Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

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10.1057/9780230115552 - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, Ross Hair

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-13

Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Topics that are bibliographic, pedagogic, that concern the social field of poetry, and reflect on the history of poetry studies are valued as well. This series focuses both on individual poets and texts and on larger movements, poetic institutions, and questions about poetic authority, social identifications, and aesthetics. Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson The American Cratylus Carla Billitteri Modernism and Poetic Inspiration The Shadow Mouth Jed Rasula The Social Life of Poetry Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism Chris Green Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian David W. Huntsperger Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse H.D., Loy, and Toomer Lara Vetter Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry Andrew Mossin The Poetry of Susan Howe History, Theology, Authority Will Montgomery Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry Ross Hair



Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Ross Hair




RONALD JOHNSON’S MODERNIST COLLAGE POETRY

Copyright © Ross Hair, 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10869–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hair, Ross, 1978– Ronald Johnson's modernist collage poetry / Ross Hair. p. cm.—(Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics) ISBN 978–0–230–10869–1 (alk. paper) 1. Johnson, Ronald, 1935– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. Found poetry, American—History and criticism. I. Title. PS3560.O386Z75 2010 811⬘.54—dc22

2010020716

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

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Permissions

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Abbreviations Introduction: “Congeries of Word and Light”

xiii 1

1

Johnson’s New Transcendentalism

23

2

Luminous Detail: Ezra Pound and Collage

51

3 Visual Integrity in The Book of the Green Man

65

4

91

Johnson’s Different Musics

5 Orphic Apocrypha: Radi os and the Found Text

123

6 A “mosaic of Cosmos”: ARK ’s Bricolage Poetics

157

Conclusion: Felix Culpa: Innocence and Renewal

195

Notes

205

Bibliography

235

Index

251



Contents



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F

irst, I thank two people without whom this book would not have been possible. I am especially grateful to Rachel Blau DuPlessis for the enthusiasm and support she has shown for this book from the outset. I also express my gratitude to Peter O’Leary for making Johnson’s Literary Estate accessible. His willingness to share his ideas and thoughts with me has been invaluable and cherished, as has his friendship. I have also benefited considerably from the advice and suggestions of several readers over the course of writing this book. I am particularly indebted to Peter Middleton who supervised me when the book was taking initial shape in the form of my doctoral thesis. I also express my gratitude to Jed Rasula and Stephen Morton for their attentive and encouraging responses to my thesis. I am also grateful to the anonymous reader of my manuscript who made a number of valuable suggestions and comments. This book is all the better for them. Several libraries and individuals have generously made archive and private material available to me. In particular, I thank Michael Basinski and James Maynard at the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at Buffalo, and William Crowe, Karen S. Cook, and Tanya Lee Shaw at Kansas University’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library. In both instances, I was overwhelmed by the kindness and hospitality bestowed on me. Thanks are also due to the Lilly Library at Indiana University for providing me with Johnson’s correspondence to Ian Hamilton Finlay. I also thank Philip Van Aver for sharing his Johnson correspondence, and Harold Bloom for allowing me to reproduce his letter to Johnson. This book would not have been possible without the generous support of the AHRC and the research and travel bursaries provided by the University of Southampton and Kansas University’s Spencer Research Library. I thank Robert Webb, a tireless promoter of Johnson’s work, for generous hospitality when I visited Topkea, Kansas, and for sharing all things



Acknowledgments

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Acknowledgments

Johnson with me during the course of my research. I also had the pleasure of Thomas A. and Laurie Clark’s generosity in Pittenweem. I am grateful to them not only for helping me with my enquiries about Johnson, but also for their friendship, which has been a happy consequence of this work. Sam Ward, on innumerable occasions, helped me with valuable references and shared pertinent material on Johnson, as had Will Montgomery. To both I extend my sincere thanks and appreciation. Likewise, my thanks go to Devin Johnston, Andre Furlani, and Edward R. Burns for their help, and to my friends and colleagues at the University of Southampton and University of Portsmouth. Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks and affection to my family and to Elodie for all their support, patience, and encouragement during the writing of this book. I dedicate it to them.



viii

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following authors, publishers, and copyright holders for permission to reproduce material. Ronald Johnson material, published and unpublished, reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson. Ronald Johnson, from The Book of the Green Man published by Longmans. Copyright © 1967 by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson. Ronald Johnson, from Valley of the Many Colored Grasses published by W. W. Norton. Copyright © 1969 by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson. Ronald Johnson, from The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk published by Jargon Society. Copyright © 1969 by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson. Ronald Johnson, from Songs of the Earth published by Grabhorn-Hoyem Press. Copyright © 1970 by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson. Ronald Johnson, from ARK: The Foundations published by North Point Press. Copyright © 1980 by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson. Ronald Johnson, from ARK 50: Spires 34–40 published by E. P. Dutton. Copyright © 1984 by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson. Ronald Johnson, from ARK published by Living Batch Press. Copyright © 1996 by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson.



Permissions

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Permissions

Ronald Johnson, from Radi os. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Ronald Johnson. Reprinted with the permission of Flood Editions. Ronald Johnson correspondence to Ian Hamilton Finlay courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Ronald Johnson correspondence to Philip Van Aver courtesy of Philip Van Aver. Ronald Johnson, from the Ronald Johnson Archives courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Harold Bloom’s correspondence is reprinted by permission of Harold Bloom. Thomas A. Clark’s correspondence to Jonathan Williams is reprinted by permission of Thomas A. Clark. Guy Davenport’s correspondence is reprinted by permission of Bonnie Jean Cox, trustee of the Guy Davenport Literary Estate. Robert Duncan, from Bending the Bow. Copyright © 1968 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted under fair use and acknowledgment to New Directions Publishing Corporation. Robert Duncan, “The Dance” and “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” from The Opening of the Field. Copyright © 1960 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted under fair use and acknowledgment to New Directions Publishing Corporation. Robert Duncan, “Variations on Two Dicta of William Blake” from Roots and Branches. Copyright © 1964 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted under fair use and acknowledgment to New Directions Publishing Corporation. Charles Ives, from Memos. Copyright © 1972 American Academy of Arts and Letters. Reprinted under fair use and acknowledgment to Calder and Boyars. The Jargon Society Collection 1950—courtesy of The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Permission to reprint Denise Levertov material courtesy of the Denise Levertov Trust, Paul A. Lacey, trustee.



Ronald Johnson, “Form” from The Shrubberies. Copyright © 2001 by The Estate of Ronald Johnson. Reprinted with the permission of Flood Editions.

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xi

Ezra Pound, “Canto XI,” “Canto XXXIX,” and “Canto LXXIV” from The Cantos. Copyright © 1986 The Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted under fair use and acknowledgment to Faber and Faber Limited.



Marianne Moore, “An Octopus” from Complete Poems. Copyright © Clive E. Driver, Literary Executor of the Estate of Marianne C. Moore, 1981. Reprinted under fair use and acknowledgment to Faber and Faber Limited.




Ronald Johnson Frequently cited works of Johnson’s, or critical work on Johnson, are indicated by the following abbreviations. ARK

BG R RJ

U V

All references to ARK, unless otherwise stated, are from the complete edition of ARK (Albuquerque, New Mexico: Living Batch Press, 1996). Because the Living Batch Press edition does not have page numbers poems are cited by title. For example, “BEAM 11, Finial” or “ARK 71, Arches V.” This also includes the brief note Johnson wrote for the Living Batch Press edition of ARK, cited as “A Note.” The Book of the Green Man (London: Longmans, 1967) Radi os (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2005) Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, ed. Joel Bettridge and Eric Murphy Selinger (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2008) “Up Till Now,” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 30 (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 1998) Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969) Ralph Waldo Emerson

N W

Nature and Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003) The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson Vol. I: Essays and Representative Men (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd.: 1931)



Abbreviations

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Abbreviations

Ezra Pound The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1998) Selected Prose, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973) Elizabeth Sewell OV

The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1960)



C SP

“Congeries of Word and Light”

—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. —Joan M. Erikson2

p

ry 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 “proprioceptive metaphysics [that] propose[s] an intimate conductivity between “



