Ronald Johnson (1) (1935–1998)

Ronald Johnson, who died in 1998, is little known outside the circle of assiduous students of avant-garde poetry, and for good reason. A West Coast recluse and peripatetic visionary, Johnson's major accomplishment was the epic poem ARK, most of which was either published in limited small-press runs or is out of print. ARK is thus a kind of holy grail of lost American weirdness; the edition I just finished reading is a softcover release from now-defunct North Point Press, dating from 1981. This intriguing backstory I took as an invitation to enter a poetic world of deep, strange, nearly incomprehensible verse that yet moves on a bizarre inner logic all its own. If you can imagine the Old Testament crossed with abstracts of theoretical physics and then narrated by William Blake at his loopiest, then you're approaching what reading ARK is like. It is probably needless to say that I'm hooked, and have ordered, at exorbitant expense, a used copy of the 1984 Dutton hardcover of the next 16 books (or "beams" in Johnson's quasibiblical nomenclature) of this strange, subterranean odyssey. What this all means, if anything, is anyone's guess.… (meer)

My introduction to Johnson was Ark, which I continue to be awed by. However, The Book of the Green Man is a completely different kind of book. Stunning bucolic imagery put into conversation with major Romantic and Augustan figures. I get little sense of pressure put on the blindspots of Romanticism--and I suppose I don't get the usefulness of that from a 1967 perspective. Charles Olson is an obvious influence over this work, but unlike Johnson here, Olson offers historiographic awareness of nature as an ideological construction, and he refutes Romanticism as much as he condones it. I do like the material texture of the poems--their engagement with sources, and the organization of the book into a sort of daybook of the seasons. It enacts the changes in the world in interesting parallel structures over the course of the year, but again, without much pressure on conventional nature writing with the exception of the field guide discourse that resists glossing over any plants (as would be more typical of some nature writing). Its a good book to read to get a sense of the early formulations of what he would more astoundingly accomplish in The Valley of Many Colored Grasses (1969).… (meer)