Interview with Julie Swarstad Johnson on Pennsylvania Furnace — December 21, 2019
Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of Pennsylvania Furnace (2019), editor's choice selection for the Unicorn Press first book series. Her chapbook Orchard Light is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press in 2020. She has served as Artist in Residence at Gettysburg National Military Park, and she is the co-editor of Beyond Earth's Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (The University of Arizona Press, forthcoming 2020). She lives in Tucson and works at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Christopher Nelson: The poems of your book move around in place and time: mid-19th century Pennsylvania, present-day Sonoran Desert, Philadelphia, Colorado—the pastoral and industrial juxtaposed, the fighter jet and the bee. Place and time have the significance here we would expect from a novel. Tell us about place and time as your subjects, not mere incidental facts, as is common in lyric poems.
Julie Swarstad Johnson: Thank you for your thoughtful attention to this book. I think of place—the land itself—as a character in Pennsylvania Furnace. Place, with all the layers of time and history that it carries, shapes our daily lives, whether we’re aware of it or not. In the sprawling cities of the west, both the land and human history on it are often literally distanced, bulldozed under in favor of the present. In rural, central Pennsylvania, I found that the remnants of the 19th century are right on the surface, sometimes crumbling deep in the woods, sometimes adjacent to the main road through town—and yet that history and that more visible landscape can still be invisible to the people who live in the middle of it. My hope for these poems is that they make this reality apparent, that we live in the push and pull of place and history right now. I see the same tug in the relationship of the pastoral and the industrial: They enable and disrupt each other. I might want to say that I’m looking up at a mountain, but I’m really looking at it through layers of power lines, over the roofs of houses that track the undulations of the desert.
Nelson: I think of your candid examination of that push and pull in “Phoenix, Arizona.” The desert, you note in the poem, is a beautiful place that attracts millions of people, with its “March when poppies / and globemallow burnish / the mountainsides,” yet its “cars spit out the rot-brown / smog I inherited, smog / I rage against from / my own car.” Did writing about these places change your orientation to them or lead you to insights about yourself?
Johnson: Moving away from Arizona to Pennsylvania and then coming back again—one of the main through-lines of this book—deeply changed my ability to see and to write about where I had come from and where I was returning to. It was a shift from west to east, from desert to ridges and valleys, from metropolitan to rural. The experience of leaving my lifelong home was tremendously disorienting but also ultimately productive, as it led me to explore the place I had come to with a degree of urgency, trying to root myself in something that was initially so unfamiliar. The title of the book, Pennsylvania Furnace, speaks to that process of change. It’s the name of a real place, close to where I lived in State College, but it is also a description of what Pennsylvania has been for me: a site of transformation, and not a simple or tidy one. That change provided new context and new opportunities to see where I had come from in a more nuanced way.
Nelson: I marvel at how these poems ennoble work without being sentimental. The woodcutter, the mule teamster, the furnace filler—all engaged in work that shapes them, feeds them, and, arguably, ruins them. What drew you to these characters, dignified in their poise against hardship?
Johnson: My first information about iron furnaces in central Pennsylvania came in the form of state park signs and pamphlets, which provided quick facts about how the furnaces operated and the number of people necessary to do that work. One sign showed a pyramid of the different kinds of workers, with the ironmaster who financed the whole operation up at the top. Information about the houses, the clothing, the silverware of those ironmasters was relatively easy to come by, but I was drawn to all those people down in the lower levels of the pyramid, whose lives showed up only as checkmarks in the attendance columns of the company record books. The woodcutter—a widow providing wood to the charcoal makers in order to support her children—was basically a footnote, a throw-away sentence in a book about the iron industry. In writing these poems, I wanted to give these people a place in our memory again, imagined out from every detail I could piece together.
Nelson: I love that: the poem as a kind of resurrection or resuscitation. It makes me think of your poem “David Ford McFarland’s Notes for a Lecture at the Bellefonte Historical Society, 1933,” which communicates a similar sentiment: “Seek out / the past—your heritage stands around you, / crying for recognition before it crumbles.” To what degree was the writing of Pennsylvania Furnace also a research project?
