BY KATHY HALL
Correspondent
Charles H. Johnson, an award-winning poet and journalist, began writing poetry while stationed in Vietnam. ‘The poet is a little god.” Charles H. Johnson often quotes this line by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro in his poetry workshops. “When you write a poem,” he explains, “you create a world — you get to run a world on a sheet of paper, no matter where you happen to be.”
Johnson, who lives in Red Bank with his wife, speaks from experience. He wrote his first poem in Vietnam. A graduate of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he was a member of the ROTC, Johnson volunteered for combat as an infantry lieutenant.
“In college I had gotten special training with a Ranger unit. I had been taught how to survive in the jungle,” he said. “I wanted to keep as many of my people alive as I could, and I did. I didn’t lose anybody. That’s something I’m very proud of.”
Johnson served as a platoon leader for six months and 21 days in the jungle west of Saigon near the Cambodian border. When he rotated back to be a staff officer, he started writing.
“I wrote about what I experienced out there in the field,” he said. “We had a lot of stories coming back, but nobody told the story of my men who had no say in going over there. They didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be the last man to die in Vietnam, and they knew that nobody cared. If it weren’t for the poetry, I wouldn’t be talking about Vietnam.
“I had about 25 poems in a little book I had put together,” he recalled. “The only person I showed them to was my father. He didn’t make any comment on it because at the time, nobody really commented about Vietnam. So I just put them away.”
His love of poetry was rekindled in 1996 when he was asked to review a book by Maria Mazziatta Gillan. Through Gillan, Johnson became involved with the Paterson Poetry Center and started writing poetry again. He still reviews poetry for the Home News Tribune where he is night editor.
Interest in Johnson’s Vietnam poems has grown. His poems are inscribed on the Plainsboro Township’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and he has done several readings at the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Holmdel.
Johnson’s poetry also captures more pleasant experiences. “I wrote a three-poem sequence about our honeymoon in Aruba,” he said. “There were certain things I wanted to remember. So I wrote those poems, and when I go back to them, it’s like reliving our honeymoon.”
Johnson participates in the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poets in the Schools program and offers workshops throughout the Paterson school system and at the Middlesex County Youth Center. Last year he served as lead poet for the Paterson Immigrant Poetry Program.
“It’s a natural extension of what I love,” he explained. “I don’t do it for economic reasons. I just love poetry, and to share my love and enthusiasm for that art form with young people, I would hope, lets them know that whatever they love, they can share.”
Johnson encourages students to read poetry as well as write it. “The best thing about teaching poetry,” he said, “is to see them smile at the recognition of their lives in some poem by someone they have never heard of, someone from a different culture or a different era, and to see them understand that ‘Hey, everybody is alike.’ ”
Although he studied journalism and English at Rutgers, Johnson emphasizes the creative process rather than literary conventions in his workshops.
“I always remind them you can’t fail poetry,” he said. “You’re not being judged on how technically sound your poem is. It’s the creative process that counts, the chance to get outside whatever is in you.”
Johnson sees a change in attitude toward poetry as children grow.
“Little kids are more receptive to poetry” he said. “They grew up on nursery rhymes so they see that poetry is fun — they like sounds, they listen, their senses are all alive. Little kids love the sound of words and the tactile sense of words when they speak them. Once they get to high school, they have been polluted by society and by their friends and have become somewhat jaded. It takes a while to get them to realize that poetry is something they can do, and everybody does it well.”
To help make poetry more accessible, Johnson presents it as a part of today’s culture.
“I remind young people that the music they listen to, rap to hip hop, the lyrics — it’s all poetry. It’s motivated by the same reasons as Homer wrote his poetry or the bards who would sit around campfires and sing their poetry to the villagers.”
Johnson laments the loss of poetry as a populist art form.
“ ‘Beowolf’ was recited to people who had no schooling because they had to work hard every day. They enjoyed the poetry because it related to them, it spoke to them,” he said. “At some point, we got away from that and became enamored of education so we would just speak to other educated people and not to the people who need poetry.
“I was teaching a workshop in Greenfields’ detention center and ran into a young man who had been at the [Middlesex County] youth center,” he recalled. “Afterward I found out that he had a negative reputation with the other inmates. He took a leadership role in that workshop and the young men got a different perspective of him. They saw him not as a sullen introvert but as someone who had a skill, who loved something they didn’t know he loved and he was able to communicate that love. Even the guards said they didn’t know he had it in him. That’s what poetry had done without trying to do it,” he concluded.
Johnson is a 2004 Paterson Poetry Prize finalist for “Tunnel Vision,” his first book of poems and a first-place winner of the 1998 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. He has had poems published in a variety of literary journals and newspapers including the Paterson Literary Review, Rockhurst Review, Connecticut Review and The New York Times. He is currently seeking a publisher for “Sam’s Place,” which continues his exploration of the Vietnam experience.
“I got the idea if I could juxtapose free verse with haiku and have the Asian form refer to what’s going on in America and the free verse refer to what’s going on in Vietnam, it might pique a publisher’s interest,” Johnson said.
After Vietnam, Johnson was in the Army Reserve until 1978 and then transferred into a National Guard unit in Red Bank, where he was company commander until he retired from the Army in 1983.
“That’s one of the things that surprises people about me, when they find out that I had such an extensive military career,” he said. “I don’t fit into the mold of a poet. The older I get, the more pleased I am that I’ve experienced life on a variety of different levels because at least my poetry is going to be real; it’s not going to be theoretical.”
Although he found his initial inspiration in battle, Johnson sees poetry as a balancing force.
“I know about the other side of life,” he said. “I know how one can use power to get another person to do what you want but poetry, creativity, seems to be the most powerful form on the face of this planet because even in the midst of war, which I experienced, people are still making love, babies are still being born, a flower grows, and we can’t overlook that.”
EXIT 116
By Charles H. Johnson
Six miles north of Red Bank
at Exit 116 on the Garden
State Parkway another world
waits quietly to be resurrected.
Memories buried deep at the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
come to life through words
that name a fallen father, son
or brother. Each mile marker
on the highway locates morning
motorists for their dash to work
with no need of map coordinates
or a compass. The past can be
avoided completely by escaping
into suburbia off Exit 114 where
no jungle can be seen. But
just two miles farther north
at Exit 116, cars race past
the place where the fog of war
daily lifts to reveal who was lost
and never can make it home again-
except as a name and dates
on a circular wall that protects
nothing and no one at all.
Charles H. Johnson, Jan. 25, 2004 Originally published in “Poetic Reflections of Monmouth County”