lecture mode.” With faint birdsong in the background, I ask Johnston first about the Wendell Berry quote he chose as the opening for his debut poetry collection, Scaring the Bears, released earlier this year. The quote reads: “Practice resurrection.” I want to know what that line means to him and how it informs the collection. Johnston responds by reading the poem the line is from, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” But first, Johnston speaks about Berry’s influence and talent—the first of many times in our conversation where he would sing the praises of another writer or artist when asked about his own work. 

“Wendell Berry is a great favorite of mine. He’s made a huge difference in my life of conscience, my teaching life, and in my writing life,” Johnston says. “He writes a great poem, a stellar essay, and super fiction. I don’t know anyone else who’s as good on all three fronts as Wendell Berry is.” 

As he reads the poem aloud, he leans into each line, clearly feeling the build up in the last few lines:

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

At the end, he looks up and says, “Sorry, I know that was a lot. But you hear how the whole poem leads up to that line?”

I do, especially after Johnston’s delivery.

He continues, “The word ‘practice’ means two things. It means practice what you preach; do whatever it is you think ought to be done. But it also means do it over, and over, and over, with an eye towards getting better at it. And resurrection, of course, according to Christianity, is a thing that happened once in the entire history of creation. Berry equates that kind of resurrection with the everyday waking up that we do. Getting out of bed, confronting a life, and making the most of it with the shadows and the light. So, ‘practicing resurrection’ is something I try to do in the poems.” 

Johnston’s poetry speaks volumes to this end—making the most of the everyday doing. For Johnston, both the poem itself and the act of writing the poem serve as this “practice.”

“A lot of times I start from a place that’s a little dark and uncertain, and I arrive, by working at the poem, in a place of reassurance,” he explains. “And the words kind of get me there somehow or other. It’s not me thinking myself or talking myself into that; it’s the act of writing the poem. And sometimes it’s the act of reading a poem like this one that brings that about for me.”

But, he continues, that doesn’t mean every poem arrives at a place of reassurance. He compares it to the blues: “My wife, when she was reading the manuscript, she said ‘Man you are a dark dude,’” Johnston laughs. “Sometimes the reassurance isn’t there in the poem, but I get to a place in the poem that leaves me in a reassured spot. Like how a blues singer will expiate whatever the cause of the angst or the duress is, and afterwards, you’re a lot lighter.”

Johnston was born just south of Macon, Georgia, near Warner Robins Air Force Base, a place he describes as “in the South, but not really Southern.” He moved to rural McDuffie County when he was thirteen, where he had no choice but to spend his time outdoors.

“I really found myself in fishing and hunting,” he says, although he admits he was a “half-hearted hunter.” He tells a story about camping out with a friend one night, sleeping on the ground, and waking up to find snow on their sleeping bags. His father grew vegetable plants from seed in a greenhouse and Johnston would sell these tomato, pepper, and other plants on the side of Highway 78. As the only other male family member, Johnston was responsible for gardening, too, and connected with the natural world in that way. 

But, he says, he grew up knowing that “there was a sense that the rural was the last place you wanted to be,” so he downplayed his affinity for the outdoors. It wasn’t until college that this changed, where the literature he encountered shifted his perspective.

“When I read Thoreau seriously for the first time, when one of my great professors Wilson Hall taught Thoreau and Annie Dillard and all these other really fine writers, I realized there was a kind of scholarship of the natural world. That you could be in it and be aware, and have a kind of philosophical and ethical sense of the natural. I was really motivated by that. And that same professor taught me how to whitewater canoe. So that kind of opened the whole natural environment to me in a new way. I saw in wilderness not really an escape from the academic things I was interested in or from the more domesticated and urban parts of my life; it was my destination. It became my real place after a while.”

Living in the South means being intimately familiar with the stigma of being Southern. Living in the rural South has its own set of stigmas, too. I mention how I lived in the Delta region of Mississippi for a couple of years, and how I had to become aware of perceptions and misperceptions I didn’t even realize people were holding onto about rural communities.

“Now,” I say, “I notice these perceptions everywhere.” It’s frustrating. 

“Lately,” Johnston says, “the outdoors have become an escape again, just from the sheer inexplicability of the choices that people make.” He tells me about a backpacking trip he took in the Rocky Mountains a few years ago—an experience that allowed him to find some shelter. “I was so frustrated with the political landscape,” he says. “But the natural landscape, it just goes on. And you are so small in it. And you’re going down the Flint, and you beach somewhere for lunch, and you find a scraper, probably a Muscogee scraper from who knows how long ago. And it’s just a little shaped fragment, a little tool. And you think about the continuum of human existence and how brief our history is, and the larger history of the whole landscape you’re in, and I don’t know why, but it makes me feel better. It minimizes our human scale. And that’s one of the comforts I take from it too.”

