Mark Francis Johnson, Sham Refugia and Poor Fridge

For several years now, the poet Mark Francis Johnson has been publishing books whose cosmic intricacies tend perversely toward disintegration. Johnson’s project of atypical world building—or “unworldbuilding,” as he has labeled it—takes place in a world or world series called “Colwynox,” the topographical contours of which remain unchartable even as they are felt. Something akin to Johnson’s poetry can be seen in ekphrastic miniature in the Justin Lieberman–designed front cover of Sham Refugia. In Lieberman’s collage, details from a Disney comic strip have been cut into various polygons and then carefully spliced together at oblique angles along the gutters. Just as the tesserae of the resulting mosaic combine beautifully while simultaneously undoing the narrative gestalt, so Johnson’s poetic units accrete into seductive “wholes” that nonetheless refuse to cohere according to traditional optics.

Sham Refugia is divided into five sections, which are respectively and fancifully titled “A Diet of Felt Painted Like Snow,” “We Were a Whole Protein,” “Fair Comment On My Means,” “Debris Too Soft To Sell,” and “A Gentle, Gentle Rebuff.” The purpose of this division is not immediately clear—and indeed it may even imply a structuration that the book in some ways works to disavow. But we can certainly pick up from the composite of these titles something highly suggestive in terms of socioeconomic arrangement—a reformulation by which familiar elements of taxonomy, consumption, and commerce have violently shifted. In the title “We Were a Whole Protein,” for instance, the puny amplification of “Whole Protein” ironically implies that the “We” is now or was once even less than protein—a demos figure with all the social influence of an amino acid. In some ways, then, the Colwynoxian world of Sham Refugia seems even more systemically iniquitous and inequitable than our own. At the same time, the difference is not simply a question of measure; however much the book resounds with the affective and tonal frequencies associated with world building, it also dispenses with the moorings that typically facilitate epistemological purchase on a given fictional world. Often, we never know quite where we are, despite the thud of the terrain beneath our feet.

Throughout Sham Refugia, Johnson’s world building unfolds in both verse and prose. When it comes to the former, Johnson is a skillful prestidigitator, making deft use of the caesural and lineal possibilities that the form allows:

(26)

The opening lines suggest a miniature Rape of the Lock redux, in which the simile-stricken tuft surrenders to the most pathetic villain in the pathetic fallacy storehouse: a drizzle. The suggestive orthography of “mar” in line six fuses horse, merchant, and blemish, and there is a related noise confluence in “Mom,” “merry,” and “mar” in the antepenultimate stanza. Such anamorphic oddity is even more extreme in the transitions between some of the lines. In the section running from “A merchant giving a horse” to “about said landscape would improve,” the cadence of a grandiloquent prose begs us to interpret the whole as a parsable syntagm—which we can, with a little effort. But the violent snaps at the line breaks seem to force the words and phrases into new language parts, or at least to plug them into extremely unusual relationships with each other. Even if we can successfully cut through Johnson’s smoke screen of wordplay, the clarified proposition that emerges still requires some interpretive contortion: “A merchant giving a horse white cement can mar a landscape [that] a treacly tale (endurable without anesthetic) about said landscape would improve.” Thus, a world in miniature, at once forensically articulated and topographically disorienting.

Another crucial element of Johnson’s world building is iterative deployment of certain words or phrases. These words or phrases might be redolent of anything from protagonists to technologies. In Sham Refugia, we repeatedly encounter such oddities as “Whayn,” “Kreeth,” “3019,” “plastic sheds,” “Wulfworks,” and “Holiday” (most of which also appear elsewhere in Johnson’s Colwynox books). There is also a rich variation of textual type—both in terms of typography (constant undulations between italicized, bolded, or quoted text) and typology (repetitions or twists on textual strings, both in the titles and in the bodies of the poems). These strategies of phrasal recombination and recirculation serve to orient us in the absence of typical narrative conventions. What we don’t get in a Johnson book are backstories, functions, or particulars—or if we do get them, they are too far out of range for our reticles to measure.

A delicious early slice of Johnson’s prose world building occurs in “Three Sweeps,” whose opening section runs:

Certainly, such writing can be described as narrative—the homuncular protagonist has been provided with setting, quest, and travail. There is narrative texture, too, a sound and a feel that are enjoyably picaresque. However, closer inspection reveals the points of connection to be somehow compromised. Both the propositions and the nexuses between them seem ever so slightly off or elliptical, complicating the temporality, the voice, and the telos of the set piece. Often, what we are left with is not quite a narrative in the classic sense but rather a potent narrative affect that miraculously survives the obscuration of the elements that are traditionally taken as essential narrative constituents.

