Ronald Johnson (poet)

Ronald Johnson (1935 – March 4, 1998) was an American poet.

Life and work
He was born in Ashland, Kansas, graduated from Columbia University and lived in New York in the late fifties, wandered around Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for the next 25 years before returning to Kansas, where he died.

At the beginning of his career Johnson was allied with the Black Mountain poets' second generation, but then began to experiment with the poetics of the concrete poetry 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's Leaves of Grass was continued into the 20th-century by Ezra Pound's The Cantos, Louis Zukofsky's "A", William Carlos Williams' Paterson, Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems, Robert Duncan's Passages, Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, and H.D.'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, "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 as America's greatest living poet, died at his father's home in Topeka, Kansas on March 4, 1998.

Publications

 * To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson (edited with an introduction by Peter O'Leary). Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 2000.