 ‘I saw in wilderness not really an escape from the academic things I was interested in or from the more domesticated and urban parts of my life; it was my destination. It became my real place after a while.’

I ask him if this is a comfort he found while working on the guidebook, Ocmulgee National Monument: A Brief History with Field Notes, as well. 

“It really is, yeah,” Johnston says. “When I moved back to Macon to teach at Mercer, one of the first things I did was go to the Ocmulgee National Monument, and I found it was exactly the same as I had remembered it. And I loved the place; I took my kids when they were growing up to the Ocmulgee Indian Celebration every September.” Johnston tells me that during a sabbatical in 2012, he spent a lot of time in the park in Macon, Georgia, where the monument is preserved, so his journal was filled with notes and poems inspired by the place. From this, an idea came about to create an updated guide book for the national monument. 

“Human beings have lived continuously in this part of the state of Georgia around the Ocmulgee River for 17,000 years. That’s the longest continuous human presence east of the Mississippi River,” he says. “So I wanted to engage the history of the Muscogee and the Mississippians who built the complex of mounds.” With historian Matthew Jennings providing the objective, historical overview, Johnston was able to use some of the more subjective, naturalist material he had been creating. “That way, we’d have a book that is a sort of imaginative response to the landscape and the human history of the Ocmulgee, and a historically correct one too.”

‘And you think about the continuum of human existence and how brief our history is, and the larger history of the whole landscape you’re in, and I don’t know why, but it makes me feel better. It minimizes our human scale. And that’s one of the comforts I take from it too.’ 

I ask him about his experience with this process when it came to writing and compiling Scaring the Bears. Johnston explains that he was motivated in part to publish this collection after the death of fellow poet and Mercer professor Anya Silver in 2018. 

“I’ve been writing poems since I arrived at Mercer in 1996,” he says. “I write on a daily basis, and often that’s poetry. So I can succeed at drafting a poem in a given morning. And a few years ago, I realized I had something like four books’ worth of poems. And I didn’t have a book.” For a while, he tried to work on sorting the poems into a book, but says he never got very far. 

“But then, Anya Silver died,” he says. “And I just had this realization that I wasn’t going to leave anything whole. I’d never been able to hand Anya my book the way she had handed me the books she had completed up until then. And Anya and I read each other’s poem drafts for a very long time. And that just motivated me to stop being so static and in the present and in the moment that I couldn’t impose a plan and an order on myself to finish the book.”

Initially, he says, he submitted a chapbook. Then he decided to approach the collection as a series of chapbooks, which worked. 

I ask him if there were any poems in particular that helped lead the shape of each section or the collection as a whole. He points to “Men’s Fashions at Forty,” and shares the opening stanzas:

On you, everything is vintage—

the new jeans, dyed in diesel oil

and the dapper shoes with soles

uncomfortably thin. All the old skins—

the freshman year flannel, lax and warm,

your father’s bachelor houndstooth coat

(borrowed, never returned), the sneakers

bought to walk your wife through labor—

wear like ironic grins. In the mirror,

you’re not retro, but has-been.

“You know, it’s this guy in his midlife, past midlife maybe, reflecting on that closet full of clothes,” Johnston says about the poem. “And it starts with his past, but then the poem goes on to the sons he has now, the funerals he’s been to lately, the fact that he’s had a vasectomy.” He shares the last two lines of the poem: 

Is not the body more than clothes? Yes.

Then why are you holding your breath?

“It took me a long time to come up with that final line about holding the breath,” he says. “Part of it was that I needed to confront the fact that I was holding my breath. Yes, I was writing every day, but I wasn’t putting the poems out there in a form that would sit on a library shelf somewhere and last. That would sit on someone’s bookshelf. That my grown kids could have. What was I going to leave? That line, ‘Why are you holding your breath?’, just kept coming back to me.”

This poem, he says, was actually the title poem of the collection. But then he found that Scaring the Bears was a better fit. 

  “You know,” I say, “I absolutely loved that poem, ‘Scaring the Bears.’ And at first I wasn’t sure if it was because—”

“Because of your experience?” he says.

“Yes!” I laugh. I’d mentioned to Johnston that I had my first bear encounter last year during a short backpacking trip in Shenandoah National Park. It’s still fresh in my mind. In Johnston’s poem, the speaker hikes down a path to a river, making noise and talking out loud in an effort to avoid unwanted bear encounters. “I had that experience of seeing a too-close bear,” I say, “and just making steady noise and saying nonsense words. And you really tied that experience of just speaking and creating sound up into those last lines: 

Meaning doesn’t matter.

