Giving a voice to memory

Former Plainsboro resident and poet contributes to township’s veterans memorial.

By: Michael Redmond
Early on Memorial Day, Plainsboro Township will be dedicating its newly constructed Veterans Memorial Garden at the Municipal Building with appropriate ceremony.
   Among the township’s invited guests will be Charles H. Johnson, a longtime resident of Plainsboro until he moved to Red Bank last year. A Vietnam veteran and a journalist, Mr. Johnson contributed three poems to Plainsboro’s new memorial stone, which honors the American dead of all wars.
   Mr. Johnson’s poems have appeared in various literary magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, and he has read and taught workshops as a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation poet. His first book, Tunnel Vision, is just out.
   The buzz is hot. Tunnel Vision "marks the advent of a major new talent on the American literary scene," writes Maria Mazziotti Gillan, one of New Jersey’s most prominent poets.
   The poems that Mr. Johnson write for the Plainsboro monument are new poems (they are not in the book), but a section of the five-part Tunnel Vision consists of Vietnam war poems. Vietnam is where Mr. Johnson became "totally consumed" by writing, he said during a telephone interview.
   "When I got out of jungle, I started writing poems. The poems I wrote for the memorial come not only from my experiences in combat, but from a sympathy for what the people at home had to endure, the uncertainty, and from the experience of coming home from a war and realizing that you’ve experienced what the people at home cannot begin to understand. Without poetry, I wouldn’t be able to keep the war as a part of my life that doesn’t hurt."
   A native of Philadelphia who grew up in Deptford (Gloucester County), Mr. Johnson began his journalistic career right after the war, with what he called "the old Home News" (New Brunswick’s city newspaper), now the Middlesex County-based Home News Tribune), where he serves as night editor.
   The journalist’s eye for the telling detail, ear for inflection and commitment to clarity inform Tunnel Vision throughout. Mr. Johnson writes what he knows, and what he knows is contemporary America — he shows a special feeling not only for his grandparents’ Virginia farm and the Millstone River but for the grit that’s quintessentially Jersey. "Riding is never easy in Central New Jersey" begins "Easy Riding," a hymn to the freedom of the open road that only a commuter could love.
   Read Mr. Johnson’s book. It’s real. And really good.
Tunnel Vision (Warthog Press, West Orange, N.J., ISBN 0-942292-17-0) can be ordered directly from Charles H. Johnson, 17 High Street, Red Bank, N.J. 07701. The book is $12, plus $3 shipping. Princeton Community TV/Cable 30A will be broadcasting an interview with the poet by Bill Hart of Vox Artis daily at 6 p.m. from Monday, May 26 through Sunday, June 1.The dedication of Plainsboro’s Veterans Memorial Garden will take place at the Municipal Building on Monday, May 26, at 9:30 a.m.