Luke Johnson was born and raised in Cayucos, Calif., and later graduated from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo with a degree in history. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College. When he isn’t vacuuming or chasing kids, he spends his time writing. He lives on the California coast with his wife, three children, Golden doodle Annie, and kitty Lucy. Luke is the co-founder of Fansmanship.com.
His poems can be found in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, Greensboro Review, The Cortland Review, and others. His debut collection, Quiver, was named a finalist for The Jake Adam York Prize through Milkweed Editions, The Levis Prize through Four Way Books, The Vassar Miller Award through the University of North Texas, The Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize through the University of Wisconsin, and was released in the fall of 2023 with Texas Review Press.
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Debut poetry collections often, though certainly not always, focus on a poet’s origins, how they came to see the world as they do, and how they reckon with the ghosts of the past that may be hounding them in the present. Such is the case with Luke Johnson’s debut, Quiver, which Johnson describes as a “book of ghosts,” one that seeks and sometimes finds reconciliation with Johnson’s recently deceased and sometimes abusive father. The figure of the father—Johnson’s father, and Johnson as a father himself—embeds itself within the poems, which brim with lyric virtuosity, startling images of natural beauty, and haunting vulnerability. The collection as a whole reckons with boyhood, with all its wonders and horrors, and with how this time informs manhood, masculinity, and fatherhood. Ultimately, it is a dazzling book, one that asks—and usually answers—whether any of us can break the cycles that perpetuate themselves in our lineage.
Phil Goldstein: Many poetry collections, especially ones that draw on the lived experience of the poet, ground themselves in place, and Quiver really brims with images and evocations of place—not an exact location but actually very specific. It’s rural, rustic, where people are connected to the land. A place that I felt was almost back in time. So why was it important to you to imbue the collection with that sense of place, and how does that inform the way the poems unfold?
Luke Johnson: I’m from a more rural part of California on the coast. Before the boom in Silicon Valley and San Jose, it was still super affordable. It was very blue collar. The capital town of San Luis Obispo at that time maybe had 40,000 people. I grew up in a small beach town called Cayucos, which is a Chumash word meaning “canoe.” The population there: 2,500. And so even though I grew up in California and California’s got this lore, I grew up in a part of the state that, for most of my life, was this unknown section of the coast really. Everyone lived in San Francisco or Los Angeles or Santa Barbara. Nobody lived in San Luis Obispo County.
I grew up with farmers, cattle ranchers, beach bums, woodsmen, and fishermen. It was a coalescing of topography. I’m three hours from Yosemite. I’m a hello from the Pacific. I’m a quick drive from the Carrizo Plains. I also grew up rather poor, in welfare lines. I grew accustomed to the natural world because we didn’t have a lot of things to play with. My sisters and I were outside in our front yard playing with butterflies and bees and the flowers, and my mom was quite the gardener. I was having conversations with place all the time.
PG: You mentioned cattle ranching which makes me think of a place that’s more like Oklahoma or somewhere in the Great Plains, but obviously you’re in California. What was it like to be in that much nature all the time? How did it feel? Was it freeing, scary?
LJ: Well, it made large cities feel swallowing. There’re parts of nature that I confronted regularly that city kids didn’t. Mountain lions were prowling the dark. Thank you for pressing on this, because now that I think about it, there was this mythological lore around the woods. People would have sightings of mountain lions and then you’d hear about the sighting the next day. There were all these rumors about hidden peoples. To this day, I can’t say if it’s true or not, but supposedly there was an occultic group of folks who lived out in the boons. Some kids had witnessed them wearing red robes when they were out swimming at the gorge. So yeah, there was both a sense of wonder and horror attached to the land.
PG: So, on that, throughout the poems, there are many images of animals that are either killed or threatened—mice, ducks, calves. And then there are also poems that have children in these incredibly vulnerable positions. What did you want to convey about vulnerability and how it relates to the speaker’s vulnerability?
LJ: So, it’s funny, you know how it is as a poet, you just write the poems and you don’t think too hard about why there’s an obsession. Those obsessions are something that you kind of lean into. But now that I think about it, having grown up in a single-parent household, connected to the land, very poor, my dad wasn’t around. My dad was rather abusive. He was an addict. I think most of my childhood felt rather vulnerable and oftentimes fragile.
And it’s kind of hard to share, really, to be honest, because I’ve had folks ask me that question, and I always have this sense of wanting to protect my mom. But at the end of the day, my dad was a wild, ruckus man, and quite difficult. She couldn’t protect me from the realities of that.