It’s just sound to save his life

until after he has fished.”

Johnston tells me he wrote the poem after a fishing trip in West Virginia, where he had to climb down to the river. Sometimes the noise of the climb wasn’t enough to warn away bears, so “speech keeps the bear from mistaking you from something it might want to meet.” The poem, he says, “came out fairly whole” when he first wrote it. He also says he always thought of it as a “minor poem,” but it was also one of the first poems Johnston fired onto a clay page in master potter Roger Jamison’s wood-fired kiln in Juliette, Georgia. 

“One of the potters, Meg Campbell, really liked it and wanted that clay page,” he says. “And she traded me a nice clay vessel for the poem on the clay, and when I gave it to her she couldn’t read all of it. And she liked that, but I went ahead and wrote the poem in pencil on the back of the page, and when I did that, that last line of the poem really struck me. And I realized it wasn’t just a poem about keeping the bears off of you. It’s also about the way art, any art that you give yourself to, can save your life. It can give you a shelter. Even through a pandemic, it can give you a means of creating and composing that can get you through some pretty dark nights of the soul. And that’s what made it the center of the book.” 

Even through the everyday efforts to take care of people around you, as a teacher, a father, or a son, Johnston says, “the life you have to save in those endeavors really is your own. And somehow you’ve to keep it together. And even if you’re not in control of your life, you’re at least kind of in charge of it.”

“Yeah,” I nod. “I mean, I think that connects to the idea of practicing resurrection too—the doing and doing and doing.” 

“You know,” Johnston says, “I wasn’t thinking of that, but that’s a good connection. Somewhere I must have been thinking that subliminally.” 

 ‘And I realized it wasn’t just a poem about keeping the bears off of you. It’s also about the way art, any art that you give yourself to, can save your life. It can give you a shelter. Even through a pandemic, it can give you a means of creating and composing that can get you through some pretty dark nights of the soul. And that’s what made it the center of the book.’

Johnston became drawn to the community environment among the potters and artists at the kiln.

“Poetry is wonderful, but it is so freaking lonely,” he says. Whereas, at the kiln, “we were always working together. We split the wood together, we stacked the wood together, we stoked the kiln together, we opened the kiln together. We all had a big potluck every time the kiln cooled down and we got the stoneware out of it. It was so collaborative.”

Johnston also found he enjoyed the unpredictable nature of scribing poems into wood-fired clay. “Often, in the early going, the poems would be obliterated. I mean the fire would just blast the whole poem off the tile,” he laughs. “And it was as if nature was rejecting some of my submissions. And you’d think I would hate that, but I sort of liked it! I enjoyed the fact that I did not know what the poem was going to look like when it came out of the kiln.”

“It’s almost like you’re using the earth to create these poems,” I say, “and the earth is creating the poems with you, too.”

“That’s a good way to put it,” he says. It’s also a way to root himself in an ancient tradition and connect to a long human history. “I’m not sure I was thinking this when I first started,” he continues, “but the first known pages, and the first newspaper we know of, were clay. Roger told me that a great traditional anagama potter in Japan that he studied under said that Americans are hungry for a long history. And I think that’s true. I think the fact that we’ve only been in North America for this long, we know the place is not really ours, we’re confronting the stolen-ness in everything, and there’s still that desire to have a root that reaches deep into real ground. That’s part of it too—wanting to be a part of an old human art.”

Johnston also roots himself in his community, as someone who is visibly invested in the careers of Southern poets and writers. I ask him what motivates him in those relationships. 

“All of those teachers,” he says, “really opened my mind up and radically altered the way I defined ‘Southern.’ So in many ways, I feel like I’m carrying forward what they gave to me.”

“And how do you define ‘Southern’?” I ask. 

“Oh wow,” he says. 

“What a question,” I laugh.

“Well, I can really talk about what it’s not,” he laughs. “But I think about myself as a Southern writer in relationship to the landscape. It’s the clay. It’s the tomato plants that I set out when I was ten, eleven, twelve years old on my father’s land. It’s riding on the fender of my grandfather’s tractor in North Carolina as he surveyed his potato fields. It’s catching crawdads. It’s learning how to read a rapid on the Amicalola River. The involvement with that landscape, the air that I breathed, the species of trees that I recognized, the birdsongs that I know so well from birth. I belong here. And so the first element of ‘Southern’ to me, and I can’t help it, is that landscape.”

Another factor of Southern writing, Johnston says, is an expected deference to the oral tradition and to the stories told by one’s elders. 

