Life & Wisdom Quote by Denis Johnson

Johnson is doing that useful, unfashionable thing: insisting on craft over aura. The jab at “modern verse plays” isn’t anti-poetry so much as anti-poetry-as-alibi. When he says they’re “mostly about the poetry,” he’s skewering a recognizable cultural move: language turned into a prestige object that crowds out the oldest theatrical contract, which is that something has to happen, to someone, in real time, with stakes an audience can feel in their bodies. Verse becomes a velvet rope. You admire it, you don’t enter it.

The line “It’s more important that the play is first” carries a double meaning. “First” is priority, but it’s also primacy: drama as the engine, poetry as the fuel, not the destination. Johnson, whose fiction often marries lyric intensity to hard narrative consequence, is defending momentum, conflict, and character against the temptation to treat the stage like a reading series with lighting cues. The subtext is almost moral: if your writing is so delicate it can’t survive action, it’s not brave enough for theater.

Context matters here. Johnson came up in an American literary ecosystem that often rewards the beautiful sentence more than the lived scene, and he watched “poetic” become shorthand for serious. His critique flips that hierarchy. Poetry onstage should be a weapon, not a perfume - sharpen the situation, complicate the silence, make the turn of a scene inevitable. If it doesn’t, the verse is just self-regard with applause lines.