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ARK
Poetry. A new edition of Ronald Johnson's masterpiece, edited by Peter O'Leary.
"ARK is a metaphysical poem that could only have been written in our time, of which it displays a new vision. It is a late harvest of seeds sown by Blake, L. Frank Baum, the Bible , and Zukofsky, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and even a new chemistry of words and images. It is for those who can see visions, and for those who know how to look well and be taught that they can see them."—Guy Davenport
"ARK is a metaphysical poem that could only have been written in our time, of which it displays a new vision. It is a late harvest of seeds sown by Blake, L. Frank Baum, the Bible , and Zukofsky, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and even a new chemistry of words and images. It is for those who can see visions, and for those who know how to look well and be taught that they can see them."—Guy Davenport
336 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1996
11 people are currently reading
378 people want to read
About the author
Ronald Johnson
118 books21 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
January 31, 2023
At the risk of geeking out over generations, I find placing Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) in his peer group a curious task. The English-language poets born in the Thirties are a "tweener" group -- between the incredible crop of especially American poets (Chuck Berry to Ted Enslin) born 1925-1929, and the generation (Bob Dylan to Anne Carson) born in the decade (1941-1953) of America's involvement in far eastern wars.
For my purposes, I place, among this tweener group, readerly bets on Gary Snyder and Derek Walcott (1930), Geoffrey Hill (1932), Jean Valentine (1934), Johnson, Philip D. Church, Kathleen Fraser and Jay Wright (1935), Frederick Seidel and Lucille Clifton (1936), Susan Howe and Eleanor Wilner (1937) and Clark Coolidge and Ed Roberson (1939). Sufficiently chagrined by the slimness of this list I wonder on what basis I leave Charles Wright and Kenneth Irby (both 1935 ) off of it. My cull no doubt irritates the partisans of Amiri Baraka, Roy Fisher, Jerome Rothenberg, Joanne Kyger, Mark Strand, Clayton Eshelman, Sylvia Plath, and Tom Raworth. Ed Sanders (1939) I see as Dylan's exact contemporary, though he's a couple years older, Wendell Berry (1934) I love only for his moralistic blast against American Agricultural Policy, The Unsettling of America, and not for his poems. Frank Bidart and James McMichael (1939) I love for their early poems, but Bidart continues to puzzle me in his evasion of his fellow Bakersfieldian, Duncan. Stephen Dunn (1939) is a tweener-outrider, whose free verse mastery really belongs to the post-late modernist pastoral period of the War Period poets (though no doubt he is Roberson's contemporary). Seamus Heaney (1939) I also put with the war group. A pastoralist at heart, for me the figure who looms over this whole tweener group is Marion Jacobs (1930), aka, Little Walter. War period poets Fanny Howe & James Tate win prizes before anyone bothers to commit to film a performance by the tweener Little Walter.
The son of an Ashland, Kansas carpenter and lumberyard manager, Johnson transferred from Lawrence to Columbia University sometime in the mid-to-late Fifties, after an Army stint, and met and became the lover of the poet and publisher of Jargon Press, Jonathan Williams (b. 1929). Williams took him to England, where Johnson finished his first book A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (1964), as well as started his second, the seasonal poem The Book of the Green Man (1967), by which time he had become involved in the International movement around Concrete Poetry, a focus that resulted in Songs of Earth (1970). By then Johnson travelled with Williams to Southern France, where at Hautrives, Joseph Ferdinand Cheval had built his Dream Palace in 1879, having tripped (so the story goes) over a stone, picked the stone up, and pocketed it for later inspection . . . just so, there, as well, Johnson conceived of his second long poem, with Cheval's niches and vaults as his central trope. This is ARK, published three times as of this writing, in 1980 (Foundations), 1984 (The Spires), and in 1996, The Ramparts now included in an essentially self-published edition of the whole poem, one that is said (though I'm no judge) to be marred by errors committed by Johnson's publishing partner and overlooked by the poet.
The conception of a surrealist epic form for Johnson's own collagist methods is brilliant. For all the poem's obsession with geometry, with the figures an architecture makes ("hands mirror diamond maker | Adam, engoldened | enter into the Grotto"), the poem's form becomes increasingly quartz-like as its completion closes in. By the third section, The Ramparts, the form (eighteen triplets per section) is set, and the self's vaulting ambition to complete the form makes our identifying the subject in it a bit of a grind. But especially in the poem's first two parts (finished by 1983) Johnson has a freedom and tension in his syntax and lines that is quite beyond most of the pastoral surrealism of that most pastoral period of American poetry. Notwithstanding your response to pre-plans, among the poets on whom my bets are laid, only Mercian Hymns is comparable work.