The effect of this tantalizing world building is even more striking when considered as an architectonic lattice that provides form to Sham Refugia as a whole. The book is a complex crystalline structure, as imposing and labyrinthine as bismuth. While such complexity does not readily lend itself to narrative glossing, it nonetheless facilitates a kind of apophatic approach to the book’s various objects. Like forerunner texts such as Francis Ponge’s Soap or Leslie Scalapino’s that they were at the beach, Johnson’s book often revisits certain vignettes in order to iterate them differently. Consider the following excerpt from one of the several entries titled “Counsel”:

The homunculus who in the first section of the book was in the process of forlornly jumping for a rung that he would never reach has now been vulgarly transformed into mere t-shirt pabulum (incidentally, the second extraction of value from him, following the audio recording of “Three Sweeps”). Crucially, though, the narrative has changed: instead of being kept at his Sisyphean task, the homunculus is reported to have reached the lowest rung on the ladder after two attempts (hence “aspirational wear”). We might believe that any aspirational valence has been nullified by the fact that the “New Citizen” wearing the t-shirt is “likely to be vaporized.” But such is the wrong way to read Johnson, I think. It is more interesting to consider what the various textual parallaxes and focalizations and reworkings tell us about Johnson’s worlds. For example, we might ask what happens to text that becomes quoted or misquoted within the Colwynoxian cosmos, or how italics impact the veridicality of a proposition. Such questions help us approach the spirit of unknowing that both binds and undoes the world structure of Sham Refugia. Unknowing, in Johnson’s work, manifests not through voids or silence but rather through the opposite—through reaffirmation or reiteration. The effect of having multiple poems titled “Counsel,” “A Familiar Problem,” and “Embarrassing” (or variations such as “Note on Counsel + Counsel,” “These Familiar Problems,” and “An Embarrassing Short,” or even hybridizations such as “Two Familiar, Embarrassing Problems”) is to imperil the moments of authority and discretion indicated by each title. In other words, the poems seem averse to being read in isolation, instead animating each other through a kind of quantum entanglement.

Perhaps we might educe something from the unexplained title of the book. If the individual poem provides no refuge (or refugium, in the book’s rather cli-fi parlance) from the hostile Colwynoxian world, might we describe the individual poem as a sham? Surely. But we must also ask whether the entangled network of poems is any more impervious to such fraudulence. I would argue that there is no escapism either way, that any sanctuary Sham Refugia offers is both illusory and temporary. Those who have read other books by Johnson will quickly realize that Sham Refugia is but one polyhedral cut from an even more elaborate hypercrystal. The book flags this imbrication several times, particularly through those of its poems that are titled “Page Discarded From Treatise on Luck” (Treatise on Luck being another of Johnson’s Colwynox books, published by Gauss PDF in 2017). Such reflexivity should not imply that Sham Refugia is simply “more of the same” (each Johnson book has its own unique piquancy and organizational structure). However, it does point to a rhetorical frame of reference that brings all of Johnson’s Colwynox books onto a shared (or at least partially shared) plane. Just as individual Johnson poems struggle to become havens in the aggregate, instead linking up with each other into a series of porous warrens, so too do his books cross over and into and through each other.

In relation to the forms of intertextuality discussed above, Johnson’s more recent book, Poor Fridge, stands as a somewhat unusual entry in his oeuvre. Nora Fulton notes in her afterword that “the presence of Colwynox has been interrupted, if only for this moment” (216). This observation is both true and not true. Unlike Sham Refugia, which might be said largely to unfold in Colwynox, Poor Fridge seems unusually earthbound for a Johnson book—particularly in those of its entries that make heartbreakingly direct biographical reference to Johnson’s family. Indeed, there is scarcely a mention of Colwynox in the book. Crucially, though, there is a mention—a solitary mention of the most tantalizing kind: “* anti-dew propagraf, Colwynox, 3019.” This text footnotes an oblique, macrographically rendered one-line poem: “Dangerous to die? Doubtful dew knows, anyway *” (90). What matters here is less what this poem means than the fact that it is a vessel by which to secrete Colwynox into the book. One is reminded of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” or M. John Harrison’s “Egnaro,” stories in which materials from a nonveridical world seem to tinge the ontic surface of a world assumed to be real. With this single, surreptitious mention of Colwynox, Johnson changes the complexion of Poor Fridge considerably, introducing a poison that the book might otherwise have given the impression of having purged.

