Ronald Johnson (poet)

For the American football player, see Ronald Johnson.

Ronald Johnson (1935 – 1998) was an American poet. He was born in 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 twenty-five years before returning to Kansas, where he died.

At the beginning of his career he was allied with the Black Mountain School's second generation, but then began to experiment with the poetics of the concrete poetry movement.

His major book is the long poem ARK, which he began in 1970 and took him twenty years to write. The poem follows in the tradition of American epic that starts with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and continues in Ezra Pound's Cantos, Louis Zukofsky's "A", Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, Robert Duncan's Passages, Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, and H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, among others.

References

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

External links

• The Book of the Green Man Johnson's first published book of poems, available here on-line from "Light & Dust"

[1] Site devoted to Johnson, with biography, bibliography, interview, and select poems

[2] An essay Jonathan Williams (a poet and publisher central to 20th century poetry in America) wrote on Johnson in 1999. Williams was a mentor to, and lover and publisher of Johnson.