“There’s a premium put on the ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘no sir,’ and you’re supposed to listen,” he says. There’s an expectation for children to learn by watching and listening. “Especially for me, growing up, I was expected to stay on the margins and pay attention. You watch the harrow being put on the tractor. You watch your grandfather as he’s setting out the rabbit box, and you watch him whittle the trigger stick that goes down inside the rabbit box so that you can whittle that stick yourself. Because next thing you know, he’s going to hand you the stick and the knife.”

There’s also an oral component to the Southern writing tradition. Johnston recalls listening to some of the writers who have influenced him telling stories around a fire. “Their spoken stories were not the same as their written stories,” he says. “I think that plays into it. You think of the orality of someone like Mississippi John Hurt. You think of Howard Finster, the folk artist and preacher. You think of the orality of great southern preaching, which often is wrong-headed in terms of its reverences, but it’s fraught with stories. You think of the orality of a great gospel record from someone like Elizabeth King. You think of Outkast. You think of the orality of Killer Mike, one of my favorite poets. That kind of orality.”

 ‘I think the fact that we’ve only been in North America for this long, we know the place is not really ours, we’re confronting the stolen-ness in everything, and there’s still that desire to have a root that reaches deep into real ground. That’s part of it too—wanting to be a part of an old human art.’

“You know,” I say, “hearing you talk about the oral tradition, I wanted to mention how clearly your voice comes through in your poems. I also can’t help but think again about that last line in ‘Scaring the Bears,’ about saying words out loud to stay alive.”

“There’s a Native tradition not to trust writings,” he says. “Which, there’s a great historical precedent for that, with so many broken treaties. Leslie Marmon Silko has a great piece about how in the Native tradition, they only see as sincere words that are spoken. That are driven by a human heart beat. That come out on a human breath. That enter by means of air and soundwaves into another human ear. And that really appeals to me. Stanley Kunitz once said that the poem doesn’t exist as a poem until it has been spoken by the poet into someone else’s ear, and then it’s a poem. But until it becomes a thing of sound, it hasn’t really arrived as a poem. I think I believe in that too.”

On the subject of putting poems into another human ear, I ask him about his experience publishing this collection, and if he has any advice for new poets. 

“Make sure you’re ready to put the poems out there,” he says. “Make sure you’re prepared to hand it over. Because it’s not an abdication exactly, but when you put the poems out there, they’re not yours anymore. You’re putting them out in the world and people will do with them what they do with them. And you’ll have marvelous readings, but you’ll also have some misreadings and people who miss the irony in a given line. Or the metaphors don’t get them where you hope the metaphors will get them.”

When it comes to actually putting the poems out there, Johnston says, “If anybody wants a poem, let your default answer be yes. Give them the poem.” He says it took him a while to learn to let his poems go. 

“Early in my career I was so fussy and uptight,” he says, “and I wanted the poems to be so perfect, that I really missed the boat. And I got into this pattern of writing until I was satisfied and confident in the poem. But I was satisfied with it because it met me where I needed to be met, or it had articulated what I wanted it to, and so it stopped right there. Didn’t go out. Didn’t meet the world. That’s like locking your children in their rooms until they’re 37. It’s not what you do! Release it into the wild! See if the poem can live on its own. I think it’s important to do that. It was also important for me to let other people read the poems and talk about how they belong together.”

He again mentions Anya Silver as someone who helped him see the shape his poems were trying to take together. “Sometimes you need help with that,” he says. “So I think it’s good to have these writing communities that you can be a part of. It’s a lonely art, but it’s also kind of congregational. When you’re getting to the final stages, where a book is ready for the world, that’s when the congregation comes in.”

On a final note about his experience seeking publication for his poems, Johnston remains characteristically humble. “I’m not the best poster child for putting the work out there and constantly believing in it,” he says. “I’m almost embarrassed; it’s been easy for me. I’ve gotten acceptances easily, and I don’t think that’s because I’m any great poet. It’s because I’ve somehow found the people that are susceptible to my poems. I’ve been really fortunate in that. Maybe there’s some kind of grace in the universe that made that happen.”

 Gordon Johnston is a Georgia native and professor of creative writing and contemporary literature at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. He has published poems and prose in The Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. He has written two chapbooks, Durable Goods (Finishing Line Press) and Gravity’s Light Grip (Perkolator Press). He has also co-authored a guide to Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, Ocmulgee National Monument: A Brief History with Field Notes with Matthew Jennings (Mercer University Press). He has worked with pottery artist Roger Jamison to create clay pages of his poems in a wood-fired kiln. His debut poetry collection, Scaring the Bears, was published in March 2021 by Mercer University Press.