Inheritance has been out for about six months now, and I’m so grateful for all the people who’ve read it, who’ve invited me to read from it this past year, who’ve held it close and shared it with friends. I’m so grateful. Hopefully, you’ll stay along for what I’ve been thinking up next. Here’s an incomplete list of some wonderful words some folks shared about Inheritance. much love to you reading this where you are.
reading on the internet
last thursday I read some poems on the internet via Scalawag with the incredible poets and thinkers Jericho Brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. the kind of presence we created within the digital confines was beautiful, and I’ll hold that feeling for awhile
here’s that reading on Scalawag’s website, featuring some real kind thoughts about my work. thank you to everyone at Scalawag for seeing my work and digging it and sharing it in this way.
thankyou Alysia and Zaina !!
four poems and some thoughts
here’s four poems and an interview I did with some folks at Revolute Lit // Randolph College MFA
thankyou William and Mateo
http://revolutelit.com/001-featured/
have a poem with some coffee
if you dig coffee, and reading or listening with that coffee, then you should get a bag of Nomadic Coffee.
inside the bag, you’ll find one of my poems, Club 2718, and a phone number you can call to hear me read it and talk a bit about how it came through.
shoutout Justin Phillip Reed for curating this experience !!
two poems // scalawag
Got two new poems in Scalawag on the internet: https://www.scalawagmagazine.org/2019/11/ekphrastic-poetry-series-taylor-johnson/
the first one, takes its sound from this :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B39m4GXQF-o
shoutout New Impressionz band
shoutout DC, all day
thankyou thankyou Tracy K. Smith
here’s Tracy K. Smith reading my poem “Trans is against nostalgia” for The Slowdown podcast. Thank you Tracy!
https://www.apmpodcasts.org/slowdown/2019/03/79-trans-is-against-nostalgia/
also, here’s a photo after I read some poems at the Black Poetry Conference at Princeton in February organized by Tracy K. Smith, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Joshua Kotin. thankyou thankyou
I read with Jericho Brown, Camille Dungy, Nikky Finney, Jessica Care Moore, and Ed Roberson (!!!) still filled with gratitude and light from that evening.
poem in the paris review
here’s a poem of mine in the most recent issue of The Paris Review
https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/7382/states-of-decline-taylor-johnson
shoutout to Monica Youn for choosing this poem
poems in The Baffler
got two new poems in this joint:
https://thebaffler.com/poems/go-go-ode-johnson
https://thebaffler.com/poems/magnitude-and-bond-johnson
(shoutout Nicole Terez Dutton)
new poems // spacecraftproject
got some poems here: https://spacecraftproject.com/taylor-johnson-poems/
spacecraftproject is a good internet spot curated by Gillian Parrish, putting out conversations with artists and poems.
Fallin' Out
for Nabi, Sarah, Jayson, Sean, and Justin who I lived with for one week in New Orleans
What will happen to all that beauty?, James Baldwin asked in the second essay in The Fire Next Time: “A letter from a region in my mind”, when he goes to visit Elijah Muhammed and observes and considers the value of a separate black nation within the united states. I can’t say for sure where all the beauty goes inside that formulation, but I have witnessed black social autonomy, the erotics of the black crowd, what happens when we gather together, what arises from our gathering. Maybe I’m entering this line of thought to ask: what becomes of my own black self when individuation becomes a private nonce taxonomy, when individuation is destroyed and the self is repurposed. (help me out here).
I want to believe the beauty Baldwin implores to stay around can be transformed into and circulated as a kind of fugitive energy outside of systemic duress. Thus, I’m proposing a theoretical framework to encompass and work toward a malleable container for this kind of energy: afro-entropy (this nomenclature is a reactionary imprecision re: afrofuturism/afropessimism false binary, other possible name: black hole theopolitical kineticism? I don’t know). Afro-entropy describes ways/moments in which public, black social intimacy isn’t assigned value as a capitalist product. Go-go music in DC, and the physical space of a go-go, is an example of this idea. (And I’d like to take some space here to praise the hyphen for the work it does in the word go-go. lil rushed caesura, linger on for only so long). Go-go resists popular consumption because of the form’s kinetic orality, reliance on live performance, and interval improvisation. At the go-go the crowd is an integral member of the band. A tenet of the sonic reality of go-go music is that it collapses the sound, the sound envelopes itself, is destroyed, is re-made as itself. There’s a loss of temporality, of linear time when listening to go-go.
In a similar sense, our gathering together, our living this week on Saint Philip street collasped my sense of self. Sean passes me in the kitchen, places his hand on my back to steady his movement forward, to warn me of his arrival. In that moment, I re-see a memory I thought I’d forgotten: The church I grew up in had no windows, the choir had taken up Hezekiah Walker’s “I need you to survive”. And those in the pews began to weep, and some of us fell out into one of our arms, passing the spirit between each other. I need you, I need you, I let go and need you.