New Website — Romantic Writings & Gothic Poetry

It has been nine months since my last post.  However, my new website has been live for about a month and I already have four significant posts published with another one planned for next week.  Next week’s post is, not surprising to those who know my consuming passions, about a letter that John Keats wrote to his beloved Fanny Brawne 200 years ago in 1819.  The letter contains some of the most hauntingly beautiful passages ever written.  Perhaps my love for Keats’s life & writings is allowing a bit of hyperbole, but if you share my enthusiasm for literature and all things poetic, then you just might like some of my posts—two Keatsian posts are already up as well as one pertaining to Percy Bysshe Shelley and nightmares.

I meant to have this new website up a year ago, but moving to Europe last summer, then to England & Scotland for the fall & winter, disrupted much of my writing-related plans such as finishing my long poem from 2017, rewriting my not-even-close-to-being-finished novel, and reworking several medium-length poems that I feel somewhat satisfied with.  However, unexpected interruptions of old projects aside, this unexpected journey did indeed inspire quite a bit of new writing.  One such new piece in particular is a poem of Gothic fantasy written under the influence of despair & madness beneath a full moon at Whitby Abbey while I wandered alone long past midnight—I will never forget that night and I can still feel its cold influence.  The poem, somewhat medium-length at 15 stanzas and 150 lines, will be published in a small New York press later this year along with four other poems of mine.

My new website also contains a small handful of some of my previously published poetry.  Most of it leans rather heavy toward the dark side, but I plan on posting some lighter work later this year as well—my Tolkienesque poems of fairy-story especially.  So, to those who suffer profoundly from consuming ecstasies for all things Gothic, for writings ghostly & supernatural, for whisperings of madness, melancholy, and all beautiful seductions of Fantasy & Romanticism, then please visit my new website by clicking the appropriately chosen Böcklin painting below or the link directly beneath it:

Or just click on the link here:   https://www.clayfjohnson.com/

Or, to go directly to my Poetry page, please click here:  https://www.clayfjohnson.com/poetry

Keats’s Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818

Anyone who has read this neglected Blog (a miserable seven posts since 2016!) or follows me on my seemingly better-loved Twitter account will know that I adore the life & writings of John Keats.  I won’t call it an obsession—I have enough of those!—for it makes me sound psychotic or like some knee-crooking fanboy, and Keats deserves better than that.  No, but perhaps it’s that I understand him, that I feel a sort of knowing yet unconscious sensitivity to his writing that I share with none other—and though this understanding and sensitivity fills the emptiness in my life with beauty, it too haunts that same emptiness with mystery and melancholy.

For me, and for many others, Keats’s letters are as poetical and fascinating as his poetry.  T.S. Eliot called his letters “the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poet.”  Although my unflinching and unapologetic bias agrees wholeheartedly with Eliot, I don’t think it’s that extreme of a statement when one considers Keats’s age when he wrote them—it seems many people forget that Keats died at only 25 years old, while the most beautiful and mysterious of his letters and poetry were written years before that.  My letters & emails written during my early twenties are the “most unpoetical of anything in existence” (and I mean this in a bad way!) and deserve a far more torturous fate than simply being burned or deleted.  Unfortunately and fortunately for me, my so called enlightenment occurred in my mid-twenties and most of my writings before that were logical and unimaginative nonsense.  Sure, I knew of poetry and literature during that time of my life, but I simply had different interests and goals then, and my Muse was not yet whispering as much to me then, and Her loving stranglehold had not yet brought me to my knees…

Horror Writers Association's Poetry Showcase Volume IV

This post is shamefully ten months overdue.  However, in my defense, ten months ago I was helplessly self-absorbed in writing a long poem that, at the time, was my greatest obsession—from March until July it occupied almost every passing thought.  Even more bizarrely this uncontrollable obsession was plaguing my dreams and causing me writer nightmares, which mainly consisted of reoccurring visions of being full of interesting ideas yet having nothing to write them down on.  I believe these nightmares stemmed mostly from occasions at the library with my old and tired laptop and not securing a table near an electrical outlet, which would cause me almost maniacal anxiety—I would literally sweat with rage when people would sit at one and have hours-long conversation about the most trifling of petulant knavery and peasant-affairs.

Anyway, before I digress about something else such as the selfish creativity of poetic self-absorption or perhaps an even longer tirade about how my obsession last year was all for naught for no proper publishing house will ever want such fantasy verse, let me get to the point of this little blog post’s raison d'être:  my publication in the Horror Writers Association’s Poetry Showcase Volume IV.  Among my meager four publications last year, this poem, titled “My Little Green Secret”, was by far the most important and dearest to my heart—not only because it was selected among the Top 3 of all submissions which included making the cover of the anthology that published my first poem just a year prior, but also because I actually enjoyed writing it.  Sometimes poetry does not come “as naturally as the Leaves to a tree”[1] and can be rather painful to work out.  Other times it can be a little too ethereal and esoteric for some (even for myself!) and have no real meaning other than whatever mysterious thoughts were passing through my mind at the time—this is not always a bad thing since proper poetry is oftentimes born from this random brooding and musing, but sometimes—just sometimes—my strangeness can be a bit much.  And because of this strangeness that creeps into my writing every now and then, combined with other reasons and inspirations (mainly from rereading Tolkien), last year I began writing more narrative poetry which, as the term implies, aims to tell an actual story complete with a clear beginning, middle, and end.  I like to believe that with this poem, and in just 35 lines, I was able to capture this sort of story-telling quality with at least a somewhat clear beginning, middle, and unquestionably disturbing end, and for that I am somewhat satisfied.

Opening Post

Welcome!

My name is Clay F. Johnson and this site is dedicated to both my own poetry and to the poetry that I love, both new and old.  I have been writing poetry and short stories off and on (mostly off) for the past five years—university studies, family/social obligations and career expectations have all added to periods of limited creativity or "off-ness."  Even though I have had to refuse my artistic inclinations at times, writing poetry is dear to my heart.  I like to classify much of my poetry—not all—as Dark Romantic, a sort of "pleasing melancholy," an ethereal Gothic of ruin and decay amid unspoiled nature in all her beauty and chaos.  And with regard to all things Gothic and Romantic, some of the poets whom I never hesitate to turn to include Coleridge, Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and my beloved Keats.

Even though I have been writing intermittently for the past five years, I have never attempted to publish any of my work—until recently, that is.  I began sending out some of my favorite poems to journals and magazines that I was familiar with back in March of this year and I am extremely excited to announce that one of those poems has been accepted for publication.  Being a complete novice to publishing etiquette, I am hesitant to publicize exactly where my work will appear just yet.  However, I will say that my poem will appear in a collection of poems and will hopefully be available on Amazon later this summer.  You can be sure I will post that link when I find out more.

Being that I am just now creating this little website and that I have absolutely no followers, I cannot say with certainty what will become of it.  I would like to think that I will slowly get followers and even befriend other poets and writers whose work I admire (and vice versa) and use this as a medium to share and support their literary endeavors.  Or perhaps the dust will begin to settle immediately after publishing this piece, and thus my first and last BlogSpot post will be in the early hours of Friday the 13th, 2016—an already dark and gloomy spring eerily reminiscent of that "year without a summer" of 1816...okay, I'll stop.  But no matter which direction this site takes, you can rest assured that I shall never stop writing as long as living blood and inspiration flows within me.

Thanks for reading and please keep checking back.

Clay F. Johnson