Starting to Read "ARK"

Abstract

ARK is clearly a modernist enterprise, influenced in its structure by Pound's Cantos. It is a monumental poem completed in one hundred sections (like cantos), it is inclusive in ambition, and it is collagist in execution. And yet it differs profoundly from Pound's work in that it is not didactic. It is often informative in content, but it is so with a push of wonder--implying how extraordinary this is! rather than let's change things around here! It is in fact barely discursive, barely of the intellect. Though words are such that they cannot completely avoid the generalizing effect of thought and the tendency toward statement, concepts being always inherent in them, such an effect and such a tendency are to be found rather in the parentheses and side-turns of ARK than in its main thrust, which is physical. It may be true that ARK exists primarily in its physical detail--unlike such a work as the Cantos, or even more Paradise Lost, in both of which such detail is always subordinate to a didactic and generalized purpose, something to do with economics, something to do with religion. Pound's didactic intentions are numerous, complex, and changing; Johnson's intentions are aesthetic. The aesthetic intention is perhaps more childlike, less pressingly adult, than the didactic. To construct a poem like a building is to enter something like a child's game, building sandcastles or treehouses, creating caves and rooms between sofas and chairs or under tables. (No wonder Robert Duncan encouraged Johnson in his project!) In fact, Johnson himself uses the word naif, in his notes at the end of the Spires volume. Naif and grandiose, I would add, and having viewed Gaudi's Sagrada Familia a few months ago--still under construction, not to be completed for, what is it, 200 years--I am supplied with a vivid analogy for the naif and grandiose structure. Gaudi's substantial spire may be covered with ceramic tiles spelling out words of adoration to be sung or spoken. Johnson's verbal spire may be referred to variously as a quilt or as a medley of bird song. The subject matter and the procedure are impossible to distinguish, bird song, quilt, words on tiles, spire. ARK is preceded by two epigraphs, the first by Dahlberg appealing to vision, the second by Stein appealing to song. The work is to be seen and heard at the same time: ear-candy as well as eye-candy. (The two are combined in a slightly primitive way--by primitive I mean it is like magic. …