For my purposes, I place, among this tweener group, readerly bets on Gary Snyder and Derek Walcott (1930), Geoffrey Hill (1932), Jean Valentine (1934), Johnson, Philip D. Church, Kathleen Fraser and Jay Wright (1935), Frederick Seidel and Lucille Clifton (1936), Susan Howe and Eleanor Wilner (1937) and Clark Coolidge and Ed Roberson (1939). Sufficiently chagrined by the slimness of this list I wonder on what basis I leave Charles Wright and Kenneth Irby (both 1935 ) off of it. My cull no doubt irritates the partisans of Amiri Baraka, Roy Fisher, Jerome Rothenberg, Joanne Kyger, Mark Strand, Clayton Eshelman, Sylvia Plath, and Tom Raworth. Ed Sanders (1939) I see as Dylan's exact contemporary, though he's a couple years older, Wendell Berry (1934) I love only for his moralistic blast against American Agricultural Policy, The Unsettling of America, and not for his poems. Frank Bidart and James McMichael (1939) I love for their early poems, but Bidart continues to puzzle me in his evasion of his fellow Bakersfieldian, Duncan. Stephen Dunn (1939) is a tweener-outrider, whose free verse mastery really belongs to the post-late modernist pastoral period of the War Period poets (though no doubt he is Roberson's contemporary). Seamus Heaney (1939) I also put with the war group. A pastoralist at heart, for me the figure who looms over this whole tweener group is Marion Jacobs (1930), aka, Little Walter. War period poets Fanny Howe & James Tate win prizes before anyone bothers to commit to film a performance by the tweener Little Walter.
The son of an Ashland, Kansas carpenter and lumberyard manager, Johnson transferred from Lawrence to Columbia University sometime in the mid-to-late Fifties, after an Army stint, and met and became the lover of the poet and publisher of Jargon Press, Jonathan Williams (b. 1929). Williams took him to England, where Johnson finished his first book A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (1964), as well as started his second, the seasonal poem The Book of the Green Man (1967), by which time he had become involved in the International movement around Concrete Poetry, a focus that resulted in Songs of Earth (1970). By then Johnson travelled with Williams to Southern France, where at Hautrives, Joseph Ferdinand Cheval had built his Dream Palace in 1879, having tripped (so the story goes) over a stone, picked the stone up, and pocketed it for later inspection . . . just so, there, as well, Johnson conceived of his second long poem, with Cheval's niches and vaults as his central trope. This is ARK, published three times as of this writing, in 1980 (Foundations), 1984 (The Spires), and in 1996, The Ramparts now included in an essentially self-published edition of the whole poem, one that is said (though I'm no judge) to be marred by errors committed by Johnson's publishing partner and overlooked by the poet.
The conception of a surrealist epic form for Johnson's own collagist methods is brilliant. For all the poem's obsession with geometry, with the figures an architecture makes ("hands mirror diamond maker | Adam, engoldened | enter into the Grotto"), the poem's form becomes increasingly quartz-like as its completion closes in. By the third section, The Ramparts, the form (eighteen triplets per section) is set, and the self's vaulting ambition to complete the form makes our identifying the subject in it a bit of a grind. But especially in the poem's first two parts (finished by 1983) Johnson has a freedom and tension in his syntax and lines that is quite beyond most of the pastoral surrealism of that most pastoral period of American poetry. Notwithstanding your response to pre-plans, among the poets on whom my bets are laid, only Mercian Hymns is comparable work.
August 26, 2011
Ronald Johnson is a great poet, and his The Book of the Green Man is one of my all time favorite books of poetry. And there are really great moments in this ambitious book length exploration of form, creation, myth, music, etc. But there's also a part of me that doesn't connect entirely with its wide berth. All this talk of the borealis aurora, the Milky Way, aswirl in mathematical forms, seems a bit too abstract for me. I found myself craving small poems, down to earth phrasings, tiny architectures with meager means. As for the music, sometimes it's there and wonderful. Othertimes it's there, but the words seem to take over in a completely architectural manner, as he puts it in the end: a kind of cement. I found myself wanting to hear how the poet would read it himself, as I sometimes had no idea where to pause, to slow down, to quicken up, etc. Because the phrasings often exist next to each other in non-sentencey ways, and often appear as a long string of abutments, there is very little hint as to how to take them, how to read them (I'm not talking about meaning here, I'm just talking about pacing). I wasn't sure how best to read it or listen to it in my head as I was reading it, and sometimes it sounded less than pleasing the way I imagined it. The parts of this book that I liked I really loved, but there were too many parts of it that I did not connect with for me to give it more than 3.5 stars.
March 28, 2014
I can't say what the long poem Ark by Ronald Johnson is about, but I can say it was thoroughly enjoyable and engaging to follow the flow of words that poured over each page with a physicality of architecture. They're playful and almost organic, like watching a living thing evolve, which is not too far afield as it took Johnson 20 years to compose this epic.
