Pry into the atom / ricochet against / wall of time,” Ronald Johnson writes in “Form,” one of his last poems, published posthumously in The Shrubberies by Flood Editions in 2001.3 In these lines Johnson gives a lucid summary of a poetic vision that began in his debut collection, A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees some thirty years earlier. Over those decades, Johnson—like two of his major touchstones, Blake and Thoreau—would continue to pry into the miniscule details of the world to find intimations of its larger orders, patterns, and designs. Jed Rasula describes this as a “pro-prioceptive metaphysics [that] propose[s] an intimate conductivity between body and galaxy,” mind and nature.4 Burt Kimmelman voices a similar notion proposing that:
Johnson’s persona sees, feels the world, knows it, and somehow knows it from the inside, perceives the connections, the undercurrents, so to speak, that make the world precisely that, a world, to be contemplated over and against chaos, even when randomness can be seen to be a force in evolution and beauty. (RJ 422)
—Ronald Johnson to Philip Van Aver1
Light is the attribute most evocative of the eye. It receives and gives forth light, it glistens, gleams, shines, glitters, and glares. All variations and qualities of light glow in the eye and are reflected in it. When it is dulled and misted over, life itself loses its luster. Light then, its focus, its variety, its play, lives in the eye and enchants the beholder.
Peter O’Leary, “Quod Vides Scribe In Libro,” in To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson, ed. Peter O’Leary (Jersey City, New Jersey: Talisman House, 2000), ix.
Christopher Beach, ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1992), 26.
C.C. Barfoot, “’ some Things I Have Known Up To Now In My Way’: Geoffrey Grigson and the Benediction of Reality,” in “My Rebellious and Imperfect Eye”: Observing Geoffrey Grigson, ed. c.c. Barfoot and R. M. Healey (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), 37.
Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of American Poetics (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), 148.
Ronald Johnson, “L.Z.,” in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 294.
Cited by De Villo Sloan in, “ ‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War,” Sagetrieb 4 2/3 (Fall & Winter, 1985), 244.
Ed Folsom, “Whispering Whitman to the Ears of Others: Ronald Johnson’s Recipe for Leaves of Grass” in The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life, ed. Robert K. Martin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 86.
Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), 12.
John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 1995), 7. See also Eric Murphy Selinger’s essay “ARK as Garden of Revelation” which identifies Johnson’s poetry with this vernacular art tradition (RJ 323–42).
Hair, R. (2010). Introduction.
In: Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115552_1
