JOHNSON, Ronald

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Nationality: American. Born: Ashland, Kansas, 25 November 1935. Education: Columbia University, New York, B.A. 1960. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1954–56. Career: Poet-in-residence, University of Kentucky, Lexington, 1970–71, University of Washington, Seattle, 1972; the Wallace Stegner Advanced Writing Workshop, Stanford University, 1991, and Roberta Holloway Poet, University of California at Berkeley, 1994. Awards: Inez Boulton award (Poetry, Chicago), 1964; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1969, 1974; National Poetry Series prize, 1984. Address: 1490 Prince Street, Berkeley, California 94702, U.S.A. Died: 4 March 1998.

Publications

Poetry

A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees. Highlands, North Carolina, Jargon, 1964.

Assorted Jungles: Rousseau. San Francisco, Auerhahn Press, 1966.

Gorse/Goose/Rose and Other Poems. Bloomington, Indiana University Fine Arts Department, 1966.

Sunflowers. Woodchester, Gloucestershire, John Furnival, 1966.

Io and the Ox-Eye Daisy. Dunsyre, Lanarkshire, Wild Hawthorn Press, 1966.

The Book of the Green Man. New York, Norton, and London, Longman, 1967.

The Round Earth on Flat Paper. Urbana, Illinois, Finial Press, 1968.

Reading 1 and 2. Urbana, Illinois, Finial Press, 2 vols., 1968.

Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses. New York, Norton, 1969.

Balloons for Moonless Nights. Urbana, Illinois, Finial Press, 1969.

The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk. Highlands, North Carolina, Jargon, 1969.

Songs of the Earth. San Francisco, Grabhorn Hoyem, 1970.

Maze/Mane/Wane. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Pomegranate Press, 1973.

Eyes and Objects. Highlands, North Carolina, Jargon, 1976.

RADI OS I-IV: San Francisco, Sand Dollar, 1977.

ARK: The Foundations 1–33. Berkeley, California, North Point Press, 1980.

ARK 50: Spires 34–50. New York, Dutton, 1984.

Other

The Aficionado's Southwestern Cooking. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1968.

The American Table. New York, Morrow, 1984.

Southwestern Cooking, New and Old. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1985; revised edition, as The Aficionado's Southwestern Cooking, Albuquerque, Living Batch Press, 1993.

Simple Fare: Rediscovering the Pleasures of Real Food. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Company Fare. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1991.

Translator, Sports and Divertissments, by Erik Satie. Edinburgh, Wild Hawthorn Press, 1965; Urbana, Illinois, Finial press, 1969

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Manuscript Collection: University of Kansas, Lawrence.

Critical Study: In Vort 9 (Bloomington, Indiana).

Ronald Johnson comments:

(1970) I have been primarily influenced by the Black Mountain school of poetry, i.e., Charles Olson out of Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, and Williams.

To see the world in a grain of sand, to see the word in a grain of sand, this is where the poem begins. Thoreau questioned, "Who placed us with eyes between a microscopic and a telescopic world?" All is built from this position, a solid construct in the apparently invisible, exact words illuminating the ineffable. A grain of sand if looked at long enough waxes first as glowing, then as large as a moon. The architects tell us that large and small are a matter of placement and that galactic and atomic are simply hummingbirds within hummingbirds, etc. To write a poem is to begin with words, and is it not where word becomes wor(l)d the primal poem exists? And it is only an arc from there to whirled and "the push of numerous hummingbirds from a superior bush."

(1974) After ten years of writing and walking out there in the trees, I have found, as William Blake knew all along, that the trees are in the head.

(1980) I am at present at work on a three-book work titled ARK.

(1995) After twenty years work, ARK is at last completed and is soon to be published by Living Batch Press in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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To encounter Ronald Johnson's work, whether for the first or the hundredth time, is to slam against the universe and fall back dazed and changed. Intelligence is its foundation, but mystery plays an equal role. Indeed, Johnson is at home with opposites, and striking one against another is his chief technique.

