halvardjohnsonbio

What is there to know about Halvard Johnson? He was born in Newburgh,

New York, in 1936, the son of a Methodist minister and his wife. He lost his

childhood in New York City and in small towns in the Hudson Valley--

Middletown, Kingston, Yonkers. He also lost his religion. For years he was

limited to walking, running, and sleigh-riding--until he took up biking. When

he was delivering newspapers, he passed long, hot summer afternoons riding

out onto the black-dirt flats just outside Kingston, New York, learning that

being lost didn’t matter as long as one knew where one was.

In 1955, he graduated from high school in Yonkers, New York, (just outside

New York City) and traveled to central Ohio, where he pleasantly passed the

next four years at Ohio Wesleyan University, waiting on tables at a local

restaurant and learning a lot about the finer points of playing Ping Pong. He

majored in English and philosophy there, learning little about either.

He spent the summer of ’58 hitchhiking around the US, and the following year

experimenting with a nine-to-five life in NYC before setting off to do graduate

study at the University of Chicago, where he lucked into an MA in English and

began to earn his so-called living as a teacher of composition, recomposition,

decomposition, and sometimes littering . . . I mean, literature.

The autumn of 1964 saw him driving into El Paso, Texas, to begin a four-year

stint teaching Miners. Then, in 1968, as friends went off to Chicago to be

bludgeoned by the local constabulary, he shipped off to Puerto Rico, where,

in a little mountain town called Cayey, he dozed through faculty meetings

conducted entirely in Spanish, and taught classes in which students who had

just come to Puerto Rico from New York and couldn’t speak a word of Spanish

sat right next to students who lived fifteen minutes away from Cayey, couldn’t

speak a word of English, and had never even been to San Juan. During these

Puerto Rican years, he put together and had published his first of four

Four years later, Johnson was on the move again. This time to Europe, where

he and his wife spent a year as vagabonds, wandering the roads of Germany,

In 1973, he began to teach for the University of Maryland at various army

posts and airbases in Germany and, briefly, in Turkey, transferring to Asia to

do more of the same in Japan and South Korea.

In 1984, he returned home to the US (you can go home again) and resumed

his East-Coast life, along with all his childhood allergies to . . . well, you name

it--dogs, cats, trees, grass, mold, the poetry of Rod McKuen, and so. His years

abroad had left him permanently twisted, permanently bent--always able to see

the US as being every bit as weird and strange as anywhere else he’d ever been.

At the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an artists’ so-called colony just north

of Lynchburg, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he met

Lynda Schor, a writer and artist he is delighted and amazed to be the hubby of.

Together Johnson and Schor shared ten years in Baltimore, before cutting their

ties (almost all) there, and removing to New York City, where they live today in

an apartment house just a short walk from the apartment house Johnson lived in

as a boy, and from PS 41, where he attended kindergarten and first grade. It’s

also only a few blocks from the dismal walk-up on Morton Street where Johnson

lived during most of his “nine-to-five” year.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, there’s his so-called career as a writer . . . as a teacher

. . . as a writer. Well, let’s be kind. He has a taxman who doesn’t snicker when

he identifies himself as a writer/teacher, even though the amount of money he’s

made from writing is roughly equivalent to the amount of money he’s found on

sidewalks and in parking lots. Back in the late 60s, he was walking along the Rio

Grande with someone who suggested he send a manuscript to someone. And over

the next ten years or so four slim volumes were published. These you can find

online at the Contemporary American Poetry Archive. There’s Changing the
Subject, which consists of poems Jim Cervantes and he wrote online at the Blue
Moon Cafe listserv over a period of six or seven thrill-packed weeks back in the
summer of 2002. That book was published on genuine hold-in-your-hands paper by
Red Hen Press in Los Angeles. It’s also available via Amazon.com. There are free
online chapbooks available at xPress(ed).

Appendix: For what it's worth (FWIW), Johnson would be mad as hell to read that
his life after all that's written above has been a mere appendix to that, and he'd probably
be right in feeling that way. It's just been a few years since most of that was written,
during which time Lynda and he have discovered (for her) and rediscovered (for him)
Mexico, where they've been spending more and more of their time in San Miguel
de Allende in the state of Guanajuato. San Miguel (SMA) lies on mountain slopes
in the central highlands of Mexico, at an altitude of about 6,300 feet--about one
foot for every gringo in a town of 80,000, most of them complaining about how
many gringos there are in town nowadays (compared, say, to the late 40s, when
there were maybe five or six, most of them complaining about how many gringos
there were in town). Johnson's usual snide response to such complaints is, "If you
want to see a lot of gringos, try living in New York."