On November 8th, 2000 at
7:00 pm
the BHSU English Department presented :
William Johnson
Idaho's Writer-in-Residence
Excerpt from Out of the Ruins book cover:
"Johnson pledges his allegiance to the
indescribable joy we find in creation.
He uses even the most homely objects in his poems- a worn out
pair of work
boots, a collapsed barn- to embody the past and unite it with the
present."
| By Bill Johnson from his
book Out of the Ruins: "Out of the Ruins" Once each year I come back to the origins, moss-warped slats of the porch where a bent nail groans its elegy and vines of a leggy rosebush bolt through cracks in the tongue-and-groove. Rust-gleams deify a sagging gutter and the hallway is a grotto of charred boards furbished by soot and morning-glory. An appletree leans through the back door like an ambush, the last words of a century my breath can't escape, deciduous, say, or winter. In the cracked sink moss has wised up years after the dripping stopped. I squint down into the cellar through a tangle of bent pipes to concrete bulging through spindly weeds, the trickle where a seep runs slick with algae, a stain like gangrene claiming a wound. |
 Bill Johnson speaks to students |
William Johnson, who was born in Portland,
Oregon, lives in in Idaho with his wife and three
children. He has been Idaho Writer-in-Residence since 1998 and
will be until 2001.
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