Midwest Story Lab
“The deep web” may seem an obscure topic for poetry — it’s an obscure topic regardless — but in his new collection Gatekeeper (Milkweed Editions), poet Patrick Johnson finds it compelling and provocative.
Johnson, who grew up in Fitchburg, discovered the deep web through a couple of classmates while an undergraduate at UW-Madison. “I set out to understand it,” says Johnson, who majored in English with an emphasis in creative writing and a certificate in material culture before heading to Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned a master’s of fine arts in poetry.
The deep web is a parallel web world, not indexed by regular search engines, accessible only via special software and hardware that garbles, or anonymizes, the user’s path through others’ random user activities. Once anonymous, users do things on the deep web that they can’t or won’t do on the more familiar web. “Ammunition sales, child pornography, this is where a lot of terrorist recruitment happens,” Johnson explains. But it has a less dark side, too, he notes: It’s a place where people with no insurance can buy cancer medications or hormone therapy, and citizens of oppressive regimes can blow the whistle without fear of consequences for speaking the truth.
Johnson entered his graduate studies in poetry knowing he wanted to ultimately “do something different,” recognizing it’s hard to get paid to write poems. He is currently studying to be a physician’s assistant at UW-Madison, graduating in 2021. The job appealed to his interest in social justice.
“My goal is to be the kind of clinician who gives people [regardless of socio-economic status] the same opportunity to have good outcomes,” Johnson says. Ultimately, his experiences with healthcare “feed back to the poetry.” The poem “wake (systemic),” is based on his experience of taking a body to the morgue.
Much of what he has found on the deep web scares him. “What kept me going was a curiosity of how people are using anonymity,” Johnson says. “What is liberatory and what is scary about that? Do people try out a new aspect of themselves that they feel that they can’t in real life for whatever reason?”
The poems, a mix of lyric verse, prose, and even charts, share a central speaker Johnson calls “Empath,” who falls in love with a second character, an anonymous user of the deep web. “That brings up the question of what we really know about the people we talk to on online platforms.” This, Johnson believes, is a central concern of millennials.
Ultimately the journey conveyed in Gatekeeper becomes an investigation of identity itself — not unusual ground for lyric poetry, but here, the question of what any person can ever know about another person is amplified by complications of the virtual.
Traveling the deep web reveals vulnerability, says Johnson. “What does it feel like to go out on a limb without knowing you will be okay, revealing something to another person?” It’s also an “opportunity for liberation, or a new future without shame,” says Johnson.
In the poem “war (back-and-forth)” Johnson foregrounds the physical nature of an internet text space, even including the shapes of the cursors in his text, while also drawing on the space as a metaphor. “Experience the split screen of the self: a masked figure below an all-reflective surface,” the poem’s speaker writes. “Speculate what ‘actually happened.’ | Unbox that imaginative zone.”
