A Note for Ronald Johnson

Abstract

count Ronald Johnson as one of the defining peers of my own imagined company of poets, ageless and yet insistently specific to all one's life might seem to be here and now. The very title of his major long poem cycle, ARK? with its determining echoes, its senses of a contiguous, innumerable event, its measure of heart and time, all the wondrous, intimate, particularizing reflection and record?proposes the character of this work so value. Ronald Johnson is most close to Zukofsky and Robert Duncan in this sense, that his becomes both inside and outside, both within and without, the appar ent of our daily living. Like Duncan especially (or Blake), the poem becomes the place of responsibility and judgement as well as the most ar ticulate compilation of the grounds of its evidence, the stuff of simple exist ence, which is flotsam unless there be a defining witness. An ark to save us?or at least recall us to a music that could sing its perceptions and pleasures simultaneously. That aboard which we all might climb, birds, beasts, and people, to set forth upon a sea of rising floods and overwhelming meanings. If you give it a meaning, it has a mean ing, Wittgenstein says. So pandemonium begins? And yet how else, other than by such art as ARK practices, could one think to balance and secure, recognize and acknowledge, all that finally is and/or might be? Come into the world was Olson's insistence, yet very few seemingly ever get there. Else a bridge then (as was Hart Crane's great premise), a rainbow arch ing the sky? Again am utterly struck by how deftly precise each edge of this work's composition is?each word, each syllable, each letter. And that may be the point as in the old stories, You've got to pick up every stick... So much floods in, aptly enough, as think of it. To see the in a grain of sand... Or Lorine Niedecker. Henry Vaughan's I saw eternity the other night. have no interest or ability to note more here than my enduring respect