Ronald Johnson

Ronald Johnson (1935 – March 4, 1998) was an American poet. He was born in Ashland, Kansas, graduated from Columbia University and lived in New York in the late fifties, wandered around Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for the next twenty-five years before returning to Kansas, where he died.

Life and work

At the beginning of his career Johnson was allied with the Black Mountain School's second generation, but then began to experiment with the poetics of the concrete poetry movement.

Johnson's major book is the long poem ARK, which he began in 1970 and which took him twenty years to write. It is a poem following in the tradition of the "American epic", a heritage once described as "that strange, amorphous, anomalous, self-contradictory thing".^[1] This mythology of an ambitious and protean epic project--- grand in creation and design--- beginning (arguably) with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was continued into the 20th-century by Ezra Pound's The Cantos, Louis Zukofsky's "A", William Carlos Williams' Paterson, Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems, Robert Duncan's Passages, Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, and H.D.'s Helen in Egypt. Like these works, Johnson's ARK was written over long stretches of time, becoming a lifetime "preoccupation" and "the poem of a life".

Johnson was also a well-regarded author of cookbooks, including "The Aficionado's Southwestern Cooking" (1985) and "The American Table" (1984).

Johnson's last book, The Shrubberies, was published in 2001 and, according to the critic Stephen Burt, "showed a poet no less spiritual than the author of ARK but also one given to extreme concision."^[2]

Ronald Johnson, once described by Guy Davenport as America's greatest living poet,^[3] died at his father's home in Topeka, Kansas on March 4, 1998.

References

• To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson, edited with an introduction by Peter O'Leary, Talisman House, Jersey City, 2000.

External links

• The Book of the Green Man Johnson's first published book of poems, available here on-line from "Light & Dust"
• the arches: A Ronald Johnson site Site devoted to Johnson, with biography, bibliography, interview, and select poems
• Height of Spring 1999 An essay Jonathan Williams (a poet and publisher central to 20th century poetry in America) wrote on Johnson in 1999. Williams was a mentor to, lover and publisher of, the poet. Johnson's work The Book of the Green Man came out of their walking tour of England.
• Ronald Johnson Papers housed at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas
• Ronald Johnson Page at Poetry Foundation

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