Strumming a Lyre

Ronald Johnson is a much too nearly lost wonder. His masterful epic ARK secures his rightful spot as one of the essential North American poets carrying on in the radical tradition grounded in the nineteenth century of the Transcendentalists and Whitman—Dickinson up through the Modernist context of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and William Carlos Willams and beyond to his more immediate near—contemporaries, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. Johnson holds his own against any of these poets. At the time of his death in 1998, Johnson’s work was little recognized outside of already familiar circles. After having for years lived from off author proceeds of his cookbooks, Johnson was forced to leave his beloved San Francisco, returning to his native Kansas and living with his father. At the time of his death he was employed as a gardener.

In the years since his passing there have been a number of Johnson publications, notably To Do as Adam Did: Selected Poems (2000), his final collection, The Shrubberies (2001), his rewriting of Paradise Lost (1667) via the subtracting of lines, RADI OS I-IV (1977), and the expansively rich collection of criticism, Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (2008). Yet Johnson’s popularity remains somewhat below radar, heavily slanted towards a more coterie prevalence among scholars and poets. For too many years, the original complete edition of ARK published by Living Batch Press has been broadly unattainable, too often exorbitantly priced via online booksellers.

Johnson composed ARK over the course of twenty years with the clear intention from the very start to complete an epic work. The completed poem represents nothing less than a textual vessel for ongoing poetic transformation of readers towards an ever greater cosmological consciousness. As hokey as that may sound, there is nothing hokey about Johnson’s project. In his short commentary “A NOTE” which serves as an afterword of sorts to the poem, he notes how the construction of the work takes shape in a structural metaphor: “An architecture, ARK is fitted together with shards of language, in a kind of cement of music.” He describes the project as “Based on trinities, its cornerstones the eye, the ear, the mind” composed of three movements The Foundations, The Spires, and The Ramparts each consisting of thirty-three poems entitled beams, spires, and arches respectively per movement. ARK remains one of the most rigorously constructed poems of its time. Johnson further sketches out his overall structure for readers:

The first book goes from sunrise to noon, the second ends at sunset with only Mt. Ossa set on Pelion reflecting back light. The third is a night of the soul. My central myth is that of Orpheus and Euridice, the blessed argument between poet and muse, man and his anima. Orpheus, who made the trees bend and animals one with his lyre. Orpheus, the beheaded voice floating downstream.

In an interview with Peter O’Leary, now Johnson’s literary executor and the editor of this edition, Johnson describes ARK as “Talking to myself. Talking to the universe.” Going on to remark in the context of referencing the myth of Orpheus and his lyre: “ARK is all a strumming of the lyre.” He also speaks of his mother and father, a dancer and carpenter, as being “the main characters” of the poem which places further emphasis upon the charting of personal constellations at work throughout.

There’s an endless fabric of sources and inspirations Johnson weaves across the poem. Figures ranging from Charles Ives, Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval in Hautrives, Blake, Thoreau, Zukofsky, and Whitman appear along with extensive phrasings from musical compositions, such as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “America the Beautiful,” and Protestant hymns. Freely quoted references proliferate as Johnson exploits his own lifelong interests and enjoyments. “Pattern laps pattern, and as they joined, Charles Ives heard the nineteenth century in one ear, and the twentieth century out the other, then commenced to make a single music of them.” Johnson’s self-assigned role as the poet of ARK is to bridge a...