Lisa Johns profile picture

Lisa Johns

I am here for Friends and Networking

About Me

"Drop a needle," Euclid suggests, "then wonder as you search for it why you don't see it immediately." As an artist, writer, poet and performer, I'm fascinated with images, with light, with all matters of perception. My earliest influences come directly from my mother who is deaf and has been since birth. She instilled a way of "seeing" that relies heavily on intuition and perception and requires a vigilant registering of the movement, energy and form of my surroundings. I started writing at a relatively young age, primarily as a way of communicating matters of sound without making any direct references to sound. Then later, after living and studying abroad, I became fascinated with the conveyance of words and images while communicating things in a wholly different order — using different formations, constructions and gestures. For me, poetry is a direct extension of all that.

My work has a distinct imagist bent and is influenced by the New York School of Poets, the French Surrealists, the Beats and the various artists who emerged from the West Coast minimalist movement, namely James Turrell. I'm currently working on my second collection of poetry entitled The Line between Lip and Liquid as well as a nonfiction project involving the artist James Turrell and his work on the Roden Crater. I've lived in cities across the U.S. and abroad and hold an eternal soft-spot in my heart for Faverges, a small town in the French Alps. I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 2003 and currently live in Laurel Canyon.

____________________________________________

My Interests

Music:

Radiohead, Arab Strap, Efterklang, Queens of the Stone Age, Serge Gainsbourg, The Doors, Miles Davis, Neutral Milk Hotel, Noir Desir, Billy Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Yo La Tengo, My Bloody Valentine, Miossec, The Flaming Lips, Beck, PJ Harvey, The Beatles, Morphine, Fugazi, U2, Beastie Boys, The Cure, Slowdive, Brian Eno, David Byrne, Elliot Smith, Pixies, New Order, Cocteau Twins, Neil Young, The Black Angels, Francis Cabrel, Iggy Pop, Modest Mouse, Depeche Mode, Bela Fleck, Death Cab for Cutie, Pinback, Sigur Ros, Bashung, John Coltrane, Kate Bush, Moby, Johnny Cash, Joee Corso, Chris Pierce, Interpol, Dead Can Dance, Kabat, 8mm, Mars Volta, The Good Listeners, Don Cherry...

Movies:

Wings of Desire, Delicatessen, The Lost Boys, Im a Big Liar, The Little Prince, Lawrence of Arabia, Lucia et el Sexo, Amlie, The English Patient, Being There, Le Grand Bleu, La Cite des Enfants Perdus, The Usual Suspects, Indochine, Singin in the Rain, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Happiness, The Bicycle Thief, Life is Beautiful, La Dolce Vita, Bladerunner, The Deer Hunter, Au Revoir les Enfants, Casablanca, Strangers on a Train, Les Nuits Fauves, The Godfather, Il Postino, The Last Emperor, The Getaway

Books:

Literary & Artistic Influences: Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'hara, Ezra Pound, Paul Célan, John Ashbury, Robert Creeley, Galway Kinnell, Aram Saroyan, William Saroyan, Charles Wright, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Anne Sexton, Sarah Slome, Brad Listi, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Stéphan Mallarmé, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Picasso, Carson McCullers, Vladimir Nobakov, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Henry Miller, Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, Michel Butor, Hermann Hesse, Mahumud Shabistari, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Jeunet, Win Wenders, Frederico Fellini, Robert Frank, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Eugene Atget, Brassaï, William Klein, Diane Arbus, Tanto Santo, Milorad Krstic, Miro, Max Alpert, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Robbert Flick, Robert Irwin, Bill Viola, James Turrell, Noel Riley-Fitch, James Ragan, Sid Stebel, Clayton Eshelman, Ari Levenfeld, Howard Johns

Heroes:

my pops

My Blog

the pondered finanlity

you say it is a waste of time, a waste of time you say all the wrestling with words or the consideration of warm milk at bedtime, or the oak leaf splitting its leaf-edges or the unseeding of the...
Posted by Lisa Johns on Thu, 14 Jun 2007 08:00:00 PST

the way

we can find our way out of the cosmic mudhole out of the loose lock of green out of the breezeway out of the nebulous misunderstandings out of the soundproof tenements out of the dissolving cap...
Posted by Lisa Johns on Thu, 24 May 2007 03:13:00 PST

shedding the offending skin

with a rug too thick for our handpalms too coarse for the tongues of our crossed knees we stretched our skin out like tablecloths like old Russian handbags of brown leather our eyes of yellowing pages...
Posted by Lisa Johns on Mon, 14 May 2007 04:14:00 PST

staring down the self

Experienced railroad ties pierced through the skull, still functioning brains and frontal lobes and sounds of chewing up and swallowing downExperienced tambourine explosions as a drop of water strik...
Posted by Lisa Johns on Mon, 05 Feb 2007 02:44:00 PST

angels sleeping on slivers of pine

we are the silkmoth freed from the cobweb with the end of a broomstick handle the silkmoth freed from the cobweb, wingstuck, disillusioned we are the aging of lakes, the dynamic equilibrium of water ...
Posted by Lisa Johns on Mon, 14 May 2007 04:57:00 PST

acquiesce

In the square Djemma el Fna, amid snake charmers rioting atop milk crates overturned and storytellers unraveling their tongueseeds across the sand, amid a field of ankles stained with henna tattoos...
Posted by Lisa Johns on Mon, 05 Feb 2007 02:23:00 PST

a burst of fast action potentials

A BURST OF FAST ACTION POTENTIALS the prevalence of movement contains patterns of discharge spokes of decaying action in the voltage-sensitive acres of our acoustic allusions acres of alfalfa ma...
Posted by Lisa Johns on Fri, 28 Apr 2006 01:31:00 PST

Poetry / Visual Art Collaborative

27 November 2005 @ 7:30 p.m. POETRY IN SPACE  - a collaborative art event featuring an international group of poets and visual artists.  Located in a former car showroom in downtow...
Posted by Lisa Johns on Mon, 14 Nov 2005 07:42:00 PST