The Work Room Interview: Jenny Johnson on Expanding the Erotic
Interview by Cassie Archdeacon
CA: In your course description, the Audre Lorde description of the butter pellet is amazing! How did you come to read Lorde's essay, and what has kept you drawn to it over the years?
JJ: When I was in graduate school, one of my mentors, Rick Barot, sent me a copy of Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” by mail. I guess, he’d had a gut feeling that I needed to read it. He was right! I’ve returned to it again and again ever since, learning something new from it every time. Most recently, I came back to it reading Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown with a group of friends in Pittsburgh. brown’s anthology opens with a reprint of Lorde’s essay. Together, we read the essay aloud around a dining room table. This time around I noticed that this idea-driven prose, which is so much about fully feeling, only contains one remarkable sensory image – a memory Lorde has of pinching a pellet of margarine. This erotic kernel from Lorde’s essay sparked the idea for the craft seminar. I am excited to teach fellow poets how to explore such kernels in their work.
CA: You also refer to the difference between Eros and explicit sexuality. How do you define the two in your own writing?
JJ: Sex is something that has felt far too prescriptive and/or narrowly defined in my life, especially growing up as a queer woman and a gender non-conforming person. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. Whereas to my mind, eros is all encompassing. Eros is sensation. Eros is self-consensual. Eros is mutually consensual. Eros is feeling tethered to your own awareness of what you and others might desire in a given moment. Eros is texture. Eros is surprise. Eros is play. Eros is finding language for. Eros is living acutely at your own edges – however you define those boundaries.
Lately in my work, I’ve been interested in what happens if we walk eros back to early moments of joyful sensation, which can be unexpectedly quotidian. Here’s an example. A recent poem of mine, “Submission,” begins with a memory I have of being in the backseat of a car on a long car trip as a kid. For what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes, I held a hat that I loved out the window, feeling the strength of the wind. The whole time the hat was in my grip and sailing about in the wind, I kept asking myself, “What if I let go?” At last, I did. I let go of the hat. And then as expected, I lost it and I felt kind of silly. But I’ve never forgotten the internal sensation of asking myself: What if? For me, eros is also what if.
CA: Who are some of your favorite writers, or what are some of your favorite, works that “expand the erotic”?
JJ: For the craft seminar, I’ve assembled a big packet of poems which includes work by Sappho, Nikki Giovanni, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Paisley Rekdal, Richie Hoffman, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, Gerald Stern, Sharon Olds, and Carl Phillips. Some other writers who’ve expanded my sense of the erotic include Samuel Ace, Rickey Laurentiis, Dorothy Allison, francine j. harris, Garth Greenwell, and Patrick Califia. I’m also a big fan of the work of Daemonumx, creator of the leatherdyke zine Fist. But ultimately, I think the expansion of the erotic is something that we can all be co-creators in. So, I’m excited to see what folks generate when we gather together in October!