INTRODUCTION

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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) Johnson’s poetry repeatedly aspires to discover and disclose revelatory form, the universe’s signs and correspondences, “organized into matter / the impossible happening / more or less endless / stable transformations.”5 In doing so, Johnson’s poetry contributes considerably in advancing and understanding a complexly rich American poetic tradition that stretches from the Transcendentalists to “the last of the great modernist poets,” Louis Zukofsky, and incorporates. European Romanticism, “naïve,” outsider art, and Concrete poetry.6 All of these touchstones profoundly shape and inform Johnson’s major long poem, ARK. Comprising three books—“The Foundations,” “The Spires,” and “The Ramparts”—Johnson’s twenty-year labor “has been compared to Ezra Pound’s Cantos” and situated in the tradition of the American long poem.7 However, the democratic scope and profuse eclecticism of ARK, along with its embrace of “kosmos” and celebration of the American grain, also makes it a late twentieth-century equivalent to Whitman's Leaves of Grass. ARK is the fullest realization of Johnson’s poetic vision, particularly its ambitious ocularcentric concerns. Reading Johnson we are repeatedly confronted with processes of vision: its mechanics, science, and metaphysics, as well as the pleasure it elicits. Johnson’s poetry repeatedly encourages us to look at the world with fresh eyes in its endeavor to recreate the wonder and experience of seeing things as if for the very first time. “Become Adam,” Johnson proposes in “ARK 35, Spire Called Arm of the Moon”: “You will see it too.” In Johnson’s poetry it is a question of how one looks as well as what one looks at. It is a poetry that is “obstinately optical.”8 Whether from close diligent observation with the physical eye or the “huge imaginings” of the mind’s speculative eye that “whet the miniscule” (“BEAM 29”), Johnson’s poetry is about looking. It is a poetry of, and for, the eye. But Johnson’s poetry is not just about what he has seen; it is about what others have seen and reported as well. It is also about looking at seeing. Johnson’s friend and advocate, Guy Davenport, emphasizes this when he draws attention to Johnson’s “special fascination with men who have sharpened their eyesight: explorers, anatomists, botanists, painters, antiquarians,



body and galaxy,” mind and nature.4 Burt Kimmelman voices a similar notion proposing that:

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poets, microscopists, mathematicians, physicists.”9 All these different eyes (and voices) make their way into Johnson’s poetry via quotation and an innovative collage praxis. Dirk Stratton is not overstressing the point when he proposes that Johnson “is one of collage’s most avid practitioners.”10 As I argue throughout this book, collage is central to Johnson’s poetic, informing his work from A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees through to ARK and beyond. The principal aims of this book are to examine the ways in which Johnson develops and advances this collage poetic in his major work, and to assess the dialogues it establishes with an American modernist collage tradition and nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism.11 Peter O’Leary stresses that Johnson’s poetry “is visionary in that it is concerned with poetry as a mode of seeing—in a spiritual as well as a literal (optic) sense.”12 Or, as Rasula proposes, Johnson’s poetry “wavers between the objective status of language event and the subjective fertility of vision.”13 Thus, collage not only allows a contrasting assemblage of visions and perceptions to be presented simultaneously on the page, but also becomes an integral part of that visionary experience. O’Leary draws attention to “Johnson’s remarkable sense of the page,” by which “he has composed some of the most dazzling page displays in recent American poetry.”14 These “displays” include innovative use of margins and the centering of text into symmetrical, bifurcated stanzas; the use of concrete poetry; the reformatting and ventilation of found texts; the use of images and illustrations; and a developed awareness for the textural and typographic possibilities that italics, quotation marks, capitalization, and typewriter symbols afford the page. (Johnson stresses in his essay on composition, “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” that, “the typewriter is still and always my main tool.”)15 Johnson emphasizes in his 1974 interview with Barry Alpert that this regard for the visual impact of the page has a clear purpose: I have always been interested in changes of focus and the multidimensional, and toward that have used changes of spacing and capitals, italics and quotes and attempted to balance them as a texture, a woven thing. (RJ 547) Thus, collage is an integral part of what Johnson describes to August Derleth as his “many-focused poetry”: “I have attempted to write a many-focused poetry, one which sees the minutiae with as much clarity as the hill it subsists on.”16 Such “a many-focused poetry” has the effect of creating compelling “congeries of word and light,”17 as Johnson writes in “Form.” That is, scintillating assemblages of light (the attribute most evocative of the eye,




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as Erikson stresses) and of words, which capture, preserve, and convey the medium of vision itself. Heaping word and light together, these collagist congeries have the effect of creating “glossolalia[s] of light” (“BEAM 14”), and “mosaic[s] of rays” (“BEAM 16, The Voices”), that simultaneously reveal the innovative interactions of Johnson’s twin muses: modernist collage praxis and the visionary concerns of American Transcendentalism; from Thoreau’s exact, scrutinizing eye for detail to Emerson’s cosmological speculations and emphasis on the “plastic power of the human eye.” The ancient Greeks called the world κόσμος, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. (N 42) However, modernism and Transcendentalism are not antithetical traditions in Johnson’s work, but rather complementary agents in his “many-focused poetry.” Guy Davenport identifies this confluence of Transcendentalism and modernism in a letter to Johnson: “Your quoting is as pious as Ives’,” he writes, “as good as Emerson’s, as pertinent as Mr. Pound’s.”18 All three men, like Johnson, have made eclecticism and multiplicity an art form. From the rich catalogue rhetoric of Emerson’s essays (also practiced by Whitman in his poetry) and his proto-modernist ideas about originality and genius in “Quotation and Originality,” to Pound’s citations in The Cantos and its “tightly woven collage,” both men’s work utilize the creative potential of appropriation and quotation.19 Situated somewhere between Emerson and Pound (chronologically and aesthetically) is the American composer Charles Ives. Ives’s musical quotations parallel the collage innovations of his modernist contemporaries in art and literature, but his philosophical ideas look back to the New England Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau. As we will see, Ives assumes a central role in Johnson’s poetics, particularly in defining Johnson’s own vernacular expressions of American culture. These three names—Pound, Emerson, and Ives—occur frequently in the course of this book as I trace and discuss the fertile intersections that occur in Johnson’s poetry between what are, too often, seen as opposing literary and philosophical movements and epochs. It is this rich confluence of modernism and Romanticism (including Transcendentalism) in Johnson’s poetry that merits a closer and more sustained examination of his work. “You are getting the purity of Masters Zuk and WCW in your clear verse,” Davenport writes in another letter to Johnson, “though I think your heart is with the Ruskinian briars and Ryder moons and Grant Wood vistas on the



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Republic.”20 This is a perceptive way to read Johnson, with his modernist collage poetics articulating longstanding Romantic subjects. Indeed, there are few poets who have assimilated modernist aesthetics, Romanticism’s visionary regard for the natural world, and singular maverick expressions of American culture and topography, as successfully and plausibly as Johnson. As Eric Selinger stresses, Johnson’s “work takes both sides of the [modernist/ Romantic] debate” and “refuses to admit their contradiction.”21 But the ease with which Johnson’s poetry blurs such distinctions (is he modernist? Postmodernist? Neo-Transcendentalist? Romantic?) is one reason why he has been largely omitted from discussions of late twentieth-century American poetry. Thus, before outlining the intentions of this book more specifically, it is necessary to address the matter of Johnson’s neglect and to locate him within the major currents of the American avant-garde poetry tradition. Locating Johnson There is a poignant moment in Johnson’s poem “Form,” when he reflects on his own mortality and poetic legacy. green archetypal ages a reciprocal journey many said could not be made will I live to see the midnight of the century to part the night of orbs in galaxy the congeries of word and light22 Johnson did not get to see “the midnight of the century.” In 1998 at the age of 62 he died in Topeka, Kansas, from a stroke that was the result of an ongoing fight with a brain tumor. In his lengthy autobiographical essay published shortly after his death, entitled “Up Till Now,” Johnson describes his situation at the time, referring to Warde-Mead, the “beautiful park” whose flora and environs gave him the inspiration for The Shrubberies. I’ve come back to Kansas to live with my father, where I cook for my supper and work on a government programme, half time at minimum wage, in a beautiful park, where I bake loaves of bread and cookies. Rather a comedown, but satisfactory all the same. As Pound remarked, “Ovid had it a lot worse.” If I’ve outstripped my early appreciative audience, they’ll catch up some fine day, I trust. (U 121)




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Despite his buoyant resilience, it is difficult not to feel the melancholy of Johnson’s situation. It is hard to imagine that this is the same poet that Guy Davenport once dubbed “America’s greatest living poet” and who, for a period in the 1960s, was published by the major imprints W. W. Norton and Longmans Green.23 And, for many, Johnson is perhaps still better known as the writer of cookbooks, particularly The American Table (1984)—his “diet of the tribe” (U 118)—than he is as an accomplished poet. Despite the pioneering work of Selinger and Norman Finkelstein, Johnson’s work largely remained ignored by academia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.24 This indifference left Johnson more despondent than he admits in “Up Till Now.” A strong sense of frustration is evident in a generic letter from the late 1980s/early 1990s that Johnson enclosed with copies of his own “Xero-Ox Edition” of sections from ARK ’s “Ramparts.”25 With nary a publisher in sight for ARK’s Spires after seven years’ building and presentation in the best of quarterlies (nor for that matter for my Collected Short Poems: 1958–85, so little seen and so of a piece with later works) and none likely, I propose to bow out of publishing The Ramparts of ARK as they come. This, on the order of Robert Duncan who paused 15 years, or Louis Zukofsky who issued 80 Flowers himself. Let’s face it: if you take Zuk and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers as models you can’t expect Helen Vendler to beat a path to the door . . . In the last few years the same editor at New Directions who called ARK 50 “a can of worms” also sniffed at the Collected as if beneath notice. When published via The National Poetry Series by Dutton, chosen by Charles Simic, the first section of The Spires, ARK 50, garnered not one serious review. Guy Davenport recently came under attack when he claimed, in a new book of essays, I might be “the greatest living American poet.” Jack Shoemaker, who offers to publish at Northpoint a complete ARK (thus tantamount to posthumous) sez I have only a handful of readers his other poets expect. So be it. On the whole I think I prefer to write for astronauts anyway (The Ramparts go from swung garden gate of Eden to planet liftoff . . .) Recently I Xeroxed copies of The Ramparts’ first three sections for friends who’ve supported me over the long haul, and I shall continue to issue these Arches in groups of three, in an edition of 33, each signed & numbered, under the label Xero Ox Editions.26 Despite the endorsement of a successful poet such as Simic, by the late 1980s Johnson’s poetry was not being read or received favorably. Why had it become neglected? Why did he have “only a handful of readers” compared



