In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—L. A. Johnson

Your two poems, “Pine Needles Fall on a Green Snow” and “Asymmetry” appear in Volume 28. Both poems feature father figures and colorful imagery. What inspired these poems?

My father died suddenly in 2019. It was a shock to me as a person and to my writing practice. I stopped writing for more than a year. These are some of the poems I wrote when I eventually started writing again.

Both poems draw their images from my mom’s neighborhood: I was on a fellowship year during my doctoral program when my father died, so I ended up moving home for a few months to support my mother in the aftermath of his death. So though I wasn’t writing, I was soaking in her Northern California environment in a way that I hadn’t since I was young. Especially images of pine trees became immensely appealing, I don’t know why. And I spent time in local parks, something I never did otherwise in my life in Los Angeles. It took me a long time to return to writing, but when I did, all those images were waiting inside me, like gifts. 

In that same poem, there are several points of repetition, used cleverly with the line spacing, that make it feel like an echo. Did you think about that as you were writing the poem? What was the feeling you wanted to evoke with this poem?

Thanks for noticing the unusual form. When I did start writing again, I returned to the page knowing I couldn’t write the same way I used to. I’ve always loved a strong line and a contained form, but I felt stuck. I didn’t feel like a lot of forms I knew allowed me to embody my grief. I wanted to find emotional structures for my poems. I wanted emotional line breaks and syntax, and so I started experimenting with how to do that. Repetition, but ugly repetition, felt like a good way to emotionally express grief. 

In “Asymmetry,” the lines go back and forth between couplets and singles, mirroring the title. When did this formatting enter the poem?

This is a poem that I’ve played around with a lot. For a long time, I thought this poem wasn’t working at all and completely abandoned it. At some point, I got interested in it again and I think at that point it got titled “Asymmetry.” When that title entered the piece, it caused me to adjust the form to the variation of couplets and monostiches. I like that stanzaic variation because of how much pressure it puts on the single lines. I think sometimes poets hide boring lines in couplets, because couplets are so perfect and intrinsically beautiful. I tell my students couplets are like putting on a top and jeans: an outfit that always “works.” Take any poem, put it in couplets, and you can hide your flaws in their beauty. Disrupting that cohesion is what the single lines are trying to do here. They’re trying to be a little ugly and dramatic, and to resist that perfection of simple couplets. I’m not sure if they achieve that, they might still be too beautiful. I’ve been reworking this poem since publishing it in Water Stone, so we will see where it ends up landing formally! Playing with form is what I love so I consider this the fun part. 

Fathers and loss feature heavily in these poems. What other themes do you return to?

Since my father died and I started spending significantly more time in graveyards, I’ve been writing about graveyards and different sites of mourning. Graveyards became of interest to me for the way they attempt to cosset grief: they keep the mourners and the dead out of view. But grief doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you’re in line in the checkout aisle and the person in front of you is buying Werther’s and it reminds you of your loved one, and a profound grief comes over you. As a culture, we don’t want to look at grief, we want to forget about it. I am also always aware of how temporary they are; all graveyards will eventually “fill” and become places no one goes any longer. I’m especially interested in what happens to those people in those forgotten places.

I’ve also been exploring poems set in places possibly unexpected or temporary for mourning, such as roadside memorials. Grief that doesn’t fit easily into a container (emotionally or in the case of poetic form!) is emerging as a primary theme for me. 

What is your writing and editing process?

My friends tell me that I’m a prolific writer, but I consider myself very slow. My poems take years. I need the gift of time to revise my poems, and my poems are borne of revision, so they need a lot of time. 

I like to do a lot of low-pressure handwritten drafting, most of which doesn’t lead anywhere. The process is intentionally unorganized and messy, and I lose a lot of drafts. I believe good ideas come back if they are good ideas. I store up these scribbled drafts over a long time and months or years later, I type some of them and try to shape them into a poem. Sometimes the first draft might just have an image or a few images, and the final draft changes drastically. I feel like I write about my father all the time but I can tell you that probably neither of these poems were about my father in the first draft and a few versions after; it sometimes takes a long time for me to understand what a poem actually wants to be about and, in this case, it might take a while for my father to enter the poem even though he’s been the topic all along. 

I often think about it less as writing and more that I’m trying to help the poem to speak. It can take years to find out what a poem wants to say. 

What are you working on now?

Thank you for all these lovely questions! I love Water~Stone and I’m so glad to be a part of this fantastic journal!

I’m working on editing my debut book of poems, tentatively titled Lost Music, which is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in fall 2027. I am editing each poem included like my life depends on it! It’s been a long journey to my first book, which was disrupted profoundly by the sudden passing of my father, so I’m really looking forward to finally achieving this long-held dream. 

I’m also in the middle of writing a super long essay for the forthcoming critical edition of the poetry of Hildegarde Flanner, which is coming out in the Unsung Masters Series and is being edited by Devin Kelley and George Kovalenko. I love her work! She is a fantastic California poet. My favorite of her poems concern sex and ecology, and she’s so freshly inventive. I hope that my essay can help invite readers to her work. I want her to be known more broadly.

L. A. Johnson is the author of Lost Music (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming 2027) and an Associate Editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf Press, 2026). She holds a PhD from University of Southern California, where through academic years 2023-25 she was a Mellon Humanities and University of the Future Postdoctoral Fellow. The winner of the 2022 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize, her poems appear in The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is currently a Hughes Fellow at Southern Methodist University. Find her online at http://www.la-johnson.com.