Jeff T. Johnson

I will wear the mask

PennSound podcast #73: Emily Abendroth and Jeff T. Johnson

PennSound podcasts

In this PennSound podcast, Jeff T. Johnson and Emily Abendroth exchange perspectives on how modular, nonlinear writing can open into enactive relationships that press readers and listeners alike beyond individual experience toward “critical empathy” and its relational tactics and strategies for living in common amidst social struggles that require collective reflection and navigation. 

March 28, 2022

Back to 'A Whole House'

A 'Trouble Songs' addendum

Jacket2 Editors

Jeff T. Johnson presents “A Whole House,” a new installment to his “Trouble Songs” project.

In 2015, we published “Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics,” Jeff T.

Janky materiality

Artifice and interface

Jeff T. Johnson

We live in machines but are not machines. Restless forms imagine new presents, where past and future meet. As becoming-digital beings, we retain and engage the problem of embodiment, which needs a world, needs other forms, needs to die. Death is our stake: neither early nor late.

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. — Amiri Baraka 

Poetry is heard; it is the heard thing. — Erín Moure

Materiality and embodiment

September 13, 2019

Filter, impose, trespass (PoemTalk #131)

Syd Zolf, 'Human Resources'

PoemTalk
From left: Jeff T. Johnson, Whitney Trettien, and Amy Paeth in the Wexler Studio of the Kelly Writers House.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Jeff T. Johnson, Whitney Trettien, and Amy Paeth joined Al Filreis to discuss a passage (pp. 73–79) from Syd Zolf’s Human Resources (Coach House, 2007). Human Resources offers a critique of corporate language as inimical to poetic language, yes — and yet Zolf strongly undoes any such easy distinction. The work insists on the reality of nonsubjective language, managing to coerce this aspect of meaning up to the writing surface so that we can no longer repress its inhumanity even as we inevitably find ourselves seeking the poetry in it.

December 11, 2018

Death's head, proud flesh

A 'Trouble Songs' addendum

Jacket2 Editors
Jeff T. Johnson

Jeff T. Johnson presents “Death’s Head, Proud Flesh,” a new installment to his “Trouble Songs” project addressing the recent deaths of both David Bowie and C. D. Wright.

Last May we published “Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics,” Jeff T. Johnson’s sprawling “investigation of the appearance of the word trouble in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music.” Announcing the piece on PennSound Daily, our own Michael Hennessey hailed the article as “a remarkably ambitious and capacious project that brings together the all-too-often disparate worlds of contemporary poetry and music.” “Within,” he continued, “we find Johnson deftly discussing John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Caroline Bergvall, and William Carlos Williams (among many others) with the same skill he dedicates to St. Vincent, Dock Boggs, Amy Winehouse, and Johnny Cash.”

'Trouble Songs'

A musicological poetics

Jeff T. Johnson

Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics is an investigation of the appearance of the word trouble in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music. It is a book-length project, comprised of three parts, each broken into modular chapters, or Trouble Songs, which build on one another as a series of albums, but are also intended as remixable and programmable singles. What follows is a compilation that spans those three parts.

May 18, 2015
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