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to what other poets could expect? Perhaps part of the problem was situating Johnson within the restrictive scope of contemporary poetry. The Language poets may very well have “caused Zukofsky’s work to move from the wings to the center stage,” as Tim Woods suggests, but “Zuk and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers as models”?27 The compatibility of Zukofsky, “the last of the great modernist poets” and touchstone for the new, radically political and intellectual avant-gardism of Language writing, in conjunction with the naïve, vernacular art of eccentric and quirky artists such as Rodia (without any suggestion of “postmodern” irony), is difficult to comprehend. No doubt, New Directions’s dismissal and North Point Press’s skepticism were based on questions of marketing and readership. Who, beyond Johnson’s own idealized “astronauts,” is equipped to pioneer the eclectic brave new worlds of such poetry? O’Leary understands Johnson as someone who “operated as a poet with a sense of entitlement,” and wrote with the ultimate expectation of a large readership: He joked with me once about Guy Davenport’s pronouncement that he was “America’s greatest living poet,” saying that he wasn’t going to use it anymore because it had made too many people angry. Finishing off an anecdote in which a fellow poet essentially broke off his friendship with Ron because he wouldn’t deny the epithet, he asked me, impishly, “Well, I mean, really? Who’s any better than I am?” He somehow expected his genius would be recognized by more than his coterie of interested readers, such that he would eventually be widely and studied intensively. (RJ 615) Johnson’s high expectations were never realized. By December of 1993, as a result of financial difficulties, he had moved back to Kansas after living for twenty-five years in San Francisco. There is a bitter irony in this, for Johnson had come full-circle, returning to where he started life: Kansas. But Johnson’s return to Kansas from “the Emerald city” or “Oz” (as he liked to call San Francisco in the spirit of his childhood love, L. Frank Baum) was not as auspicious as Dorothy’s in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Johnson recounts in “Up Till Now,” that he was born “bawling with red hair, November 25, 1935, smack dab in the dustbowl” (U 109). This “dustbowl” refers specifically to Ashland in Kansas, which Johnson describes in his 1995 interview with O’Leary: “I come from Kansas [. . .] from a town of about two thousand, on the edge of the prairies, just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It was a horrible place” (RJ 567).




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Why does Johnson’s poetry now merit attention and reassessment? Johnson has, like Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, always been slightly “out of key with his time,” remaining throughout his career largely peripheral to the major movements and schools dominating twentieth-century American poetry.28 This situation, no doubt, is exacerbated by Johnson’s commitment to unite modernist avant-garde praxis with Transcendentalism’s visionary scope into a poetic that also incorporates naïf outsider art, Americana, and European Romanticism. Johnson’s closest affiliations are with the diverse assortment of poets associated with Black Mountain and the journals, Black Mountain Review and Origin. While living in Washington, D.C., Johnson, in late 1958, met former Black Mountain student and Jargon founder, Jonathan Williams. “We joined forces,” Williams recounts, “And I became a mentor, just enough older for that relationship to work.”29 Soon after they moved to New York where Johnson’s poetic vocation really began. We moved to New York and I worked at the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, while RJ completed a B.A. degree at Columbia College. We spent a lot of time at the Cedar Bar on University Place with friends like Joel Oppenheimer, Franz Kline, Dan Rice, Fielding Dawson, Gilbert Sorrentino, Esteban Vicente, many of whom I’d known from my earlier days at Black Mountain College.30 Johnson was in a prime position to absorb the intellectual and creative ideas spilling out from Black Mountain’s recent closure: “I learned from all of them, that whole Black Mountain circle, because Jonathan knew all of them and he published them on [sic] Jargon Press. And so I was immersed in this world of wonderful creative people. And so I began writing” (RJ 567). In these formative years, Olson in particular made a significant impression on the aspiring poet, becoming an important model for Johnson’s early poetry. Johnson even dedicated his first collection, A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (published by Jargon in 1964) to Olson. Ezra Pound, one of Olson’s early masters, also became an instructive model for Johnson. Johnson and Williams visited the poet in Venice during their trip to Europe in 1966/1967. It was a “most memorable day,” Johnson writes, “when Jonathan and I entered into the presence of Ezra Pound.” We knew he’d not really talked to anyone for several years, but Jonathan had him talking after a chance remark that he published Mina Loy. Pound’s ears pricked up at that and we chatted comfortably for an hour.



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A crucial influence on Johnson’s work, Pound’s Cantos provides the basic collage mode that Johnson’s poetry utilizes and is a touchstone across his poetry. However, Johnson increasingly promotes a collage poetics, most emphatically in ARK ’s “Spires” and “Ramparts,” that questions the high modernist principles of Pound’s work, especially the pronounced pedagogic tone of The Cantos, the specialized cultural ideals it perpetuates, and the strong emphasis that Pound places on reference and history. Johnson was younger than the majority of poets associated with Black Mountain who were advancing the innovations of Pound and Williams in the 1950s. When Johnson was just starting to write his own poetry—his first collection was published by Jargon in 1964—many of the older poets associated with Black Mountain had established themselves as considerable figures within the poetry scene. It is also significant that the work of their major touchstone, Pound, was undergoing reassessment at around the same time. By the end of the 1960s, Christopher Beach claims, “what seemed urgently radical in Pound’s work ten or fifteen years earlier no longer seemed so: the force of the Pound tradition had dissipated and its practitioners had been scattered.”31 Yet Johnson’s poetry continues to show strong sympathies with this older tradition long after its influence had waned. The marginal presence of Johnson in American poetry is further amplified when some of his other friendships and acquaintances are considered. A visit to the United Kingdom toward the end of 1962, which lasted for nearly a year, brought Johnson into contact with a number of poets, artists, and writers that would impact his developing poetics. The most important of these include Basil Bunting (another important influence in Johnson’s later years) and Ian Hamilton Finlay, via whom, Michael Basinski notes, “concrete poetry entered Ronald Johnson’s imagination and thereafter became a fundamental part of his poetry” (RJ 199). It was also around this time that Johnson met the artist John Furnival who collaborated on a number of Johnson’s poems including Io and the Ox-Eyed Daisy, first published in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s magazine, Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, in 1965. Johnson also established friendships with a number of more mainstream poets and artists. One example is the British poet, critic, cultural historian, and writer Geoffrey Grigson. During their stay in the United Kingdom, Johnson and Williams spent time with Grigson and his wife, Jane Grigson, herself a successful cookbook writer who may very well have influenced



Then with Miss Rudge he took us to the canal where A Lume Spento was written. We discussed Olson and Dahlberg, William Carlos Williams, and Creeley, I seem to remember. (U 116)

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Johnson’s own career in that area. As it is, The Book of the Green Man—for all the debts it owes to Pound, and more tenuously to Thoreau—is inconceivable without Grigson’s influence. Although Grigson had rejected Imagism by the mid-1930s and expressed little interest in avant-garde poetry, Johnson saw in his “detached descriptive stance” and his emphasis on the “ ‘observations’ of the eye rather than of the animadverting mind,” a parallel with the Imagism and Objectivism central to his own poetry.32 Indeed, it is easy to imagine Johnson making connections between Grigson’s “verbal registration of the cultivated eye’s experience,” and Pound or Zukofsky’s emphasis on detailed vision. Another important name for Johnson’s poetry is Guy Davenport to whom Williams introduced Johnson in the early 1960s. He would prove to be one of Johnson’s most important friends, exerting considerable influence on the development and direction Johnson’s poetry would take over the following decades. With his encyclopedic knowledge and capacity for writing on numerous subjects—from Louis Agassiz to Archilochus, snake handling to Stanley Spencer and David Jones, Indian arrowheads to Charles Ives—Davenport was something of an American Grigson. Unlike Grigson, however, he was passionate about modernist literature, tirelessly championing Pound, Olson, and Zukofksy in his essays and his English classes at the University of Kentucky. Hugh Kenner, a close friend of Davenport, has called Davenport “the Hermit of Lexington.”33 It is an accurate description of Davenport’s own peripheral status in late twentieth-century American poetry. Despite his important influence as a Poundian scholar and his reputation as a successful and accomplished poet and short-story writer, Davenport never affiliated himself with any specific group or movement. Thus, Johnson’s close association with “the Hermit of Lexington” compounds his own marginality.34 Johnson, Black Mountain, Language, Zukofsky So where can we locate Johnson on the American poetry map? Is he a Black Mountain poet, slightly out of key with his time? Or can we identify him with contemporaneous currents of poetic activity? It is possible to do the latter—specifically with Language poetry—but this raises further questions about Johnson’s ambiguous position in relation to the late twentieth-century American avant-garde. In 1968, after his ten-year relationship with Jonathan Williams came to an end, Johnson “left the confines of Jargonia to live à seul (more or less) in hectic S. F.”35 Johnson’s relocation to “Oz” put him in the



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There were interesting friends to meet again, Rexroth and Duncan, and new ones to make, Thom Gunn. Thom and I could talk (but not in bars), and I drove Robert Duncan once a month over the bridge to Berkeley to shop and have lunch. I’ve heard the cowed say that Dunc was a monologist, but we talked endlessly, brilliantly. This was the first person who treated me as a peer. (U 117) Living in San Francisco from 1968 to 1993 meant that Johnson was also, tangentially, caught up in the younger, burgeoning Language poetry scene emerging out of the activities of people such as Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. Apart from location, what connects Johnson with these slightly younger poets is an interest in the poetry of Louis Zukofsky. Johnson even wrote a brief prose piece on Zukofsky’s prosody entitled “L.Z,” which was initially published in Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews’s L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine in 1978.36 Despite his strong affinities with the Black Mountain poets, Johnson’s own sympathies are not entirely anathema to Language poetry. Joel Bettridge, for example, drawing reference to unpublished notes Johnson made for a conference in the late 1980s entitled “Words as Objects: Three Undergrounds,” cites Johnson’s comments on the Language poets: “When they are good they shake the very foundations we cultivate. When they are bad they may be even better. Let us hear and see and talk about what they have to say” (RJ 345). The openness that Johnson expresses here, according to Bettridge, makes it “evident that Johnson believed in the value of Language poetry, but perhaps for different reasons than some of the Language poets themselves did” (RJ 345). Those differing reasons may have to do with Pound. Like the Language poets, Johnson foregrounds Zukofsky as the measure of this new writing, but does so without completely abandoning Pound, the standard for the earlier generation of Black Mountain poets. These evenings’ principle quest has been to study the very limits of the Greeks’ and Zukofsky’s and Pound’s measure of melopoeia, phanopoeia, logopoeia . . . toward a vital poetry the future might look to. Logopoeia, Zukofsky read highest of all. . . . No doubt they will disagree with me, but this is the scale on which I wish to weigh the Language Poets. Let them, I say hatch their own equations . . . and (at their finest) pay strict attention to any world they fix to paper. (RJ 345)



immediate proximity of a well-established poetry scene and its prominent figures.

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Rather than representing a break from Pound, Johnson sees Zukofsky as indicative of the ways that Pound’s work can be developed and taken in new directions, “toward a vital poetry the future might look to.” For Johnson, Language poetry, this new chapter in twentieth-century experimental American poetry, represents the continuum of a tradition rather than a break from it. This is typical of Johnson’s thinking; the same principles of continuity and affinity inform Johnson’s attitude toward nineteenth-century Transcendentalism and its relation to modernism. Johnson’s involvement with Zukofsky goes back to his New York years when, with Williams, he would visit the Zukofskys. Johnson had followed his work closely, even sending his own poetry to Zukofsky to read. “He didn’t like my poems much,” Johnson tells O’Leary: “Ultimately, he liked one poem of mine, and that was the one that sounded most like him, ‘Of Circumstance, the Circum Stances’ ” from A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (RJ 584). Despite Zukofsky’s indifference to Johnson’s poetry, his work becomes increasingly important for Johnson and the direction his poetry takes in ARK. Johnson joins Ron Silliman, Robert Grenier, Barrett Watten, and Charles Bernstein in recognizing Zukofsky’s “seminal place in American poetics.”37 These Language poets, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley notes, have “appropriated” and “expanded on” Zukofsky’s poetics: Like Zukofsky, these poets (1) foreground language, in order to “repossess the world,” (2) reject symbolism and mythic superstructures and embrace linguistic structures, (3) perceive an interrelationship between the word and the world, and (4) regard the self as a marginal presence in the text: the mediating subject disappears.38 Likewise, Tim Woods, emphasizing their predominant concern with linguistic structures, claims with regard to the Language poets that: Their interests in issues such as aesthetics and politics, challenging the reification of language, and the possibilities of a linguistic art achieving the representational paradigm of music have retrospectively caused Zukofsky’s work to move from the wings to the center stage.39 Although Johnson’s poetry bears notable similarities to these basic principles of Language poetry, it lacks the radically political agendas characterizing Language writing or its rigorous theoretical bent. Nevertheless, like Language poetry, Johnson’ s work foregrounds language in order to “repossess the world” and renew it. That the initial title for ARK was Wor(l)ds



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indicates that Johnson, like the Language poets, was aware of the pertinent interrelationships occurring between words and constructions of “world.” Johnson never abandons his ocularcentric concerns, but in the later books of ARK he becomes increasingly interested in the condition of music, appropriating Zukofsky’s “excision of all but ears to the language itself” for his own bricolage poetics.40 Johnson’s “excision” shifts attention from Pound’s emphasis on the image in order to pursue an interest in syntax and prosody more aligned with Zukofsky’s poetry. Furthermore, as with Language poetry, the mediating subject disappears increasingly throughout Johnson’s poetry so that, with ARK, we are presented with language “ ‘play’d by the picture of No-body’ ” (“BEAM 5, The Voices”).41 The question of myth—its function and significance—in Johnson’s poetry is more complicated. In being so, however, it highlights the unique position Johnson assumes in relation to the older generation of modernists and the new generation of “post” modern poets. On the one hand, the visionary scope of Johnson’s poetry shows considerable sympathy with the imaginal verities and mythopoeic concerns of Pound, H.D., Williams, Duncan, and Olson. “From Duncan,” Johnson writes in “Up Till Now,” “I learned to see the angels in Rilke and to trust them” (U 115). And like Duncan, Johnson identifies strongly with the Orpheus myth. “I’d met my myth,” Johnson writes in “Hurrah for Euphony,” “Orpheus and Eurydice, and that proved a honeyed terrain. Myths gather gossip of the race distilled as a story, a story moreover which involves us all.”42 Johnson’s final point, that myth “involves us all,” is an important one and indicates the egalitarian and democratic nature of his own mythopoeic vision which is realised in ARK ’s “Spires.” Charles Boer notes with reference to Duncan’s “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” the prominent belief in myth, the unconscious, and the imagination in Duncan’s modernist forbears: Ezra Pound and HD [sic], to name but two of Duncan’s supreme forebearers [sic], wrote little that was not ever conscious of god-step at the margins of thought. Even when gods are not mentioned in particular poems by these now classic poets of American literature, they are there guiding the mind, focussing the eye, limning the voice.43 But to maintain similar beliefs in the 1980s and 1990s, Boer suggests, is to appear anachronistic: Their generation must now begin to seem puzzling, if not altogether archaic, to younger readers, who are, shall we say, more flattened-out?




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For Pound, Kenner maintains, “To see gods was a way to see nature, not to use an antique way of talking.”45 For Johnson, conversely, to see nature is to witness gods, such as Orpheus, who throughout Johnson’s poetry manifests in the universe and the mind as natural processes and patterns. Thus, by understanding Orpheus, the universe is understood. This is at considerable odds with the more “flattened-out” sensibilities of Johnson’s contemporaries such as the Language poets. According to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Johnson sees myth rather like the high modernists do, “as central among the building blocks of the world—a kind of ancient science and spiritual philosophy that has not been surpassed, had we but the eyes and ears to penetrate its encodings and secrets” (RJ 312). DuPlessis also notes that this is “the position of most romantic poets,” and to that could be added their American cousins, the Transcendentalists (RJ 312). Johnson’s reading and appropriation of Transcendentalism draws on this “ancient science and spiritual philosophy,” making it an integral part of his own cosmography. For DuPlessis, Johnson’s conception of myth recalls the kind of totalizing structures that inform Pound and Eliot’s work, contrasting markedly with the later conceptions of the “objectivist nexus and [. . .] the language cohort” who “totally secularize and declare to moot / resist that [Orphic] myth of poetic vocation,” and “transpose its functions away from transcendence” (RJ 311–2). Johnson’s concept of myth, however, resists these straight distinctions between high modernism and “the objectivist nexus and [. . .] the language cohort.” The issue of myth in Johnson’s work is further evidence of how his poetry resists assimilation into convenient poetic categories. Not quite fitting with Language poetry’s reassessment of high modernist mythopoeia, yet still showing enough affinities with it to distance him from the more romantic positions of the Black Mountain generation following Pound and H.D., Johnson’s position is at once incongruous but also easily overlooked because it does not conform to such demarcations. These incongruities mean Johnson’s poetry resists convenient homogenous collectives: whether consciously contrived by a group of writers or by a more general, or retrospective, critical consensus. Again, comparison with the Language poets and their regard for Zukofsky helps elucidate the implications of Johnson’s solitary position. Although Language poetry does not present, as Bob Perelman stresses, “a uniform literary program, let alone a uniform style,” it is still very much rooted in a



I mean, Duncan and company really took the Gods seriously, not just as mythological decoration, not just as classical nostalgia, and least of all as symbols or poetic bric-a-brac. They believed.44

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strong sense of community and camaraderie, encouraging creative exchange amongst its affiliates and promoting a broadly collective poetic.46 A “group” identity therefore makes it easier to grasp and assess the work of a particular writer such as Carla Harryman or Bruce Andrews. By reading their work within the context of Language poetry, there are tacit criteria by which to read and evaluate their work, position it, or situate it within the broader context of late twentieth-century American poetry. Because Johnson’s poetry resists such collective poetics makes it so valuable for re-examining and re-assessing the development and history of late twentieth-century, avant-garde American poetry. Eric Keenaghan makes a similar assessment of Johnson’s poetry in terms of queer theory, stressing how “Johnson’s homosexuality, like his poetry, is not dependent on group affiliations” (RJ 389–390). Although Johnson was active in San Francisco’s gay scene, even running a successful leather bar called The No Name, his sexuality rarely figures in his poetry making it resistant to “being read reductively as speaking on behalf of a particular community, against heterosexual culture, or even about the performativity of identity” (RJ 366).47 Johnson himself purposefully treats his own sexuality in an oblique manner, so his homosexuality remains the proverbial “open secret,” complete with all of the ethical and political ambivalences that attend an author’s refusal of published disclosure. (RJ 364) As Keenaghan sees it, this resistance actually reasserts key debates of queer theory by tacitly questioning “the presumed need to articulate sexual identity” (RJ 365), thereby encouraging a “rethinking [of] queer theory and even gay history” (RJ 367): His is an inherently political project; his refusal of narrative and identification produces a poetical treatment of political specificities circumscribed by a humanistic, philosophical concern with ethics. Investigating what it means to be a human agent and participate in world-building, he asks: Can we imagine identity, relationality, agency differently? (RJ 367) Questions such as these also assert themselves in more general issues concerning the history of poetry. Johnson’s singularity, as Keenaghan terms it, calls attention to the frequent assumptions made in defining and mapping contemporary poetry. By pursuing what is ostensibly a solitary path, Johnson’s poetry invites a re-charting of the twentieth-century poetry map. It encourages a reconsideration of the borders that are often drawn up to demarcate opposing poetry movements and epochs,




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and a re-examination of what occurs on the peripheries of those familiar territories. The implications of this re-mapping can be explained with the examples of Zukofsky and Language poetry, the critical success of which is partly due to its strong group identity. As the dominant voice in American avantgarde poetry throughout the 1970s and 1980s and in establishing a strong profile in academia in the 1990s, Zukofsky’s work has tended to be read and assessed through the lens of Language poetry. However, as Scroggins notes, the collective assertion of Language’s goals and procedures (however loosely defined) does have a “somewhat less salutary” subtext that “implies that Language poetry itself—a corrective collaborative organization, or a similarly collaborative nexus of poets—is the only true inheritor and forwarder of the innovations of Zukofsky’s poetics” (emphasis added).48 In 1978 serious claims were being made as to the true inheritors of Zukofsky when Robert Duncan and Barrett Watten came to heads after the screening of Richard Moore’s documentary film on Zukofsky at the San Francisco Art Institute. This was “a clash of personal egos, of poetic ideologies, and of poetic groups,” Scroggins writes, “and a clash that demonstrated that there was already under way a struggle over Zukofsky’s poetic inheritance.”49 The ramifications of this clash would not be felt fully until the summer of 1984 after Poetry Flash published an article by David Levi Strauss (a former student of Duncan’s at New College) describing the events of six years earlier, and dismissing Watten’s discussion of Zukofsky on the grounds of it being “tediously tendentious and closed,” and doing “real violence to the work at hand.”50 Strauss’s contentious article, De Villo Sloan writes, opened a schism between two generations of Bay Area poets: The struggle took place between the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets and a group of less clearly defined poets centered around Robert Duncan with Black Mountain and Beat connections: two disgruntled and strangely related factions of the American poetic avant-garde. The central issue of the poetry war relates directly to other political and social events occurring in the Bay Area that summer: A definition of SELF.51 As Sloan points out, this “minor skirmish” raises some important questions about the terrain of American avant-garde poetry in the late twentieth century. “Who are the literary reactionaries? Who represents the literary establishment? How will history define postmodernism? Who is good? Who is bad? Who will win? Who will lose?”52 To these questions can be added: Who writes the history that determines the



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problematic label “postmodernism”? It seems reasonable to claim that it was the Language poets who won this war and who have been recognized largely as the true inheritors of Zukofsky and, for a period, deemed the advanced-guard of late twentieth-century “post” modern poetry. After all, as Sloan points out, in contrast to the “less clearly defined poets centered around Robert Duncan,” the Language poets possess a collective rationale, establishing a stronger position from which to defend and advance their poetics. But are they the true inheritors of Zukofsky and the only representatives of American post-modernist poetry? A poet in a position such as Johnson’s tacitly questions these kinds of assumptions, complicating the dichotomies that define literary histories. For example, Johnson’s marginal status encourages a reconsideration of the adequacy and worth of drawing up such rigid lines demarcating “Language poets” on the one side, and “Language Bashers” on the other.53 Where would we situate Johnson in this struggle? Or, come to that, Jack Sharpless, another overlooked and neglected poet whose work displays the strong influence of Zukofsky and who lived in San Francisco at the time of the Bay Area “poetry wars”?54 If nothing else, Johnson reminds us that poetic histories are never quite as black and white as the critics (and victors) tend to suppose, or have us believe. A history of collage? It is with Johnson’s peripheral position in mind that I approach the principal topic of this book: collage. Collage is an intrinsic and ubiquitous sensibility and aesthetic for Johnson that informs just about all his activities, not just his poetry. It is evident in his assemblage sculptures and in “ARK 38,” Johnson’s experiment in music. In the early 1980s, Johnson with sound technician Roger Gans made a sound recording for KQED in San Francisco. Entitled “ARK 38, Ariel’s Song to Prospero,” the piece comprises approximately six minutes of manipulated Western American bird song recordings.55 “I used records,” Johnson tells O’Leary, “and stitched together a music with a sound technician to make a real music from six little bird songs” (RJ 582). The music recalls the “musique concréte” pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry on recordings such as Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul (1950), where audio collages of pre-recorded sounds are sped up, slowed down, played backwards, altered in pitch and intensity, or subjected to reverb. “My idea with ARK was that there should be a special thing for people that if they paid $50 they got a record with the ‘Songs to Prospero’ on it” (RJ 582).




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Johnson’s cookbooks are composed much like his poetry: cookbooks, too, are never created out of pure inspiration but rather are collected and revised and edited from other cookbooks, the pieces borrowed and recomposed into new formulations.56 Although, as Keenaghan points out, Johnson, on the whole, tends to separate his autobiographical life from his poetry, there are still notable similarities between the two. Johnson’s catering career, Folsom proposes, is one. More generally, however, one can see the opportunistic resourcefulness of Johnson’s collage poetics paralleling the pragmatism he applied to his everyday life. Living hand-to-mouth for most of his life, turning his hand to whatever the situation offered him (nightclub organizer, restaurant manager, retail worker, cook, cookbook writer, baker), Johnson exercised the same practical resourcefulness in his life that characterises his poetry. In “The Spires” and “The Ramparts” especially, Johnson is always turning the situation to his advantage—finding poetry in television fragments, overheard conversations, and colloquialisms—and learning from it. “If I have learned anything,” Johnson tells Alpert, “it’s that living itself is a process, a process of learning. And everyone has something to teach” (RJ 548). This openness to learning and readiness to adapt and appropriate is apparent in “Up Till Now” when Johnson acknowledges those he has learned from: From Ives I learned how collage could be used to effect. From Stan Brakhage I learned the virtues of cutting for speed, and from the painter Jess how to reconstruct a puzzle so the seams became the seen (and viceversa). From R. B. Kitaj, that anything might happen in the way of connections. (U 115) Evidently, Johnson’s collage sensibility draws considerably on nonliterary models from music, art, and film. Nevertheless, at the core of it are the innovations of the American modernists. In his 1974 interview with Barry Alpert, Johnson remarks: The history of collage has not yet been written. It’s central, I think, to understanding Eliot, Pound, Marianne Moore, W.C.W., and in other ways Zukofsky and Olson. All of them have used chunks and snippets,



Collage also informs Johnson’s cookbook writing, Ed Folsom suggests, evincing “the same sense of diligent gathering” that characterizes his poetry:


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According to Dirk Stratton, “when such a history is written, it will have to include a chapter on Johnson since he is one of collage’s most avid practitioners.”57 But this history can also be written from the perspective of Johnson’s own collage poetics. By tracing the growth and development of Johnson’s own collage poetics, as I endeavor to do, it is possible to identify a series of different stages in that modernist tradition of Pound, Williams, Moore, Olson, and Zukofsky. But, as Johnson’s poetry indicates, this tradition also establishes salient dialogues with its predecessors (including European and American forms of Romanticism), contemporaneous spheres of activity in music and visual arts, as well as vernacular forms of American art. On the one hand, the evolution of Johnson’s collage poetic mirrors a general trajectory that we also find in Language poetry; namely, a shift away from Pound and his emphasis on the image to Zukofsky (and Gertrude Stein), and a new focus on syntax. As Michael Davidson points out, the provenance of this modernist literary collage tradition is in the European innovations spearheaded by Picasso and Braque in the visual arts. In the United States, the first appearance of Cubist painting and collage in the Armory show of 1913 and then in Alfred Steiglitz’s magazines Camera Work and 291 were a revelation to many poets. Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, Mina Loy, and others seized upon the possibilities of fragmentation, repetition, and montage in the work of Picasso, Braque, and Leger. In particular, the poets were interested by the way painters incorporated found materials onto canvas.58 As much as Johnson’s poetry connects into this largely avant-garde European tradition of collage, it also engages a tradition of folk and outsider art practices occurring without the professional art world. Where the modernist collage of Pound or Picasso, for example, is ultimately a product of (and for) the gallery or library, the folk and outsider strains of the aesthetic are rooted in quotidian and vernacular environs. As Rasula maintains, ARK is “Ostensibly a homespun work of Americana—like Charles Ives’s music, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, or James Hampton’s ‘Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly’ ” [see “BEAM 28, The Book of Orpheus”].59 The Americana of these artists display a collage praxis rooted in principles of contiguity, juxtaposition, and superimposition that also play prominent roles in modernist poetry.



artefacts and re-creations, past and present, to put another sense of time and space into poetry. (RJ 547)

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In addition to Ives’s music and the bricolage of Rodia and Hampton, the work of Robert Duncan’s partner Jess, John Chamberlain, Arthur Dove, Robert Rauschenberg, and Wallace Berman could be added to this American collage tradition. Johnson too, because, in the mid-1960s he started making his own assemblages. It was in England I started collecting the objects—mostly rusted metal— that I was to turn into sculpture years later, as well as the sea-sculpted stone that I carried back from the beach at Clovelley, which I made my “cornerstone.” In SoHo a couple of years later I was walking with Bill Benton and picked up a perfect Chamberlain “wave.”60 Bill said, “I think it was Rauschenberg who said: ‘If you go around the block in New York without seeing something to put in a picture, then you’ve not been looking.’ ” I held on to this “wave” for years, saving up bits and pieces that would bring it out; until living in my Dad’s basement in Topeka, where I had weathered wood and electric saw to construct objects I’d saved for years for want of a studio for my second wave of sculptures. Thus, when I found my métier was rust, not paint, I finally became a visual artist. (U 114) Johnson’s salvages show a resourceful, pragmatic sensibility that is also applied to his poetry. And like his poetry, these assemblages are as much a response to folk and outsider art as to the avant-garde art world. As Rasula has noted, Johnson has a long-standing interest in the visionary and vernacular outsider art of “naïf” self-taught artists such as Rodia and Hampton. This tradition of amateur autodidactic art becomes a crucial factor in the direction Johnson’s collage poetics take in ARK, which, Stratton maintains, “represents a final realization of [Johnson’s] poetic vision, one that builds upon and incorporates the work of a lifetime.”61 As John Beardsley suggests, Rodia is representative of a tradition of “handmade environments that express a moral or religious vision, typically fabricated of found materials by people who aren’t necessarily identified by themselves or by others as artists.”62 Beardsley stresses that, “one of the defining characteristics of these creators is biographical: they are all artistically self-taught.”63 The self-taught visionary, innocent of rules, is evident in ARK ’s bricolage poetics, which favor vernacular and naïf forms of collage over Pound’s high modernist model. As Scroggins notes with regard to ARK, “Johnson reconceives the modernist poetics of juxtaposition and the ‘luminous detail,’ ” of Pound, “revising it downward, as it were, into the realm of folk culture and bricolage” (RJ 9). Scroggins’s observation is especially poignant if we note that Johnson comes full-circle with this method. Johnson explains to



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Alpert how his earliest attempts at writing poetry were experiments in collage, made in ignorance of the avant-garde tradition he would later make his own: “I saved boxes and boxes of words and phrases cut from newspapers and made collage poems from them—before I knew what collage was either” (RJ 546). Johnson mentions these poems again twenty-years later in his interview with O’Leary. I did some collage poems in which I took snippets from newspapers that said something strange, just two words or three words, and I made poems out of those and I made different forms and they were all pasted in a book. That’s disappeared, too. I didn’t get rid of them; they just disappeared. I looked for it because I’d love to see that book. So already then, before I knew anything much about poetry—well, I’d write this collage poem—I didn’t know anything about modern poetry, not really. (RJ 568) It is striking that ARK, Johnson’s crowning achievement, should aspire to the naivety of his earliest work, written in innocence of “modern poetry” and collage. But Johnson stresses that he “wished, from the beginning, to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand” (“A Note”). It is this kind of wide-eyed prospectiveness that Johnson’s poetry seeks to achieve; to see the world, as Olson writes in Maximus, “as though it had never / happened before”: that all start up to the eye and soul as though it had never happened before.64 Olson’s use of the conditional, “as though” is a crucial point for Johnson’s own prospective stance. Whereas Johnson was essentially naïve when he wrote his “newspaper poems,” by the time he writes ARK he is at the height of his powers, thoroughly schooled in the work of his modernist masters: Pound, Williams, Moore, Olson, and Zukofsky. It should be stressed then that Johnson wanted to appear naïve and pretend to know nothing, contriving a spirit of naivety similar to his early “newspaper poems.” In this faux-naïf bricolage poetics we find the culmination of Johnson’s longstanding exploration of “innocent” or “naïve” vision. These Adamic endeavors are realized in the way Johnson responds to historical material without preconception or prescription but pragmatically,




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taking it at face value as valuable building material for his own literary edifice, ARK. In tracing the trajectory of Johnson’s collage poetics, I hope this book will make a strong case for reading Johnson and recognizing his stature as a considerable participant in late twentieth-century American poetry. In discussing and explicating some of the debates and issues of the New American collage tradition, stretching from Pound to Zukofsky and beyond, Johnson’s significant contributions and advancements to this tradition can begin to be acknowledged. By admitting Johnson’s rightful place in the company of Pound, Moore, Zukofsky, and other recognized practitioners of collage, the history of this important aspect of twentieth-century American poetry can start to be reassessed and revised with the valuable insights and lessons that Johnson’s poetry affords it.



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The “visionary” is the man who has passed through sight into vision, never the man who has avoided seeing, who has not trained himself to see clearly, or who generalizes among his stock of visual memories. If there is a reality beyond our perception we must increase the power and coherence of our perception, for we shall never reach reality in any other way. —Northrop Frye1

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ut of the New American poets following in the wake of Pound, Moore, and Williams, Johnson is particularly vocal about his Romantic and Transcendental affinities. In a letter written to Dirk Stratton in 1991, Johnson describes his poetic response to the world as “Visionary Romantic” and “New Transcendentalist.”2 Indeed, Johnson’s poetry supports Albert Gelpi’s argument for the existence of “a subtler continuity between Romanticism and Modernism” than what many critics accept.3 Johnson’s perpetuation of this “continuity” is evident in his essay “Hurrah for Euphony,” when he praises Thoreau for Romantic and modernist qualities. I spent years reading in the two huge volumes of the Dover Edition of Thoreau’s Journal to sharpen my eye and how it intersects with text. I learned how Henry David could set down the miniscules, then slip right into the unconscious, speculating about snakes in his stomach or eating a red raw muskrat.4

Praising Thoreau for his imaginative speculation and his precise observation, Johnson echoes Marjorie Perloff’s distinctions between Wallace



CHAPTER 1

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Stevens’s Romanticism and Pound’s Modernist classicism. Perloff emphasizes these distinctions by contrasting a quote from Stevens’s Opus Posthumous—“Poetry as an imaginative thing consists of more than [what] lies on the surface”—with Pound’s “attention for what ‘lies on the surface.’ ”5 In Johnson’s assessment of Thoreau, there is attention and awareness for both: a Poundian concern for what lies on the surface and a Stevensian or Romantic speculation about what exists beyond or within it. The passage from Thoreau’s 1851 Journal that Johnson discusses actually forms the cornerstone of ARK as “BEAM 15, Cornerstone,” which re-presents Thoreau’s text in a justified, rectangular prose block. Quite literally, Johnson’s poetic edifice is built on these two modes of vision: speculative Romantic vision and objective Modernist observation. It is predominantly in the form of Transcendentalism that Johnson’s poetry brings Romantic concerns about Idealist metaphysics, intuitive epistemologies, and speculative vision into the twentieth century by reexamining them through the lens of modernist poetry. As “a branch of Emersonian thought emphasising organic process, vital expression, cultural and political democracy, and the cultivation of an indigenous art,” the Transcendentalist affinities that Johnson’s poetry displays make it a prime candidate for “the green American tradition,” proposed by Sherman Paul.6 Paul outlines an American tradition beginning with the Transcendentalists and continuing in the critical work of Paul Rosenfeld (from whom Paul gets the phrase “the green American tradition”) and Alfred Kazin; the architecture of Louis Sullivan; and the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder. Paul’s later work on Olson and other New American poets would suggest that he sees these poets as other significant representatives of this “American principle,” which entails the “Affirmation of man’s whole nature [and] embrace of all the earth bound up with it.” 7 Mina Loy, Robert Duncan, Lorine Niedecker, David Antin, and Jerome Rothenberg—along with Williams, Olson, and Snyder—have all been associated with this green Emersonian tradition.8 Out of such a body of modernist forbears and contemporaries, it is Johnson who shows the most explicit affinities with Transcendentalism, re-seeing it with the eyes of a Modernist poet. Like a double helix or the entwined snakes of Hermes’s caduceus in “BEAM 16, The Voices,” these contrasting literary and philosophical modes are not antithetical but complementary in Johnson’s poetics. Modernist collage becomes a natural continuation of the catalogue rhetoric practiced by Emerson and Whitman, providing effective means for enhancing the Transcendentalists’ celebration of a manifold world: a world of multiplicity and metamorphosis.



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Another enduring concern of Johnson’s poetry—and one very much implicated in his collage poetics—is to recover the eyes of Adam and see the world as if for the first time. Doing so, however, requires engaging “vision in all its manifestations,” as Guy Davenport notes, “from the scientific to the simple but difficult business of seeing the world with eyes cleansed of stupidity and indifference” (V 11). It is an ideal that recalls the Transcendentalist desire to overcome “superficial seeing” and apprehend the world with innocent eyes, as Emerson proposes in Nature: To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood (N 38). Johnson’s desire to “see the world from scratch” (“BEAM 17”) and his exhortation in “ARK 35, Spire Called Arm of the Moon” to “Become Adam” follows Emerson’s aspirations in his early essays. To quote Johnson (in turn, quoting the eighteenth-century physician John Haygarth) in “Samuel Palmer: The Characters of Fire,” Johnson’s poetry is largely concerned with the “situation of the eye” (V 20). Johnson’s poetry engages what Martin Jay describes as a dual Western concept of vision: “the alternating traditions of speculation with the eye of the mind and observation with the two eyes of the body,” which, together, provide “the fertile ground for the varieties of ocularcentricism that have so deeply penetrated Western culture.”9 Bound up in these modalities of vision is the significance of Transcendentalism in the development of Johnson’s collage poetics that evolve from a pragmatism with roots in the work of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Johnson’s later collage poetics in ARK recalls what Lee Rust Brown calls Emerson’s “visionary empiricism” or “empirical transcendentalism.”10 Empirical Transcendentalism posits that visionary transcendence (in the sense of Frye’s term) can only be realized through empirical activity and a receptivity to what Emerson, in “The American Scholar,” calls “the near, the low, the common” (N 101). I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provençal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. (N 102)




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Empirical Transcendentalism stresses the importance of heeding quotidian details or, as Johnson writes in “Hurrah for Euphony,” of being “sentinel for incidence.”11 From such a perspective, Emerson reasons, “the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench” (N 102). Johnson’s visionary stance recalls Emerson’s “picture of mental life,” which, according to Brown, “revives the manual sense of grasping or taking (capere) buried in the word ‘perception’ ”: “Vision has a hands-on dimension, as it were, in which worker and material come together.”12 A similar notion of “hands-on” seeing is evident in Johnson’s poetics. For example, in “Still Life” from A Line of Poetry, referring to “the palm of a hand with an eye the Indians made” (V 51), Johnson asks us: “What hand will reach out to see the world?” (V 52). Evidently, this image made a considerable impression on Johnson. Thirty years later, writing in “Hurrah for Euphony,” Johnson recalls the image: “Sometimes the hand has an eye in the palm, as the American Indians remind us. Grab a frontier!”13 Such tactile perception is at the very heart of ARK and its ideas about vision, experience, and history. However, to see how Johnson arrives at these ideas in ARK, it is necessary to go back to the early work comprising Johnson’s debut collection, A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (Jargon, 1964), and trace the evolution of these Transcendentalist affinities. Charles Olson Johnson dedicated A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees to a bemused and indifferent Charles Olson. Johnson would later write to Edward Dahlberg of Olson’s response to the gesture: “I dedicated my first book to Olson, I received not even a word from him, except through Jonathan [Williams], to whom he gave his amazement that I should bother.”14 As the dedication suggests, A Line of Poetry clearly shows the strong influence of Olson, with a significant number of the collection’s poems attempting to grapple familiar Olson themes. Johnson’s book is divided into two sections. The first half of the collection entitled “The Garden,” comprises poems that concern the natural world, botany, gardens, and the visionary art of Samuel Palmer and Arthur Dove. It is the second half of the collection, entitled “The Prairies,” where Olson’s influence is most apparent. “Prairie” poems such as “Quivara” and “Lilacs, Portals, Evocations,” for example, engage the subject of the discovery of the New World and the American push West. Other poems, such as “Of Circumstance, The Circum Stance,” take



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Mayse, my mother’s family name & had it crest, Maize one would make it: a brown field sprouting Indian corn, of red & yellow kernels that various, still variegated display of ancestry. (V 64) Following Olson’s example—and Pound before him—Johnson tends to present the “facts” of his research in the form of direct quotation. More often than not, Johnson quotes material concerning the history, settlement, and topography of the New World as seen by “the first Western eyes” (V 38), along with information about the indigenous North American Indian communities—their customs, ceremonies, and relationships with the land. According to Patrick Pritchett, Johnson “mimes with perfect fidelity” Olson’s “allusive style” (RJ 26). But unlike Olson’s poetry, Johnson’s presentation of historical material reads more as a discursive essay than a poem. For example, in “Of Circumstance, The Circum Stances,” Johnson writes: I quote from Quill & Beadwork Of the Western Sioux: ‘Beyond these everyday things, came the ceremonial property. Any important man had dreamed, after fasting & prayer, of some powerful being, like an animal or plant, with more than human knowledge. This guardian spirit had given him magic power & bidden him collect certain objects which should express it & which he was to keep with great reverence. Usually, he wrapped them in a rough skin bundle



Kansas as their primary subject, exploring its history and Johnson’s own family heritage.

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In these early poems, Johnson’s earnest tone is suggestive of the didacticism that he increasingly questions in the work of Pound and Olson. However, neither older poet asserts his facts with quite the same level of formality and solemnity as Johnson does in this poem. The mannered tone and precise, formal imagery of the “Prairie” poems differ considerably from Olson’s poetry. Johnson’s poems rarely display the projective thrust so characteristic of Olson’s writing—what Robert Von Hallberg describes as “truncated ratiocination” and the eschewal of “whimsicality, facetiousness, or anything sufficiently artful to be called precious.”15 Indeed, it is hard to imagine Olson using the mannered archaic diction that Johnson employs (via Samuel Johnson) in “Lilac, Portals, Evocations”: ‘And where are you, Mr Johnson’? quoth the Matron, & I ‘I am, madame, here,’ I said, though it were much too simple a conviction for her, (V 71) Instead of evoking Olson’s “composition by field,” the refined, quaint diction that Johnson often employs in these poems is more akin to the cultivated gardens and pruned topiaries they describe than Olson’s open, “composition by field,” poetics. Where Olson’s lines often seem feral, Johnson’s establish, as he writes in “Shake, Quoth the Dove House,” “clear space // to cultivate // the wild, Espaliered, Tangled, / Clipped // estate” (V 18). It is not only form that distinguishes Johnson’s work from Olson’s but also the subjects that Johnson engages, particularly in “The Garden” section of A Line of Poetry. Johnson’s interest in the British visionary landscape painter Samuel Palmer in “Samuel Palmer: The Characters of Fire,” or his use of Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison’s writings on garden aesthetics in “Shake, Quoth the Dove House,” are a far cry from Olson’s subjects. Likewise, the evident interest in Transcendentalism that Johnson’s poems show in A Line of Poetry also sets his work apart from Olson. Nevertheless, Transcendentalism is as much, if not more, a pervasive presence as Olson in A Line of Poetry, providing a kind of nexus



made by himself, but sometimes the woman might add her beaded or quilled decoration’. (V 67)


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for the various and disparate ideas and subjects Johnson engages in, and across, these early poems.

