Poet's Advice: Just Listen
Devin Johnston '85
by Kim Underwood, Winston-Salem Journal

The music of it is something that I want people to experience,” Johnston said. At one time, he focused more on the language in his poems, he said. “Now I focus more on sensory expression and emotional experience.”

Johnston has written two books of poetry - Aversions (2004) and Telepathy (2001) - and a book of criticism called Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice (2002). Along with another man, he also runs Flood Editions, an independent, nonprofit press for poetry that they founded together.

Johnston, 36, lives in St. Louis and he teaches literature at St. Louis University. He grew up in Winston-Salem. His family moved here from upstate New York when he was 3. His father, Dillon Johnston, taught English at Wake Forest University, and his mother, Anne Coggan Johnston, taught at Summit School. Johnston started school at Summit - where his mother now focuses on staff development - and then went to Reynolds High School.

He picked up a love of reading from his parents. From there, it wasn’t too big a leap, he said, to scribbling things down when he was in high school. Initially, he didn’t think of himself as a poet.

That emerged as he discovered his gifts and interests. For one, he really likes the sense of possibilities that comes with starting something. Also, he found that the shorter span of attention required for writing poetry compared to longer works was just right for him.

After graduating from Reynolds in 1988, he went to the University of Chicago, received a bachelor’s degree in Latin and stayed for his doctorate in English. Johnston and his wife, Andrea Dunn, who works for a community radio station, have a 5-month-old daughter, Hazel Tone. The family has a border collie, and Johnston gets some of his best poetic thinking done when taking the collie for a walk.

“Lately, I put off writing it down as long as possible,” he said. He finds that when he lets a poem continue gestating in his head connections are made that might have been lost if he wrote it down right away. So, when the time comes to put something down, he may find himself scrambling to find a scrap of paper.

At St. Louis University, he teaches poetry classes for the most part. In assigning papers, he does his best to avoid the “what’s it mean?” approach. He might ask students to give an account of what the experience of reading the assigned poetry was like.

Johnston was invited to participate in Wake Forest’s reading series after Conor O’Callaghan and Vona Groarke - a married couple who share a job as poet-in-residence at Wake Forest - read a review of Aversions that mentioned the Winston-Salem connection.

As it happens, Johnston’s father started the reading series some years back, and a couple of years ago it was named the Dillon Johnston Writers Reading Series in his honor. That has nothing to do with his son being invited, O’Callaghan said. “This guy is a good poet, and he deserved to be in the series.”

In Johnston’s poetry, O’Callaghan said, he often takes images common to everyone such as clothes scattered on the floor and looks at them in a slightly skewed way. “It’s like a cubist painting,” he said.

Looking at things in another way through Johnston’s poetry can make the world seem fresh, O’Callaghan said. One of the purposes of the series, O’Callaghan said, is to help students and members of the community see that poetry is not something historical that is over and done with.

“Poetry is a living thing,” he said. O’Callaghan also made a couple of the same points that Johnston did about how to approach poetry. “People, in general, are terrified of poetry,” O’Callaghan said. “You don’t stand in front of a Charlie Parker solo and go, ‘What does that mean?’”

He hopes that people who might not be completely comfortable with poetry come and leave saying, “Actually, you know, I quite enjoyed that.”

© 2006 Winston-Salem Journal. Reprinted with permission, all rights reserved.

Editor’s Note: In her introduction of Devin at the WFU poetry reading last fall, Candide Jones, assistant director of the WFU University Press, commented: “He [Devin] has received critical praise, including the comment that he ‘may well have the best ear of any poet of his generation.’ She said that Ethan Paquin stated in the Boston Review that ‘while many American poets write complacently autobiographical verse…writers like Johnston are developing a complex, resonant hybrid of carnival music and classicism.’”

Devin ’85 received his B.A from Oberlin and his M.A. and PhD from the University of Chicago. He now teaches in the English Department at St. Louis University.