Ronald Johnson was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 poet

Poetry of the United States

American poetry, the poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the thirteen colonies...

. He was born in Ashland, Kansas

Ashland, Kansas

Ashland is the largest city in and the county seat of Clark County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 867.-History:...

, graduated from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and lived in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 in the late fifties, wandered around Appalachia

Appalachia

Appalachia is a term used to describe a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S...

 and Britain

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 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

Concrete poetry

Concrete poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on....

 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". This mythology of an ambitious and protean epic project--- grand in creation and design--- beginning (arguably) with Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

's Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman . Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death...

was continued into the 20th-century by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

's The Cantos

The Cantos

The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered...

, Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...

's "A", William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

' Paterson

Paterson (poem)

Paterson is a poem by influential modern American poet William Carlos Williams.The poem is composed of five books and a fragment of a sixth book. The five books of Paterson were published separately in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958, and the entire work was published as a unit in 1963. This book...

, Charles Olson

Charles Olson

Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

's The Maximus Poems, Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (poet)

Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...

's Passages, Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

's Stanzas in Meditation, and H.D.

H.D.

H.D. was an American poet, novelist and memoirist known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington...

'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

Stephen Burt

Stephen Burt is a literary critic, poet, and a professor who teaches at Harvard University.-Elliptical Poetry:Burt received significant attention for coining the term "elliptical poetry" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's book, Smokes, in Boston Review magazine...

, "showed a poet no less spiritual than the author of ARK but also one given to extreme concision."

Ronald Johnson, once described by Guy Davenport

Guy Davenport

Guy Mattison Davenport was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.-Life:...

 as America's greatest living poet, died at his father's home in Topeka, Kansas

Topeka, Kansas

Topeka |Kansa]]: Tó Pee Kuh) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, located in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was...

 on March 4, 1998.

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
  Jonathan Williams (poet)
  Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...
  
  (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