Johnson: Pennsylvania Furnace was very much a research project, through deep reading in books and archival collections as well as physically visiting the sites of nineteenth century iron furnaces around where I lived in Pennsylvania. The project started with basic curiosity; I lived in an area that had just the right conditions for producing iron by nineteenth century methods, and there were furnaces scattered all over the place—the furnace stacks resemble large stone towers, and because they are made of stone, the stacks frequently remain even when all the other buildings around them are gone. No one could tell me much about them, but I found a wealth of information—both in older, scarce books and collections of personal papers and company records—at local historical societies, state and national parks or historical sites, and particularly in Penn State’s Special Collections. The older accounts of the iron industry, such as David Ford McFarland’s papers which are held by Penn State, proved to be an important foil to my own understanding of the region’s history. McFarland was a professor of metallurgy at Penn State from 1920 to 1945, and in his papers, I found an interest in the iron industry that felt very similar to my own, as someone coming in from outside the region and wanting to understand the physical remnants of the past on the landscape. But there are also key differences in our perspectives: For McFarland in 1933, there was a sense of unfettered possibility, unending resources, and a glorious past to protect. From my vantage in the present, when the connection between our dependence on limited resources and climate change is so apparent, I have to tell a different story. I intentionally placed McFarland’s voice next to “Phoenix, Arizona,” which critiques that same mentality alive and well in the present—in myself as much as in my home city.
Nelson: I enjoy books with a certain “texture”—a unity of voice and mind, a thematic focus, but surprise and variety in subject and style. I experience this in Pennsylvania Furnace: poems historically rich next to poems of personal reflection; poems in couplets, a bi-vocal poem in columns, a prose poem. Can you tell us about your experience organizing the collection?
Johnson: My ideas about how to organize a poetry collection come from Jamaal May, who visited Penn State while I was a student there. May described his approach to organizing his first collection, Hum (2013), as organic ordering rather than prescriptive ordering. Instead of grouping together poems with clear relations or repeated topics, he mixed sets of poems into one another, looking for the less obvious points of connection—resonant images, dovetailing ideas. When I put together the first post-MFA drafts of Pennsylvania Furnace, this approach felt right for the wide-ranging set of poems I had in front of me. I laid out all of the poems on my living room floor and just kept moving things until I saw connections. At the same time, it felt important to me that each of the three major strands of the book—Pennsylvania in the past, Pennsylvania in the present, and Arizona in the present—had a discernable arc across the book as well. As a reader, I additionally tend to prefer books broken into sections for the mental resting points those sections provide, so I was thinking in terms of creating sections as well, looking for an emotional or thematic unity in each. It’s gratifying to know that the larger sense of unity comes through those layered arrangements.
Nelson: Congratulations on your forthcoming chapbook, Orchard Light, to be published spring of 2020 by Seven Kitchens Press. Can you give us a preview? Are your subjects different from Pennsylvania Furnace? Your styles?
Johnson: Thank you so much. Orchard Light came out of a residency at Gettysburg National Military Park in early 2018, through the support of the National Parks Arts Foundation. The poems focus on a particular family that lived in the middle of what became the Gettysburg battlefield, a family of German Baptist Brethren—pacifist Christians. Orchard Light looks at this famous battle and its aftermath from the unique perspective and position of this family. I went into the project thinking I might write persona poems similar in style to the ones in Pennsylvania Furnace, but that ultimately wasn’t the right choice for this material, as I didn’t have any writing from the family themselves to work with, only writing about them. Because they were real, specific people, it didn’t feel appropriate to try to take on their voices, so the poems are all written from a close third-person perspective. It’s another book about Pennsylvania in the nineteenth century but on a very different topic and with a tighter focus, in terms of following just one family in one relatively limited moment in time. Historian David Blight has pointed out that more books have been published on the Civil War than the number of days that have passed since Appomattox; my hope for Orchard Light is that it provides a very different perspective on something familiar and that the difference might be productive for us in the present.
