But in the sonnet, he found a home for both his maverick tendencies and his attachment to tradition: He even made practiced, dedicated use of rhyme.
"[4][5] John Casteen identifies the urban landscape in which the poem unfolds: "The Incognito Lounge" is set in an apartment complex and several bars of what I assume is probably Tucson, Arizona—Its speaker, with "my eyes closed and two / eyeballs painted on my face," is both present and not present, expressing but not perceiving.
The poem's ambiguities mount as we get comfortable with its setting: the helicopter both asking and telling "whatwhatwhatwhatwhat" the synaesthetic gesture of the 'boiled / coffee that tastes like noise.
'"[6]Nicholas Niarchos notes that "The Incognito Lounge" is set "in an apartment block with a [narrator] who revels in sightlessness ("I go everywhere with my eyes closed and two / eyeballs painted on my face").
He inhabits a world "right slam on the brink of language," where things tend to meld into one another…"[7] In describing the sonnet's first strophe or stanza, critic Richard Miklitsch observes that Johnson abandons "acoustics…metrics…rhyme and enjambment" in favor of "an obsessive image…in this case, one of the most intimate and seemingly familiar of images, the human face."