An Interview with Ronald Johnson

Abstract

Like his poem ARK, Ronald Johnson's life can be seen in three parts. first part begins and ends in Kansas, most of it spent in Ashland, a small town in the western prairies where he was born in 1935, with a brief stint in Lawrence, at the University of Kansas. second part he spent on the East Coast, traveling a great deal. He moved to New York City in the mid-1950s to attend Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. He spent the early 1960s walking through Britain and Appalachia, and served in the army during this time. His poems soon began to appear, first in an issue of Poetry devoted to the long poem and then in books: A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees came out on Jonathan Williams's Jargon Press in 1964, and Book of the Green Man, his long seasonal poem composed out of his experiences walking through England, was published by Norton in 1967, which also published Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses in 1969. By this time, Johnson had settled in San Francisco and had already begun working on ARK, thus entering the third part of his life. As his life shifted to the West Coast, so did his publishers: Sand Dollar (Berkeley) published RADI OS in 1977, and North Point Press (San Francisco) published the first part of ARK as ARK: Foundations in 1980, one of that now-defunct publisher's first titles. ARK 50 (Spires 34-50) appeared in 1984 as a National Poetry Series winner, and since then, ARK has appeared mainly in scattered literary journals. Johnson lived in San Francisco for twenty-five years, making his living, in part, writing cookbooks, before returning recently to Kansas, where this interview was conducted. three parts of ARK are The Foundations, The and The Ramparts, each divided into thirty-three sections. The Foundations, beginning at dawn and ending at noon, lays out the forms, ideas, and themes of the poem in great variety. Concrete poetry, lyric poetry, prose-poems, and poetic quotations use quantum physics, physiology and optics, and astronomy to reveal myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hermes, and the Wizard of Oz. The Spires, going from noon to sundown, are the vertical counterpoint to the horizontal of The Foundations. They rush up to the sky, their words rising rapidly, composed into high-flying windmills, pillars, and fireworks that the poet dedicates to other poets, friends, places, and mythic figures, such as Ariel and Prospero. The bring the horizontal and the vertical together into a grand arcade of arches. Each Rampart is composed of a cluster of three arches, and each arch of eighteen tercets. There are eleven encircling the structure, covering a range of material from Thoreau's Journals to Van Gogh's letters to Protestant Hymnals, culminating at crack of dawn with the rift-off of the spaceship that is ARK. Peter O'Leary: Let me start by asking how ARK changed over the course of the twenty to twenty-five years or so of its composition. Since it was published in increments, you always included incidental notes describing the next step or two... Ronald Johnson: I worked on it all the time. I knew it would be three parts. I didn't have The Ramparts quite named--I've forgotten I called them. But I was lucky to envision a form that left me three different periods. So that when I got to doing The I could just do Spires and think what is a Spire? And then when I got to The Ramparts, which was really influenced by the mosaic arches outside of the Watts Towers, each one of three lines is meant to be an arch. So I was just lucky. PO'L: ARK seems comparable to epic Modernist poems like Cantos, Paterson, Maximus, as opposed to modernist long poems like The Waste Land or Briggflatts. Did you conceive of ARK along the lines of the big modernist poem? RJ: Well I wanted it to be equivalent. Olson said that an epic is a poem with history. Zukofsky put a lot of contemporary history and Marxist politics into his poem. …