Take poems, add essays, season with some stories, simmer for a decade, and Chris Johnston finds himself nominated for an Oregon Book Award

They are some of the least commercial books you can imagine. Long, elliptical prose poems whose central themes link questions of war and peace and human nature to the nature of modernity, no less.

But the weird thing about Christopher Johnston’s books is that they are not just books qua books but books as art objects, books created to be parts of an art installation.

The art exhibit hasn’t happened yet, although it may soon. But that didn’t prevent one of the books, "Violent Homeland," from being nominated for an Oregon Book Award for poetry.

"I was so impressed by Johnston’s poetry it almost literally blew my mind," says OBA poetry judge Paula Gunn Allen, a retired UCLA professor.

"Violent Homeland" is an extended meditation on the improbability of peace and justice in the Middle East. Mixing free verse with allegory and dramatic monologue, it’s guaranteed to send scholars scrambling for their Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida.

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"It’s a metaphor for bigger ideas about how modernity is," Johnston says.

Like the philosopher Foucault, Johnston sees elaborate and invisible cultural mechanisms functioning to maintain order and control. While it’s not easy to boil down fivecomplex books, the idea is definitely not a feel-good message.

"The modern era has created an environment where peace and social justice aren’t possible," Johnston says. "The world is filled with people with such different values that co- existence may not work."

Johnston, 40, of Ashland, traces the ideas that would become "Violent Homeland" back to his days as a graduate student at Colorado State University over a decade ago. With the world lurching toward the new millennium, he was looking for ways to express some of his larger ideas.

"I didn’t know it would be a 10-year project," he says with a laugh.

Early on, his work on the project led him to abandon a doctorate program at Cornell University, turn his back on academic methodology and take up poetry.

When he moved back to Southern Oregon in 1993 to spend summers managing the marina at the resort operated by his family, Howard Prairie, he began writing the first three books of what would eventually become the five that would make up the art piece.

Writing through the winters, he produced three books the next few years: "Captive Mind, Incomplete Life," "The Autobiography of Swimming Bear" and "White Clouds." By the time he found himself editing those books, he had written two more: "Sylvia Plath Was Murdered by the Murder of Crows in My Head" and "Violent Homeland."

Editing the first three books, he made a discovery.

"They are the same story," he says.

The thread — it would in turn become the foundation of the bigger art piece (remember the bigger art piece?) — is that freedom is a constant issue running through human nature but is often undermined by human institutions.

"Captive Mind" mixes a long essay and poetry and links both to a fictional writer, a black man awaiting execution on death row.

"Swimming Bear" is the testimony of another fictional character, an American Indian whose whole life has been a poetic experience.

"White Clouds" is about a man who goes to China and finds a Taoist monastery where his grandfather had been a monk, masters the wisdom and rewrites the Tao Te Ching, the foundation of Taoism.

The thing in all this that bids to drive readers crazy is that Johnston embeds his themes in elaborate layers of verisimilitude. The old Indian, the black convict and the Chinese-American seeker, all fictional, come to life in turn. Then Johnston augments the illusion by concealing textures of prose and poetry under a Barth-like layer of fictional editors and translators so that the reader must peel back layers within layers, like Matryoshka dolls, one within the other.

Johnston shrugs.

"It seemed crucial to separate it from myself," he says. "Sometimes you can’t see something until you have the right metaphor."

To push for further explanation would seem to ask the question, why poetry?

"There are questions you can’t adequately answer in straight language," he says. "You need layers of metaphor."

He even invented a publishing history for his convict, Robert Mwalimu, that includes 1983’s "I am the Mind of Norman Bates and Kurt Gödel" and 1985’s "Faces Without Mouths, Mouths Without Words."

Then, "I am the Mind of Norman Bates and Kurt Gödel" reappears in "Sylvia Plath was Murdered by the Murder of Crows in my Head" under a byline of Christopher Johnston and Sylvia Plath!

Swimming Bear’s autobiography was purportedly translated by "Robert White Jay," an anthropologist at Southern Oregon University.

Johnston puts his reimagining of the Tao into the hands of "editor" Stephen Tzupo, for whom he also invents a life (missionary parents, immigration to America, a monk grandfather).

Johnston has since reissued the trilogy combined into one book as "The Upadhi," a Sanskrit word meaning roughly something added by chance. For example, while it might be true that smoke proves fire, it might be equally true that fire can exist without smoke. More mystery.

"Captive Mind" has a foreword by "Chris Johnston," but it’s a fictional Chris Johnston, yet another wave of the magician’s rhetorical wand. Now you see him, now you don’t.

"People have thought they were real," Johnston acknowledges of the characters to which the poems and essays are attached.

One reader was disappointed to learn that a character did not exist.

"It crushed her when I said it was fiction," he says.

Until recently, Johnston envisioned an installation in an art gallery with hundreds of books on a table, but he decided to distill it into something tighter. He hopes to have a reduced version of the installation comprising 300 books and a shopping cart on display in the main Portland library in time for the OBA awards ceremony next month.

The piece would underscore the point that illusion is part of all art, endowing the piece with a life of its own, separate from the artist.

Like the installation itself, the award-nominated book is a thing of several levels. "Violent Homeland" is a hyperbolic treatment of the story of Gilgamesh, the legendary Babylonian hero and the subject of probably the oldest epic on Earth. It is also a metaphor for the contemporary Middle East (oddly, Gilgamesh’s kingdom, Sumer, was in what is today Iraq).

"It’s the simplest piece I’ve written," Johnston says.

That’s relative, of course.

Ultimately Gilgamesh, the hero, and his rival/friend Enkidu, realize they must make peace, even without an accommodation, like it or not.

Oh yeah, "Violent Homeland" is the first in another three-part series, one that would in turn refer back to the Sylvia Plath stuff, which may be the source for yet another cycle, and so on.

Judge Paula Gunn Allen, for one, can’t get enough.

"Such power," she says, "such profundity, such strength of observation and mastery of poetics!"

But a message, Johnston says.

"Maybe as a society, we have to say we have to stop," he says.

Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

"If we’re ever going to move beyond modernity to solve these bigger problems, we have to move on. We might do it kicking and screaming, but we have to do it."

Why spend 10 years, thousands of pages and five books on a project that is part of something else?

"A psychosis?" Johnston says. "I don’t know. The things I was trying to explore required me to make these things."

Of course, as an oil painter, he always felt the work wasn’t really himself unless he was grinding his own pigments.Although the message is a stark one, Johnston says he believes we must hold out hope.

"If we learn," he says, "if we pay attention, and find the roots of our suffering, maybe we can move beyond it."

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com