The three parts of the poem feel like a construction site, laying a foundation and building up, and in the process creating a structure in which it's capable of holding all human experience. At least, that's what it felt like to me. There were references that I picked up, others that I knew were there, but elusive to my limited knowledge and experience. And it builds, literally and figuratively, to a crescendo that is like a dialogue between the profane and the divine. But I have no idea of anything, other than the sensual pleasure of reading the words composed on paper.
For a better understanding, read this recent New Yorker blog post by Stephen Burt about the new Flood Edition that was published in 2013. Or, better yet, read the poem. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs...
The three parts of the poem feel like a construction site, laying a foundation and building up, and in the process creating a structure in which it's capable of holding all human experience. At least, that's what it felt like to me. There were references that I picked up, others that I knew were there, but elusive to my limited knowledge and experience. And it builds, literally and figuratively, to a crescendo that is like a dialogue between the profane and the divine. But I have no idea of anything, other than the sensual pleasure of reading the words composed on paper.
For a better understanding, read this recent New Yorker blog post by Stephen Burt about the new Flood Edition that was published in 2013. Or, better yet, read the poem. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs...
August 13, 2015
Like Joseph McElroy's PLUS, a symphonic work of experimental science-fiction whose (relative) optimism re: the future of the human imagination feels incredibly poignant given our species' present circumstances. Also: I'll never look at poetic meter the same way again.
Read
June 23, 2021I'm never going to finish this (like reading from beginning to end) so I decided to remove it from my reading list. I will pick it up and put it down a million times. I will read 'around' in it.
September 11, 2008
A very long poem consisting of 99 "Foundations", "Spires" and "Arches"; Ronald Johnson becomes a postmodern Noah, taking an inventory of his world, housing all the "transcendent razzmatazz" of language, literature, music, history, and science from the impending deluge.
June 16, 2020
“Eden, glossolalia of light”
Beam (1-33) is a miraculous fusion of prose and poetry; lyric, science, and devotion
Moved, particular, the poems on perception—sight, sound—that wonderful mechanism of the body. And which fuse, perception, the science of matter, and the divine (Beam 14). They’re fusing different discourses into something new, chasing down that harmonization of science and religion a lot of Enlightenment-era poets chased down.
Unfortunately, like Dante, the further this ascends, the more tedious it gets. The nimble shits in rhythm, line, and discourse turns into a endless trudge through musically arranged elevated diction: “summit, cradle / in ecstasy of palimpsest // font acup core, / peel back dark the more / and knock every door forth time. // seat / chasms / pinnacle.”
I lv Robert Duncan, but, whew,
turns out that a glossolalia of light/language-y pastoral gets pretty monotonous.
Or was I just not in a place to fill in these gaps? To take up a the poems’ suggestions?
The ending recovers somewhat. I’ll happily split Beam off from the rest to reread.
Beam (1-33) is a miraculous fusion of prose and poetry; lyric, science, and devotion
Moved, particular, the poems on perception—sight, sound—that wonderful mechanism of the body. And which fuse, perception, the science of matter, and the divine (Beam 14). They’re fusing different discourses into something new, chasing down that harmonization of science and religion a lot of Enlightenment-era poets chased down.
Unfortunately, like Dante, the further this ascends, the more tedious it gets. The nimble shits in rhythm, line, and discourse turns into a endless trudge through musically arranged elevated diction: “summit, cradle / in ecstasy of palimpsest // font acup core, / peel back dark the more / and knock every door forth time. // seat / chasms / pinnacle.”
I lv Robert Duncan, but, whew,
turns out that a glossolalia of light/language-y pastoral gets pretty monotonous.
Or was I just not in a place to fill in these gaps? To take up a the poems’ suggestions?
The ending recovers somewhat. I’ll happily split Beam off from the rest to reread.
October 4, 2025
But another feeling told me there was nothing in front of me but the blue sky and that within myself a window opened...
we have always known the eye to be unsleeping, and that all men are lidless Visionaries through the night.
After a long time of light, there began to be eyes, and light began looking with itself.
A man once set out to see birds, but found instead he'd learned to listen:
Its dreams are the abyss and empyrean, and to that end, may move, in time, the stones themselves to sing.
Line eye us. Web stir us. - as the eye leaves outside of itself the object it sees - the mind weaves it of itself incessant shuttle to external's shelf
How to inquire within the fire? What thinnest spoke-infolded core of farthest star invoke, in what we are? Were?
Convoluted of sun and dust, shut dark in a skull, the labyrinth is its own clue. Our lot is puzzlement.
