How writer, editor, instructor, and Lowertown resident Chris Johnson forms poems: “one drip at a time”

By Ben Ladouceur

A fact about poets: if you give fifty of them the same topic, they’ll write you fifty very different poems. “Everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” Elizabeth Bishop famously cried about a trout. Confronted with the same genus, Anne Carson once noted, “You can write on a wall with its heart. It’s because of the phosphorus.”

Another fact: poetry publishers and magazine editors support poets with unparalleled passion, and rarely with robust coffers. Canadian poets pay their bills with day jobs, as teachers, lawyers, bartenders, booksellers, doctors, baristas, cognitive scientists, public servants. Miss Bishop worked at a magazine, later at Harvard. Carson, according to her author bio, “teaches ancient Greek for a living.” Fifty poets will write fifty different fish poems. They’ll also attest to fifty different livings.

Maybe more than fifty. One approach is to accumulate a number of livings in the literary world – special opportunities to put to use the skills of the poet: an eye for detail, a way with words, the patience of a saint. Ideally, they’ll be able to keep a few hours of the week to pursue their own writing. This is the less common approach – and it’s the one taken by Lowertown East poet Chris Johnson.

“The funny thing is,” says Johnson, “I thought I would find The Thing – one full-time job – and then that would be what I do for the next forty years. It worked out differently.”

Johnson was passionate about poetry during university, co-editing Carleton University’s literary magazine, In/Words, during their undergrad and graduate studies. Before finishing their master’s degree in 2014, Johnson joined the team of Ottawa-based lit mag, Arc, as coordinating editor. Four years after that, they became the magazine’s managing editor – the person primarily responsible for one of Canada’s most widely read lit mags.

Three years ago, Johnson also began teaching a course at Carleton on how to make a literary magazine. This was a fitting application of their vast poetic toolbox. And most recently – in December – Johnson became an editorial assistant for BC-based book publisher Nightwood Editions. (Editor-in-chief Silas White is another poet with a day job: he is the mayor of Gibsons, BC.)

The whole while, Johnson has been publishing poems in literary journals and anthologies, and joining forces with other artists, in Ottawa and beyond, on sound poetry performances and collaborative chapbooks.

“A lot of people who go to [literary events] probably go because they want to support a certain author, buy a certain book,” says Johnson. “But you can also go to support the literary community as a whole. The community aspect is something that I thought about for a while, and I try to emphasize that whenever I can.”

Supporting the artists around them – magazine contributors, students eager to learn about the literary world, authors both emerging and established – is, indeed, a throughline in Johnson’s artistic activities. 

A chapbook, by the way, if you don’t happen to know, is a slim volume of writing, rarely longer than 40 pages, often stapled or handsewn. “walking in a downpour / and a poem is / forming / one drip at a time,” Johnson writes in their latest chapbook, 320 lines of poetry (Anstruther Press, 2023). They’re currently at work on a full-length manuscript of poems – that is, when there aren’t other poets’ works to see to press.