Daniel Johnson

Daniel Johnson was born in Salem, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 2007, The Iowa Review, and I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio. Johnson is founding executive director of the youth writing center 826 Boston and, for over a decade, has taught writing in public schools, hospitals, and prisons. He lives with his wife, Ebele, in Boston. To experience more of his work, visit www.danielbjohnson.com.

Praise for How to Catch a Falling Knife

“Fans of poets as disparate as Troy Jollimore, Dean Young and Billy Collins will love Johnson’s How to Catch a Falling Knife—a mournful but wry homage to a childhood in the Rust Belt, to the subtle dangers of family, to overpowering love, to so many things. Johnson’s voice is clear, distinct, and he creates an indelible world that could not have existed without his verse.”

—Dave Eggers

“Daniel Johnson’s debut book has an inventive exuberance of imagery that is startling and ominous. He gives us a beautifully unpredictable account of the everyday dangers among which body and spirit must move. And he celebrates the everyday, too, with great generosity of spirit and an energetic love of our baffl ing, irrepressible, unbearable lives.”

—Reginald Gibbons

Poured into the drain, the dregs of wine.Wiped down, the mini blinds and toilet seat.

Boxed up, our shoes and taxes, my insect collection, your wedding dress;

our paperclips, records, and aspirin bottles, knives, salt, plates, books,

and dark room. � is place, another, is almost gone.

But it’s not the treelined street I’ll miss— it’s the bedroom light switch

and the fi lthy nimbus ringing it.

So let the supers paint our bedroom walla sea of pale rose. I refuse.

HOW TO CATCH A FALLING KNIFEApril 2010

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Apt. 2

Shahid Reads His Own Palm

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband, the father of a young son and a poet. Betts won a 2010 NAACP Image Award. He has been awarded the Holden Fellowship from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, the Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Institute, a Cave Canem Fellowship and a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poetry has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review and Poet Lore. Betts graduated from Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Maryland and the University of Maryland in College Park. His memoir, A Question of Freedom, was published by Avery/Penguin in 2009.

an interview with Reginald Dwayne BettsReginald Dwayne Betts

� ere is a drowned man who will tell everything, his headburied in a sentence, his head fullof feathers and nothing, of fl owers and fi sts, the broken backs men hide with bed covers, the lies wrapped in dust balls, and what happens when no one is looking in the middle of the silence, beforehe speaks, is your chance. Walk away.� ere is nothing good in his words:only stories of what happenswhen men have power in the dark.

Alice James Books: Did your interest in poetry begin before or during prison? How has your relationship to poetry changed over time?

REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS: I came to poetry while in prison, but saying that misses part of the point—the truth is, I came to poetry at a time when the sense in my world was failing. I was a kid, sixteen years old, in a place ruled and ruined by violence. Poetry, for me, brought light into that world and gave me a medium from which to try to understand this. Understand, I’m coming into manhood in a place that destroys men, and so, I’ve always felt like the poem, and all it does, helped me make sense of insanity.

AJB: What compelled you to choose poetry as opposed to any other medium?

BETTS: I’m not sure I chose poetry over any other medium. I write essays, I wrote a memoir, I’ve dabbled in fi ction. And still, I am a poet, and I think that identity marker means more to me than saying I’m a novelist, or an essayist—it has something to do with a precision with words and a stance towards the community that doesn’t exist in exactly the same way for people working in longer forms. � e poet (my idea of the poet) demands an audience, a space to have their words in the air. I once heard Etheridge Knight say that he’d rather read his poems aloud than publish books, if he had to choose, and if I had to choose, I’d like to think I’d say the same thing. (� ough I’m not always sure.)

May 2010

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A Head Full of Feathers

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Our AJB interns recently sat down to ask Reginald Dwayne Betts some questions about his poetry and he gave us an insight into his writing, life, and views on social activism.