I sing the one wherein all colors of this whirling world begin and end.
catching the sun (O all it's cracked up to be)
we have always known the eye to be unsleeping, and that all men are lidless Visionaries through the night.
After a long time of light, there began to be eyes, and light began looking with itself.
A man once set out to see birds, but found instead he'd learned to listen:
Its dreams are the abyss and empyrean, and to that end, may move, in time, the stones themselves to sing.
Line eye us. Web stir us. - as the eye leaves outside of itself the object it sees - the mind weaves it of itself incessant shuttle to external's shelf
How to inquire within the fire? What thinnest spoke-infolded core of farthest star invoke, in what we are? Were?
Convoluted of sun and dust, shut dark in a skull, the labyrinth is its own clue. Our lot is puzzlement.
I sing the one wherein all colors of this whirling world begin and end.
catching the sun (O all it's cracked up to be)
May 19, 2025
Wowee this is a fucking elegy to sonic poetry. Never have i experienced such volume in writing before
May 25, 2025
Fantastic; a contemporary romanticism of Blakean intensity, as filtered through the Transcendentalists and Black Mountain poets.
outsider art from someone on the inside fringe.
outsider art from someone on the inside fringe.
October 4, 2024
Ark is an experimental book-length poem broken up into three sections of 33 poems each. Each section and the individual poems (or “Beams” and “Arks”) are linked thematically and formally. There is no narrative that I could find. The poems are often collaged together using found text or scraps of language from various sources, from the Bible to the letters of Van Gogh.
You can probably read all about how Ark and its individual poems work together to construct a larger theme, idea, or aesthetic proposition in an essay somewhere. It would take a few more reads of this book, as well as an erudite essay, for me to understand the bigger picture here. While Ark is an incredibly challenging book to read, it employs a language that is refreshing, to almost Oulipian effects. I read this book on a trip to Spain (for my honeymoon), both on the beach and in an airplane. Sometimes it was thrilling; other times I struggled to stay awake. Ark might be best enjoyed if you’ve read too much confessional or autobiographical poetry lately. Whether it’s botanical catalogs to drawings or scientific diagrams and amateur illustrations, there is much more “eye” than “I.” I will read this again.
You can probably read all about how Ark and its individual poems work together to construct a larger theme, idea, or aesthetic proposition in an essay somewhere. It would take a few more reads of this book, as well as an erudite essay, for me to understand the bigger picture here. While Ark is an incredibly challenging book to read, it employs a language that is refreshing, to almost Oulipian effects. I read this book on a trip to Spain (for my honeymoon), both on the beach and in an airplane. Sometimes it was thrilling; other times I struggled to stay awake. Ark might be best enjoyed if you’ve read too much confessional or autobiographical poetry lately. Whether it’s botanical catalogs to drawings or scientific diagrams and amateur illustrations, there is much more “eye” than “I.” I will read this again.
March 24, 2014
I loved the experience of reading this book. I was lost in the musicality and wonder of each chiseled fragment, the analytical and the anecdotal drifts. I felt like by the end either it had lost steam or I did. The cut-ups segments from letters, Arches, is where the tone couldn't hold me anymore, but I pushed through and will always return for a new view because as a reader it is our responsibility and I am now sort of hooked on Ronald Johnson.
October 13, 2011
I'm not "currently reading" this anymore, because in moving I've misplaced my photocopy. But it was beautiful, what I read, over many breakfasts. I cannot say I understand it. Maybe one day, multiple reads from now.
May 26, 2014
it's like, woah, trippy, vaguely new-agey, woah.. I mean it's good, but far too mystical to make a lasting impact on me. I like some of the beginning and bits of the end very much. I wish he had continued experimenting with handprints and diagrams and concrete poetry all the way to the end.
July 14, 2014
One of those books (Zukofsky's A, Pound's Cantos, Olson's Maximus, Williams' Paterson, et al) that is outstripped by the grand idea of the book.
But like all books of its kind, there's some miraculous stuff therein.
But like all books of its kind, there's some miraculous stuff therein.
May 18, 2022
Complex, book-long poem. Challenges your conception of poetry and language itself. Mindbending; often thrilling, other times baffling. Came around to it in the end, though, and brought me to check out Johnson's other (excellent) work.
July 3, 2007
I want so badly to love it. I'm afraid I'm just too dense, or just not open enough, to enjoy this one yet.
September 9, 2012
I can't say I understand it, but I love it.
May 23, 2009
rapidly developing into some sort of obsession...
February 17, 2010
Gets precious.
May 12, 2016
Lovely, Kansan, musical, backwards, rolling, stoic, meaningless, too big, sad, accidental.
December 28, 2022
"We dream the root to leaf the now. The song sings the bird, and the crow the cock, and it is not so much we who live as that we are lived."
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews