Ronald Johnson, Take Me Away!

A small but happy conversation going on over at the Say Something Wonderful Poetry Forum (already 43 members, and growing by the hour!) about how much folks liked reading Beam 10 of Ronald Johnson's ARK at the SSW NEH seminar this summer. We read it on the day we studied "Riddles and Charms," and participants were tickled to see how much sense they could make of it in conversation, when it seemed so elusive before the discussion began.

(For those of you who don't know the text, here it is: "daimon diamond monad I / Adam Kadmon in the sky." Yup, that's all of it. We started by looking up the words; "Adam Kadmon" is best hunted up as a phrase, a name, rather than as two separate words, although it functions that way too. Oh, and keep an ear out for puns.)

In any case, I was so pleased to see a teacher vow to "start each of my classes this year with the Adam poem" that I took a few minutes to hunt up some RJ resources on the web, easy to find. So here they are:

• The very useful Dictionary of Literary Biography essay on Johnson's life and work, along with its only slightly dated bibliography;
• A charming, comprehensive interview with the poet, late in his life, by his literary executor, Peter O'Leary;
• Johnson’s cheerful ars poetica, “Hurrah for Euphony”;
• some photos of the poet;
• The complete text (remarkably teachable!) of Johnson's lovely long poem The Book of the Green Man;
• A selection of concrete poems from Ron's book Songs of the Earth (my favorite works in that genre, by any poet), and a discussion of Ron's work in that mode from the 1960s, which will introduce you to the international history of concrete poetry more generally;
• A selection of poems from Ron's last book, The Shrubberies; and a fine review of that book by Mark Scroggins;
• The poems “Samuel Palmer: the Characters of Fire”; “Stereopticon (for Lorine Niedecker)”; another Shrub from The Shrubberies; Beams 21, 22, 23 from ARK (subtitled “the Song of Orpheus”); ARK's Beam 30: The Garden;
• A reflective, informative obituary of Johnson by poet and publisher Jonathan Williams;
  
• A news story on the recent dedication of a plaque to Johnson at the Kansas park where he worked at the end of his life, with biographical material, photos, and links outward;
• “The Arches”: A Ronald Johnson site with lots of links I've duplicated here:
• An issue of Octopus Magazine on Ron's work, with essays and poems by various hands:
• An assortment of comments from bloggers on Ron and his work can be found here, and here,and here;
  
• Some reflections by uber-blogger (and poet) Ron Silliman on the new edition of Radi Os, Johnson's rewriting-by-excision of Paradise Lost, here, and here; and Ron S on Ron J's poem "Blocks," written in memoriam AIDS, over here;
  
• And finally, if you really get the bug, you can order two videos--the latter simply heartbreaking, if it's the one I saw some years back at the Buffalo conference on RJ--over here, from San Fransisco State University.

I'll post links to Ron's cookbooks on request. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you at the Forum!