Appropriately, purging poisons is one of the book’s broader preoccupations. It is a forlorn preoccupation, however, since both the alexipharmics and the poisons are too slippery:

The above excerpt is from a poem titled “U,” one of sixty-seven poems from “All Twenty-Six Volumes,” the longest of the book’s three sections. That this section presents itself as an ordered system—an abecedary, to be specific— only to stutter repeatedly on certain letters and spew out multiple alternate entries is exemplary of how, in Johnson’s poetry, the alexipharmics and the poisons often snake elusively around each other. It is probably not accidental that the “U” (with its homophonic suggestiveness) happens to be the letter that is dreamt off as alexipharmic. Most demanding of our attention, though, is Johnson’s “shit old joke” (which is actually a pretty damn good one!). To put the scrip in scripture would be not merely to betray a financial dimension in the religious text but to place the scriptural transaction at a further fiduciary remove, thereby codifying an estrangement from the wished-for redemption (in both the spiritual and the financial senses of the word). That such a joke should appear in this book is unsurprising, since mammon and lucre from on high are very much in the poet’s crosshairs. Consider the poem below, reproduced in its entirety:

(180)

Like all the poems from the section in which it appears (“Thumb Winter Sea”), this poem, “22,” is excessively and unusually punctuated, its nonstandard commas recalling the restless quotation marks in Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette. The idiosyncratic punctuation serves to wring from the disgusting fact of exploited labor a bondage and a murderousness that the ineluctable convention of making money would rather occlude. We are not even a “thing” habituated to gore—we are the gore; it is they who are the ones habituated to this thing. We might read this poem and start wondering what money even is. Appropriately, the poem allows us doltishly to “misunderstand” money via an enjambment that upends the noncount noun: “Can it recognize a money.” Money is shit, and its sublimation as newsprint allows us to return the shit to itself by locating an apt “use” for it (“newsprint as toilet paper”).

While there is surely no more depressingly sanguinary figure than “gore” by which to register the effacement of human life in the capital relation, not all of the book’s responses to such effacement are quite so defeatist. One way that Johnson challenges such effacement is by breathing life into inanimate objects or by endowing already animate objects with heightened significance. Another is by attempting to mentally degrade or immiserate enemies. Corn (“corn and beans,” “standing corn,” “corny example”) is later animated (albeit pluperfectly) as “Corn”:

(155)

This sad, angry, tender poem seeks to push fantasy into irrecusable fact, to degrade the horse killer into a horse while exalting the dead Corn. Johnson’s narrator attempts to exact revenge via a kind of psychic brigandage, mentally “robbing You” on a daily basis. Such imaginary robbing effects an ontological schism by which the You who thinks themself “well off” is complicated by the You who is subject to interminable privation in the “hard mind” of the narrator. Doubtless, such private reprisal impacts on the corporeal You not one whit. But regardless, as tokens of a desire to redress injustice, Johnson’s mentalized subjects or objects clearly entail a poetically ethical orientation to capitalist exploitation, an orientation that pushes empathetically beyond the human. Anyone who reads Poor Fridge must conclude that Johnson is an animal lover—the book is sympathetically full of deer, horses, chickens, snails, and other animals. Perhaps the most important animal in the book is the bovine, which doubles as a figurative and literal site of capitalist extraction. Indeed, Johnson’s vicarious feeling for cows and oxen is so acute that his narrators can tip over into a kind of boanthropy:

(119)

On top of coalescing with cattle, Johnson’s narrators become one with the field from which labor and value are extracted. In one of the “F” poems, the forehead (with its “acre of brow”) becomes the “poor soil” into which “shame carved the furrow,” while in a poem from the final, untitled section of the book (a series of stretto-like entries that answer earlier material), the taste of one’s thumb is described as “like robbing a fallow person” (94, 203). Such specific coalescences place the fantastical within the purview of political economy, proving that Johnson’s often seemingly unnavigable worlds can sometimes cut right through to Earth with satirical clarity. Ultimately, Poor Fridge takes seriously the task of registering one’s entanglement with capitalism and personal heartache while staying faithful to the imperatives of an “unworldbuilding” impetus already well established.

While it is not necessarily unusual for literary works to deploy ambitious forms of endophoric and exophoric reference—that is, to gesture both within and outside of themselves in order to expand or complicate their own ontology—it is certainly unusual to encounter something as sustained and intricate as what we encounter in Johnson’s work. We might call Johnson’s brand of referentiality bibliophoric, given how obsessively it implies book- or world-building structures and affects. Johnson’s bibliophora is not simply a token of metafictional self-awareness, a textual flagging of his books’ artifice; rather, it is a complex and variegated poetic enquiry into how books and their worlds are (or might be) contained or not contained. It is a measure of the extent to which books can or cannot connect with the world in which they were written—our world, whatever that might mean. However we choose to define it, Johnson’s ongoing Colwynoxian (and perhaps now anti-Colwynoxian) project has given rise to an intercomplicating series of worlds that are at once richly peopled and impishly elusive. Humorously and vertiginously, Sham Refugia and Poor Fridge further problematize the terrain.