This is a true gem of modern literature. Reviewing the new edition in the Boston Review, Dan Beachy-Quick noted the interconnections between reading and writing modeled by Johnson’s work: “part of what is so remarkable in Johnson’s project,” he remarked, “is the empowering sense that any genuine reading of such a work as Paradise Lost accomplishes within each reader a similar work: a reading as individual as the mind that reads.”, Johnson’s epic work, ARK, was published in its entirety twice: first by a small press run out of an Albuquerque bookshop in the 1980s and 90s, and in 2014 by Flood Editions. This world, it insists, ‘is paradise, / odd words in legion / beating around the veritable bush’ (that is, the burning bush). Stars comb out its lumen / horizon.” Johnson meant to unify the wonder of science and the pre-scientific postures of awe, listening for “A god in a cloud, / aloud,” and trying to teach us to see what he could see—“The front of the eye is a convex glass, alive.” And “ARK” is literally full of things to see, not only brief descriptions but diagrams, a handprint, and plenty of concrete poetry, deriving “form from form from form from form” through the shapes that letters make on a page. shush our inner apes.

Born in Ashland, Kansas, Ronald Johnson moved with his family to Topeka in the 1950s. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ace your daily challenges from health, work, and relationships. It's the season of pain, but you're not alone. He seems to have had the air of the saved. He has successfully married the expansive projectivist poetics of Charles Olson's Maximus with the spare, lean and architectural music of Louis Zukofsky, and in the process created something wholly original. On his return to Topeka, Johnson worked as a cookie baker at Ward-Meade Park. Johnson called the ninety-nine parts of his poem in progress “beams,” “spires,” and “arches,” as if he were making both vessel and cathedral; the whole thing took him twenty years to finish. Rather than read it through as you would read a novel, or an epic, or another kind of book-size poem, you can wander through “ARK” as if through a sculpture garden, or a gallery, marvelling at the installations you prefer, passing by those that leave you cold. At best, though, those echoes show us how to enjoy the visual, acoustic, and metaphysical resonance that “ARK” finds all over the place, on and off and even under Earth. ARK is a masterpiece and I wish it was more widely available at an affordable price. “As mole toil / to loam / Antarctic pole,” the poem will tunnel from everything to everything, its “least testament” to “expound / plowed clay.”, There is not much overt sexuality in “ARK,” but you can find a lot of pride: Johnson attempted to make a religious poem that would accept everybody, especially those whom convention had rejected. The little house wren in it, his cinnamon supercilium, the drab pattern of his plumage. delight! In 1970, the poet and cookbook writer Ronald Johnson, reared in Dust Bowl Kansas, just back from England, and newly settled in San Francisco, began to fashion “a lofty Temple of words, images, and music”—a long poem that he titled “ARK.” “This structure was in the form of a spaceship, to carry mankind, along with the wonder of old earth, to the stars,” he later explained. Explore acceptance, change, perception and more in this collection where form and free verse traverse a variety of voices, themes and styles. His first book of poetry, A Line Of Poetry , A Row Of Trees , 1964, contained many specifically Kansas poems such as "Quivira" (partially quoted below).

Seas to Mulberries: Poetry by Frank Watson, Beneath the Same Stars: A Novel of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, The Art of Listening Prayer: Finding God's Voice Amidst Life's Noise, The Tao Te Ching 101: a modern, practical guide, plain and simple (Zennish Series). Please try again. Subsequent volumes included The Book of the Green Man (1967); Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses (1969); an erasure of Paradise Lost entitled RADI OS (1977; 2005); the 99-part metaphysical poem, ARK (1980, 1984, 1996, 2014), based on architectural features—among them the Palais Idéal in Hauterives, France, and the Watts Towers in Los Angeles; and The Shrubberies (2001).

His first book of poetry was A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (1964). We know what advice “ARK” gives us (“delight! Like Johnson, he imitates creation myths, adapting Lucretius, Ovid, and the book of Genesis: “Before the sea / and before the lands … Nature / was an unatomized sundering of sames: called / chaos.” “God dwells not [on] an inaccessible mountain but a profounder sphere of things.” Although O’Leary earned a Ph.D. in religion, he excels in the language of scientific fact.

It was really neoclassical in some odd way. It isn't easy, but it's rewarding and deserves to be more widely known. Another page offers the pentagonal.

delight! When he began, he was part of a community of experimental poets, and of young gay men, in San Francisco, and he had published with houses large (such as W. W. Norton) and tiny (such as the Jargon Press, operated by Johnson’s former romantic partner in England).

A must for all lovers of great poetry.

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