The natural world became another family member for me, a canvas, even if it meant dark, vulnerable things. On top of that, I also think that this book explores a lot about boyhood and brutality attached to boyhood. And I don’t want to stop there because I don’t think that gives Quiver its due. I think it’s not just about brutality, it’s about finding the tenderness that exists within brutality. I want boys to be celebrated in the book, even though oftentimes they might be displayed as difficult creatures. I don’t know if that answered that question, but…
PG: No, that’s great. I mean, as somebody who’s written a lot about boyhood myself, I completely get that idea of not being protected, but also being protective of the people who were around you. And I also get that sense of being a kid can be really, really terrifying sometimes in really stark ways. And that can coexist simultaneously or concurrently with just the joy of being a kid.
LJ: Yeah, I think you’re helping me uncover that a little better. I wasn’t a brutal kid necessarily, but like most kids, I spit in ant holes and basically drowned ants with my spit. I mean, most kids have done that. And if you think about that, that’s quite a brutal act. But in that moment, that kid isn’t thinking it’s brutal, that kid is actually filled with wonder, as weird as that sounds, because they’re playing with the natural world.
PG: I know you mentioned when you’re writing this, you’re not consciously often thinking about language or motifs, but as somebody who read the book a couple of times, a lot of things did really stick out. One of them was that there are several poems that have the image of something being sequined or compared to sequins. So, there’s bloodstains, a silk blouse, wakes of water, snow, light. This is more of a philosophical question. Is there something about the way that things can shimmer or reflect light and not really be themselves that appeals to you?
LJ: Great question. I’ve always had an obsession ever since I was a little boy. I’m just going to paint the picture for you. I can’t even put it succinctly into words, but you’re sitting on a front porch and you’re looking out through a field and the sun’s going down. There’s this eerie desire to see something emerge from the wood line. I’ve always loved dusk for its blend of light and shadow. It subverts the beautiful, causes the senses to blur and scatter.
PG: Well, maybe it’s because it is about something that is almost kind of beautiful but unattainable at the same time. It’s something that you can never really get the full picture of or hold onto.
LJ: I’ve been on a journey to reacquaint myself with what I call ‘playing the game.’ For a long time, I possessed this Whitman-like gaze. I was often the kid who liked to go to the periphery and kind of take it all in. And so that’s what I mean by playing the game or not playing the game.
Now that I have kids, I’m trying to get better at playing the game, which I think most poets can relate to. We’re trying to curate life, basically distill life, because in some way we’re all thinking about death. But before we know it we never live life. Like truly live it. We just write about it. Which is sad.
PG: So, tough question, but I think it’s important to ask. The poem, “Like a Fish Gasping,” is a poem that really struck a chord with me as somebody who was sexually abused as a child. And you’re mentioning your dad, there are flashes throughout the book of abuse that the main speaker endures mainly from his father. How did you want to render that and how does that inform the poems?
LJ: So that poem came out of a workshop I did in my MFA program where I got to study under Patricia Smith. In one of her workshops, she basically said, let’s write a poem that’s all questions or majority questions. And I thought that was a cool idea because it allowed me to do what I like to do as a poet—as a lyric narrative poet really—which is to build and pivot.
That poem is probably the most true form when it comes to my real life. That poem came out of a friend’s experience. I had a friend who was abused by a satanist cult that was living shockingly in the town where I grew up in. I was his best friend and I had no idea that he was going through that. I was just a kid. And he ended up displaying some behaviors towards me that were abusive. I’m just coming to terms with the fact that I actually went through some abuse attached to that. And so that’s been a process. But he basically did what kids do. He took the abuse that he was experiencing and started to display some of that towards me. And that display towards me was actually what ended up resulting in him telling his mom and my mom, and led to those cult members getting arrested. It was this whole ordeal in town.
PG: I mean, oftentimes kids who’ve been abused, they don’t know how to articulate what’s happening to them.
LJ: Basically, his way of articulating was to do some of the things to his best friend that was happening to him. It was a cry for help. It’s a part of my story I’ve needed to tell for a long time. I think poems can be like little evangelists that try to tell our story before we’re capable of doing so. I’ve always been extremely claustrophobic and I had never connected the fact that I was claustrophobic from that experience. My abused friend put a sheet over my mouth and basically suffocated me.
PG: It does, it does. So, you mentioned poems as evangelists. That’s interesting because the next couple of questions I have are kind of religiously inflected. There are a lot of biblical references throughout the book, but they mostly deal with sacrifice or the tales of trials that biblical figures go through. Does that strike a chord with you, or do those allusions spring to the front of your mind more readily?
