The Anvil's Children by my best friend Jason W. Johnson is a collection of poetry which represents one of the first works of Noumenism, an ideology based on the fully artificed exploitation of what is essentially psychic automatism. Johnson's youthful brilliance is evident in this innovative book in which painterly scenes are depicted, revealing religious imagery hidden in the poet's subconscious, yet deliberately expressed as conscious metaphorical thought. It continues the esthetic of Surrealism: the surprising meaningfulness of chance occurrence, making the poetry analogically reminiscent of the visual art of Antonio Muñiz. Like Muñiz' fumage paintings, The Anvil's Children is full of images which portray the irrational, yet show a profound spirituality. The poet's search for the sacred in The Anvil's Children may reveal a reluctant Catholicism, with moments that parallel the role of woman as preternatural mediatrix in André Breton's Nadja (1928). Johnson's writing therefore shows a real understanding of the esthetics of contemporary art, with mental pictures that express the current transition in poetics from deconstructive to reconstructive postmodernism. This awareness, which is nothing less than an extraordinary sense of Jacques Derrida's plus-prèsent, takes the form of a paranoiac-critical self-portrait that operates according to a transcendental law by which visionary experiences are systematized as independently varying parameters. Close reading reveals a sophisticated intertextuality in which each part of the text is a transformation of some previous element, resulting in intensely recursive poems that bear a remarkable resemblance to serial poetry: a highly concentrated narrative remains incomplete by design. Serial poetry is a unique product of 20th-century postmodernism, but, in Johnson's hands, the genre has been revitalized. The use of automatism reveals the truth of the unconscious, and with the techniques of Noumenism, this truth is put into combinatorial, often paratactic, poetic form in which repetition plus synonymy subjects the written word to virtually infinite qualification. With The Anvil's Children, Jason W. Johnson has created something of illimitable literary relevance. Buy your copy here or here!
Hats Off, Gentlemen, a Genius!
ZANE GILLESPIE
After six years as Minister of Music at Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church (UMC) in Holly Springs, MS, I was recently called to continue to work to address public engagement in music participation as Director of Music Ministries at First UMC in Water Valley, MS. I am a Composer, Theorist, and member of both The College Music Society as well as The Poe Studies Association (PSA). I am also an active pianist and vocalist, specializing primarily in church music. My paper entitled ““Mesmeric Revelation”: Art as Hypnosis” has been published by the international, peer-reviewed journal Humanities. In addition, another paper of mine entitled “A Model of Triadic Post-Tonality for a Neoconservative Postmodern String Quartet by Sky Macklay” has been submitted to the peer-reviewed Music Theory journal Perspectives of New Music. At the end of February 2015, I served as Chair for the session entitled “Aesthetics and Philosophy” at The Fourth International PSA Conference in New York City. On June 21, 2014, my Quartet for Alto Saxophone and Strings, a commission from concert saxophonist Walter Hoehn, was performed as part of Concert V of the Eighth Annual Belvedere Chamber Music Festival held at Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Memphis, TN. Characteristically neo-romantic (in the original sense of the word), my music earned me the Nancy Van de Vate Award for Composition three times from the University of Mississippi Department of Music. A native of Pontotoc, MS, I hold degrees from the University of Mississippi (BM; MM), and the University of Memphis (DMA) where I was the 2011 recipient of the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music's Smit Composition Award. I live in Memphis, TN.