<p>Poetry. STUDY IN PAVILIONS AND SAFE ROOMS is an exploration of public and private space at their extremes. Borrowing titles from state-planned exhibition halls and panic rooms built for riding out the approaching apocalypse, these poems stage collisions of aesthetics, politics, and history in artificial environments. These poems are phenomenological investigations gone awry under the sway of unruly and contradictory forces. "Smart, elusive, like Debussy's Nuages, crossed with Ashbery's Three Poems—a stately Happening, where Stockhausen drops by to dish. Paul Foster Johnson uses syntax as a friend, a chaperone, a punching bag: it keeps him—and his happy reader—in a sequestered, cozy space of detente and narcosis. Reading these taut, architectural poems, I feel like I'm figure-skating on Bauhaus ice; thus Johnson gives us a sexually ambiguous, cerebral map of how to write a poem today"—Wayne Koestenbaum.</p>

Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms

Literature & Fiction

Johnson, Paul Foster

Poetry

Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs

<p>Poetry. LGBT Studies. REFRAINS/UNWORKINGS is Paul Foster Johnson's first book of poetry. Juxtaposing Romantic ideology against a postmodern disregard for "found" or "authentic" meaning, where "everybody's ontological investigation/ is guided by anticipated findings," these poems explore the social space of sound and rhythm and rhetoric. These are love poems, too, paeans so private and so simultaneously public, they evoke a contemporary return to Hart Crane's White Buildings. Yet, the speaker here resists the totalities of lyric history and their familiar arguments of selfhood: Romantic Man of Taste, revenant noisemaker of the New York School, vatic observer of the Republic, gay poet. Every new utterance is already old—already within limiting quotation marks. Johnson's clever answer to the problem is a complex recapitulation and revision of lines, phrases, sounds, and images, where even entire movements of a poem are "refrained" but re-contextualized in later poems. Nowhere is this more evocative than in the bookends of REFRAINS/UNWORKINGS. In the first poem, "Rhythmicon," there is only the voice "without anchor," a "birdsong of institutional being," a voice wherein art is without purpose even while the urban bourgeoisie search for new theories of art. In the last poem, "Art of the Cities," the same sentences of "Rhythmicon" form new lines within the context of polis and socius—post-9/11 New York City—where new construction ultimately leads to monumentally empty glass buildings and memorials to grief, perseverance, and failure.</p>

Refrains/Unworkings

Apostrophe Books

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Books by Johnson, Paul Foster

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Johnson, Paul Foster. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms

Refrains/Unworkings