Johnson's erudition, obvious throughout his work but especially so in the experimental ARK books, may occasionally intimidate. More often, however, it inspires awe. The opening of the early poem "The Different Musics," the title of which serves as the first line, exemplifies his more accessible work:

   come simultaneously
   across water,
   accumulating fume, spray, the flex of ripple.
 
 
   As fume, from the Latin fumus, Greek
 
 
   thymos: spirit, mind. "See
 
 
   DUST, THEISM: cf.
   FEBRUARY, FURY, PERFUME, THYME."
 
 
   (Cf. means "compare" &
   "leads to useful, interesting, or related material that is not,
   however, essential to an understanding of the meaning.")

Opposites abound here: lyricism and epistemology, list and sentence, concrete image and abstraction, word and abbreviation, and statement, poetry, and prose.

"Stereopticon" may serve as an ars poetica of sorts:

   What we wanted
 
 
   was both words and worlds
   you could put your foot through. To be
 
 
   eye-deep in air,
 
 
   and the inside of all things
   clear
 
 
   to the horizon. Clear
 
 
   to the core.

Johnson desires the abstract ("words") and the physical ("worlds") simultaneously and to be at once within "all things" at the farthest reach ("the horizon") and at the heart of the universe ("the core"). In essence he wishes to become the point at which opposites are united into one, and he has achieved his wish. He is able, for example, to weld seamlessly the scientific to the poetic so that one becomes dependent upon, even invigorates, the other, as in "Four Orphic Poems and a Song":

   Newton
   —it is said—did not show the cause of an apple falling,
 
 
   only the similitude between the apple
 
 
   & the stars.

In Johnson's work, however, words and space are equally important. In RADI OS—based on Paradise Lost, from which Johnson "erased" most of Milton's first four books, leaving only the words suiting his vision—word and wordlessness (i.e., space on the page) create both tension and meaning. Johnson's title is Milton's with six letters erased—Pa radi se L os t—extracting the highly technological world ("radios") from the prelapsarian while juxtaposing them. Johnson erased all but thirteen words of Milton's first thirteen lines:

   O
   tree
   into the World,
   Man
   the chosen
   Rose out of Chaos:
   song.

RADI OS beguiles, making sense despite occasionally odd syntax, capitalization, or punctuation, as in

   we
   build up
   dream,
   this place
   Beyond
   height or depth, still first and last
   sit we then projecting
   another World, called Man.

The epic grandeur of Paradise Lost has been absorbed by RADI OS and continues in Johnson's ARK books.

When, in "Beam 28," "voices" tell Johnson "TO GO INTO THE WORDS TO EXPAND THEM," his ARK volumes seem less elusive. The lushness of earlier volumes is evident throughout the ARK collections and is often counterpointed by scientific, historical, or sociological data or by found materials that force readers to expand their imaginations, as in "Beam 1":

   Clouds loom below. Pocked moon fills half the sky. Stars
 
 
                      comb out its lumen
                           horizon
              in a gone-to-seed dandelion
   as of snowflakes hitting dark waters, time, and again,
 
 
                     then dot the plain
   186, 282 cooped up angels tall as appletrees …

His wordplay also transforms the ordinary, often with humorous results: "daimon diamond Monad I /Adam Kadmon in the sky" ("Beam 10"). Johnson even challenges our concept of poetry. "Ark 38," for example, is not a poem in the traditional sense of the word but "just over six minutes of … songs of … birds" taped by Johnson and broadcast by a radio station. The "poem" that we read in ARK 50 consists of the section titles Johnson has given to the birds' songs. In the mid-1990s, after two decades of working on the ARK project, Johnson finally completed it.

Regardless of his experimentalism, erudition, and reliance on—even reverence of—other texts, Johnson has a lyric voice, at once unique and common, strange and familiar, whose subjects are as old as that of "Adam Kadmon":

I sing
the one wherein
all colors of this whirling world begin
and end.

—Jim Elledge