LJ: Yes. I grew up in the church. In a really cool, odd, weird hippie congregation. In Quiver, the speaker begins to blossom into fatherhood. Something I’m firmly aware of is that my kids are not going to experience the type of pain and sadness I did. I’m the first guy in my father’s lineage to not die young from addiction, end up in prison, or just flat out abandon his family. There’s a hurricane of addiction, trauma, and toxic masculinity that I inherited as a result. But it stops with me. No more. Does that make sense?
PG: It does. And that kind of brings out a bunch of different questions that I have. There’s a poem early on, “Numbers 14:18,” which refers to a Bible verse that says “The Lord is slow to anger and abounding steadfast love, forgiving inequity, and transgression. But he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation.” So, you were just mentioning breaking these cycles. Do you think that we can ever outrun the sins of our parents or their legacy? How do you go about breaking those cycles?
LJ: Wow. I think not all of us are lucky enough to break those. So, I want to be really humble about that. I was blessed with a really good mom who taught me about love early on, and she was a sacrifice in the sense that she kicked my father out, and knew that life was not going to be easy, but that it was a worthy cost for her kids to not be around that all the time. So, I guess my mom was the first sacrifice and I was the second.
I think my relationship with the divine has helped me reconcile who my father was, both as a monster and a broken boy. I don’t think I could have gotten there without concepts of a love that’s larger than what I possess.
But breaking that generational curse took time. There were moments where, for instance, my wife and I would argue like any married couple does, and I would literally feel this energy in me that wasn’t me. It said things internally like “I don’t need you; I don’t need this crap. I’m going to go live off alone, so screw you,” which is not the way I really feel about my wife. But there was this energy in me, this unhealthy momentum to abandon.
I was able to recognize that though, thank God, and go against the grain of the thought. I love my wife. I love my kids. I learned to speak to the curse as if it’s foreign, rebuke it.
PG: I mean, I think that that’s definitely great and noble that you’re able to do that and help people. You’re talking about going against the grain of the thought. And I think that having those anchors, whether that’s a loved one, like your partner or your kids, helps hurry that process along or it helps strengthen that pushback against a thought that might be embedded within you because of your upbringing or because of your genes or whatever.
LJ: I don’t want to dumb this down. I should’ve mentioned that sometimes I dumb down my religious spiritual background because I fear people won’t believe me. I’ll never forget when I was 12 years old, I had a powerful lady—the only way I can describe her is that she was spiritually connected the way a prophet was—prophecy over my life that I would break that ugly tradition. I’ve grown up with a calling attached to breaking that. I feel like I’m the reckoner. I go into the storm to end the storm so that my kids don’t have to experience it.
PG: So, mentioning your kids, there are a lot of poems that are either about or directed at the speaker’s children, and there’s both a palpable sense of worry and desire to protect them, and worry that the speaker won’t be able to. As someone who’s not a father myself, these did still feel really poignant to me, even if I couldn’t directly relate to them. How would you say becoming a father has changed either your poetics or just how you view life and how that then informs your writing?
LJ: Once I had my kids, they came into the world so fragile, I instantly became fearful because I was scared to lose them. And I had never quite experienced that type of love. And so being a father has changed me in lots of ways. It changed my poetics. I feel like I’m writing with an urgency now. I want my kids to live a life that I’ve never lived, and to be free of the things that I’ve experienced. So, there’s that aspect. I also feel like my kids have given me whole other worlds that I can write into. Sometimes I get sick of myself. “Shut up, Luke, I don’t want any more of you to talk. Quiet.” And so, my kids give me this whole other universe to explore in my creative imagination. The trippy thing is my kids just sort of arrive in my poems. I chuckle when it happens. I’m like, oh hi, what are you doing here? What do you want to say? What do you want to teach me or show me? So that’s kind of cool. My kids are very much living, breathing creatures like you and me, but they also haunt me like ghosts in a way.
PG: I hear you. So, I want to turn back to something that we talked about earlier about masculinity. So as someone who’s written a lot about what it means to be “a real man,” to me, I felt a real connection and simultaneous kind of conflict to a lot of the poems in the collection, but maybe not in obvious ways. So let me explain. The main speaker of the poems has hunted, killed animals, handled a gun, and just kind of had a more traditionally or stereotypically masculine upbringing than I certainly did. And yet I get the sense from the poems that the speaker feels kind of a rebellion against that and longs to be engulfed in the beauty of the natural world. How did you approach that not necessarily dichotomy, but those two ideas?
