“I was drawn to the piece because it’s austere and minimal.”

Jay Johnson walked into Northwind Arts Center and was captivated by a spacious, black-and-white photograph of water, land and sky by Port Townsend photographer Brian Goodman.

“I’m a minimalist, you might say – visually, and also in my writing,” Johnson said. The photograph gave her a time and a place to dream.

Johnson, an artist and poet who lives part-time in Port Townsend and part-time in Des Moines, Iowa, was at Northwind on Tuesday, Aug. 8 to participate in an evening of ekphrastic writing, during which writers were invited to stop by and respond to “Expressions Northwest,” an art show that’s part of the annual Art Port Townsend festival.

Looking at the photograph more closely, she noticed its title, “Moon Glow,” which brought her back to a popular 1930s song by the same name, “Moonglow.”

The song began running through her mind as she looked at the photograph. “It must have been moonglow / way up in the blue,” the song begins. She remembered her father playing it on vinyl when she was a girl.

Johnson seated herself in a chair, facing the photograph, and began to craft a poem.

CHANGE IN THE PLAN

At the time of beginning this writing journey, Johnson erroneously thought the song (written by Will Hudson and featured in the movie “Picnic”) was written by Henry Mancini (of “Moon River” fame).

So – thinking that Mancini wrote “Moonglow” – she began to recall and write about the time she met Mancini, quite randomly, on an airplane, leaving her awestruck, she said.

“I’m in the midst of recollection and reverie,” she said, “trying to bring the experience of sound and visuals together, to make it somehow harmonious.”

Johnson later realized Mancini was not, after all, the composer of “Moonglow.” “Oh gosh – there goes my poem!” That was her immediate reaction.

She thought about it a bit more, and realized she was OK with the mixed-up recollections. And she became excited instead to see where that realization would guide her.

It’s all part of the writing process, she said, and finding yourself making mistaken connections can happen.

“It’s called pre-association,” she said. “All of a sudden, something comes up and it connects with something you’re thinking about.”

BECOMING A WRITER

Johnson became a writer via visual art. She was a sculptor and a sketcher first. Then, she started writing little captions for her art.

“I liked what I wrote, and I thought, ‘Well, I made a little picture, only with words.’”

She soon became entranced with writing poetry. She took classes and went to university. She helped found the Des Moines National Poetry Festival, and also attended the Centrum Writers Workshop, discovering Port Townsend to be a place she could call a part-time home.

“The moment I walked in, I knew I had found my flock,” she said. All the people at the conference were wearing Birkenstocks. (“I was the first woman in Des Moines to ever buy a pair of Birkenstocks,” she said, laughing.)

Johnson found writing poetry to be more difficult than visual art, and that excited her. Furthermore, she discovered poetry encompassed all of visual art together. “I see this art incorporating so many visual aspects of what I used to be drawn to,” she said. “It’s kind of a culmination of everything.”

A poem can take form, she said. A poet can put “weight” on the end of a line with highly charged words, or use a dash that visually brings the reader to the next line.

Color and texture can be introduced through language. And poetry can be musical with its rhythm and rhyme: “It’s almost like a jazz musician that keeps changing the tune as they go along,” Johnson said of the writing process.

A MINIMALIST

One aspect Johnson knew she wanted to capture in her ekphrastic poem was the energy she perceived emanating from the photograph “Moon Glow.”

“The piece that I’m writing about is so minimal and so austere that I prefer to keep the poem that way,” she said. “So, it’s not going to be long, involved, complex or adorned,” she said. “It’s going to be hopefully as minimal as the photograph,” she said.

Johnson is a devotee of minimalism in her everyday life.

“[Minimalism] means continually stripping away something until you get to the bones of the truth,” she said. “I try and find the right thing to say, and the right thing that I want to place in a space.”

Johnson noted that when she was a younger artist drawing human figures, she always liked to start with the bones, and then sketch the flesh.

“I always liked to see the bones of things,” she said.

In her Des Moines home, the architecture is “pretty astounding,” she said, so she keeps decorations minimal so as to see the beauty of the space itself.

“I can’t stand clutter,” she said. “I’m drawn to things that give me space.”

Goodman’s black-and-white photo gave her that space.

What she loved best about the piece was that there was no focal point to it, and it gave her the space.

“It gives you room to move into the photograph and just feel what it’s emanating,” she said.

FINISHING THE POEM

Johnson started her poem Aug. 8 and finished it six days later, on Aug. 17.

Writing the poem took her down many paths. She delved into moon-themed pieces, listening to Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata,” performed by Mancini, and then “Moonlight Serenade,” a piece written by Mancini that references Beethoven’s famous piano piece.

Soon enough, though, Mancini slipped like moonlight through her fingers. “[He] kind of slipped in as a springboard and quickly slipped out,” she said.

She returned, instead, back to the song “Moonglow” and left Mancini on the plane where she’d met him. He no longer had a place in her poem. “I was left with this song that I loved,” she said.

She returned to memories of her childhood, of her dad playing “Moonglow” on vinyl, and she also re-watched the scene from the movie “Picnic” that featured the melody from “Moonglow.” She described that scene as so hot “you need a fan.”

She finished the poem Thursday, and found herself a bit shocked by how effortlessly it came together.

“It took me to a place where I didn’t expect it to go,” she said.

Now, Johnson is happy to relax on vacation in the San Juan Islands with her 14-year-old grandson and a friend. Her grandson, who’s visiting from Seattle, has written some poetry himself, she said, and she’s hoping they can perhaps write together.

She’ll try to make it back to a reading at Northwind on Aug. 24 – if she can catch the ferry on time. And maybe she’ll change the poem before then; she never feels her poetry is ever really complete.

But for now, she said, “I’m going to let it be.”

THE POEM

“Reverie” by Jay Johnson / Inspired by “Moon Glow” by Brian Goodman

“We seemed to float

right through the air”.

Remember Moon Glow,

the song, the piano?

Those lines as smooth

as water,

how it played you?

You were sixteen

and listened

to Moon Glow spinning

from your father’s vinyl 33.

You listened for hours

to that touch.

The sound seemed

to slide across water,

letting you remember

the iconic scene

from Picnic –

Kim Novak pressed

to William Holden.

You can find them

waiting for you

in the archives

to play them again,

dancing under the stars

just like they did

in 1955.

But here I am

staring at a photograph,

water, and moon glow,

losing myself in this liquid light,

hearing the music,

but now only pianissimo,

while I vaguely see a shadow

that just passed through –

and notice these horizontal lines

like the strings on a piano

and this glow –