LJ: The first version of masculinity you described is very much my father. The rebellion to that version is me. Both of those exist in my speaker because this is a book of ghosts, a reconciliation of sorts.
My dad passed away a couple of years ago. As weird as it is to say, Phil, this book is an homage to my dad. He wasn’t a good father. At all. Caused lots of wreckage and grief. But I loved him still. And want peace.
I love the fact that Ellen Bass picked up on that. So did John Sidney Williams. Both described this glorious complexity. And I was like, yes, because simultaneously, there are poems that mock and rescind and rebuke the father. And then there are poems where I had this energy of homage to my dad, even though he was difficult.
In order for me to write this book and reconcile with my father, I had to really go through an experience where I’m meeting my dad in his ugly beauties. There’s a poem in there called “The Unnamed Garden,” and it ends in a very brutal way:
You cradled the fawn.
You offered it back to the snow
and your daddy said here
by which he meant sip, to swallow the moon’s graffiti.
In order for me to have a conversation with my father, I had to allow a speaker to inhabit both of those ideas of masculinity.
PG: That makes sense. I mean, you’re talking about forgiveness. We just, for us Jewish folk, we recently went through the High Holidays and Yom Kippur, which is all about seeking forgiveness for past wrongs. And one of the things I was reading was this passage from this guy Alan Lew, who was a rabbi, and he wrote, “Forgiveness, it has been said, means giving up our hopes for a better past.” And that really resonated with me.
LJ: While I’m really sensitive to folks’ difficulties and struggles and life experiences, I would never pull a Doctor Phil and tell people what to do with their resentments or their wounds. I can attest for myself that having decided not to live there with my father has been the most liberating experience of my life. My follow-up book to this one is going to surprise a lot of people. It’s me. It’s very much in the voice of Luke, but there’s less weight that the speaker’s carrying. I don’t think I could have written this new book without Quiver.
PG: Well, that gets me to one of my last questions, which is what are you working on right now? How does it relate or differ from Quiver?
LJ: Actually, this has been a cool journey. So, since Quiver was picked up, I had the normal moment that most of us have: what the hell do I do now? I have a friend in Hollywood who’s a pretty well-known producer there, and he and I have always talked about writing a script together. I thought this was my moment where we’re going to write that script, which at some point we’ll do, but you know how poetry is. You catch the bug and it’s hard to get away. Recently I had an epistolary call and response project with the poet Megan Merchant picked up by Harbor Editions.
PG: I know her well. She’s a press-mate [at Stillhouse Press].
LJ: Yeah, she’s a great poet. I just finished the follow-up to Quiver. That’s sitting on my editor’s desk now. I’m waiting to hear back from him. That book is called Disitributary, and it’s a book about melancholia, cultural violence, and grief.
PG: So last question. You mentioned Megan, she’s fantastic. I know that you’re a big reader and appreciator of poetry. What today in the modern contemporary world of poetry, what kind of thrills you when you read it or what unlocks something within you? You don’t need to give me a list of names, but what kind of really sets you on fire when you read it?
LJ: I can tell you what doesn’t set me on fire. I don’t want to sit around for four hours and decode a poem with fancy abstract talk and disembodied phrase work. I want to feel and I want to be changed. And so hit me, man. Alter me. I want to be haunted by your verse.
From a craft level, I’m blown away when work can use economy and drive the volta with syllabics and syncopation. My work does that. But it took a long time to figure out.
You want names?
PG: Sure, yeah, go for it.
LJ: Who thrills me right now? A lot of poets thrill me. I love Despy Boutris’s work. I think Despy’s doing some really great work in the ways that I’m describing. She writes more into love, I think, than I do, but writes with a similar tenacity.
Of course, I’m a student of Patricia, so she’s fantastic, but that’s kind of a “duh” point. We all know that.
I know you don’t want dead poets, but I was ruined by Larry Levis. I have lines from “Winter Stars“ tattooed on my chest. He feels like this mentor I never met. So, I’m really haunted by him.
I’ll include Phil Levine, BPK, Patrick Phillips, early Terrance Hayes, some Olds, Charles Simic and a handful of others.
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Phil Goldstein’s debut poetry collection, How to Bury a Boy at Sea, was published by Stillhouse Press in 2022, and it reckons with the trauma of child sex abuse. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net award. His poetry has appeared in Atticus Review, The Shore, South Florida Poetry Journal, Rust+Moth, Jet Fuel Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Jenny, and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and cats Grady and Princess.