Johnson’s interest in Transcendentalism occurs at a time when the movement was being rediscovered by a number of influential scholars. F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) and Perry Miller’s anthology, The Transcendentalists (1950) are, perhaps, the most well known of these and were particularly influential for the renewed interest in Transcendentalism from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Other books from this period made significant inroads for revaluating the legacy of Transcendentalism and its important role in the formation of American literature: Sherman Paul’s Emerson’s Angle (1952), Charles Fieldson’s Symbolism and American Literature (1953), and R.W.B. Lewis’ The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955), to name but a few. While mutually agreeing that “Transcendentalism” is a nebulous term for a group of New England intellectuals and reformers writing from the 1830s to 1850s who did not subscribe to a unanimous manifesto, these studies tend to identify characteristic traits that the movement’s participants share: aesthetic and philosophical syncreticism; Protestant and Unitarian religious roots; the influence of German philosophy (particularly Kant’s Idealism) and British Romanticism; emphasis on individualism and self-reliance; and a regard for Neoplatonic ideas concerning the immanence of God in the natural world and the soul. These influential studies also flagged up the ambivalent relationship Transcendentalism maintains with European culture and its desire to forge for itself a uniquely American identity out of Old World heritage. Johnson’s own reading of the Transcendentalists shows the influence of this scholarship. Miller’s primary interests, for example, concerning “American intellectuals wrestling with their European cultural inheritance in conflict with America’s provincial openness” and the Transcendentalists’ attempts to come to terms with modernity and “a world without verifiable transcendent meaning,” are concerns that clearly carry over into Johnson’s work.16 For example, ARK ’s distinctive Americana displays creative tension between American provincialism and the influence of European cultural and aesthetic models. Furthermore, the use of Jungian psychology and contemporary science in Johnson’s later work provides the means for inquiring into the possibility of transcendent meaning in a modern world. Indeed, Johnson’s allusions to quantum physics, astronomy, and other contemporary



The Orphic Voice

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sciences in ARK ’s “Foundations” recall Paul F. Boller’s belief that “if one wishes to recapture the feeling of excitement, challenge, adventure, and sheer wonder that the Transcendentalists found in the universe, he must turn to contemporary physics and astronomy [. . .], both of which are seething with new discoveries and fresh insights.”17 Sharing in that Transcendentalist spirit, Johnson’s recourse to contemporary science is not to disprove, discredit, or reason away the mysteries of the world, but to increase and enhance “the Eternal / interior, / not ocular, vision” (“BEAMS 21, 22, 23, The Book of Orpheus”). Johnson’s own Transcendentalist canon—comprising Emerson and Thoreau, with Whitman on the periphery—loosely follows the “intellectual genealogy” that Matthiessen sketches in American Renaissance.18 Matthiessen, Charles Capper suggests, casts Emerson “as the fountainhead of his book’s entire American philosophical-artistic tradition and Thoreau as its greatest Transcendentalist artist.”19 And, like Matthiessen, Johnson is predominantly interested in Emerson and Thoreau’s prose. Writing about Whitman and Dickinson in “Hurrah for Euphony,” Johnson asserts that they “are the twin fonts of American poetry [. . .] both grounded in scripture but bound for rapture.” To stress this point, Johnson compares these “twin fonts” against “two of our most original prose writers,” Emerson and Thoreau: A poet might find profit by a study of their pithy fine distinctions—in Emerson’s case also disjunctions—Yankee dictions, surprise like possums under every bush. Consider Thoreau writing ‘to make the earth say beans’ after a day of hoeing, as fine a line as Dickinson or Whitman, any day.20 In addition to the more conventional studies of Transcendental literature by Matthiessen and Miller, Johnson’s own approach to Transcendentalism is also a consequence of reading Elizabeth Sewell’s book, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (1960). An English-born poet, novelist, and critic, Sewell (1920–2001), who became an American citizen in 1973, wrote a number of influential books on literature, including The Structure of Poetry (1951); Paul Valéry: The Mind in the Mirror (1952); The Field of Nonsense (1952); and The Human Metaphor (1964). While holding a Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester in 1955, Sewell established a lasting friendship with the influential thinker of science, Michael Polanyi, to whom Sewell dedicates The Orphic Voice. Polanyi was an influence on Sewell’s interest in the intersections of literature with science, especially poetry and natural history. In 1982 she became one of the founding editors



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of Literature and Medicine, a journal concerned with exploring the connections between the two fields. Evidence of Sewell’s influence is evident throughout A Line of Poetry with Johnson’s references to Transcendentalism tending to occur within the context of Sewell and her ideas in The Orphic Voice. Johnson even dedicates his sequence “Four Orphic Poems” to Sewell, quoting lines from her book alongside prominent figures in Sewell’s Orphic tradition, including Emerson and Francis Bacon. Sewell’s book also appears in “Still Life” as one of the treasured objects Johnson’s poem lists, sharing significant shelf space with books by Agnes Arber (The Mind & The Eye), John Bakeless (The Eyes of Discovery), Olson (The Distances), Edgar Anderson (Plants, Man & Life), Thoreau (Excursions), and Lucretius, (On the Nature of Things): the books have ranged themselves: The Mind & The Eye, The Eyes of Discovery, The Distances. Plants, Man & Life – Excursions, The Orphic Voice. On the Nature of Things. (V 51) As well as providing a neat summary of the themes and subjects concerning Johnson in A Line of Poetry and beyond—that is, ocular and oracular vision and the dialogue it establishes with the mind; the processes of natural world; contemporary American poetry; Transcendentalism; and travel—these books and their authors also represent the core of Johnson’s own Orphic tradition or genealogy. The importance of The Orphic Voice for Johnson’s poetry is fundamental. “When I read Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic Voice,” Johnson writes in “Hurrah for Euphony,” “I knew I wanted to be of that order of writer she talked about.”21 But it is not only Johnson’s interest in Transcendentalism, but also his affinities with certain strands of British Romanticism, his admiration of Geoffrey Grigson’s writing, his recourse to natural history and contemporary science, his understanding and application of myth and concepts of imagination, along with the ocularcentricism of his poetry, that owe a debt to The Orphic Voice and Sewell’s “brave power to see connections among opposites, to see straight to the inner nature of things.”22 Sewell’s project in The Orphic Voice is to overcome opposites and antitheses—especially those existing between science and poetry—and “see straight to the inner nature of things” via a method she calls “postlogic.” The method, the postlogic, is a way of using mind and body to build up dynamic structures (never fixed or abstract patterns) by which the




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Sewell is interested in the way scientific and mythopoeic thought patterns intersect and complement one another. It is the figure and legend of Orpheus who provides the framework for achieving this kind of reciprocal interpretation. “Language and mind, poetry and biology meet and bear on one another in the figure of Orpheus,” whose myth “asks a great question about poetry in the natural world, the central area where language works with and on that most astonishing of biological phenomena, the human mind” (OV 5). Why Orpheus? “Discovery, in science and poetry, is a mythological situation,” Sewell argues, “in which the mind unites with a figure of its own devising as a means toward understanding the world” (OV 20). Orpheus represents this “mythological situation” for Sewell because: “The myth of Orpheus is statement, question, and method, at one and the same time” (OV 4). Orphic postlogic, Sewell claims, “attests a tradition and a method of thinking” practiced by Shakespeare, Linnaeus, Goethe, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Rilke, among others (OV 404). All of these figures have demonstrated the inclusiveness and reflexivity that Sewell values so highly in postlogic, by either directly drawing upon, or tacitly evoking, Orpheus in their writings. Francis Bacon is another important reference in Orphic postlogic for Sewell, and cites from his Instauration (1620): But the universe to the eye of human understanding is framed like a labyrinth; presenting as it does on every side so many ambiguities of way, such deceitful resemblances of objects and signs, natures so irregular in their lines and so knotted and entangled. (OV 99) Although Bacon’s description of the universe as labyrinthine is essentially negative, Sewell finds affirmation that “statement, question, and method” can reside in the same phenomena and, for the inquiring Orphic mind, comprise “a system of working figures made manifest” (OV 28). This is emphasized by Sewell’s optimistic response to Bacon’s unease about the universe’s “deceitful resemblances”: “Yet where the figure is the answer is” (OV 99). Sewell’s assertion recalls Emerson who, in Nature, claims that, “nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design”: We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of



human organism sets itself in relation to the universe and allows each side to interpret the other. (OV 404)


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Likewise, Sewell holds that the external world’s manifold morphology is not deceitful but illuminative. Nature holds the necessary clues for understanding its vicissitudes and processes. As Johnson writes in “BEAM 12”: “the labyrinth is its own clue.” Johnson uses Bacon’s labyrinth metaphor and Sewell’s commentary in the fourth of his “Four Orphic Poems,” evoking Bacon’s imagery in his description of “Nebula, whirlpool, mist & cloud” as “knotted, asymmetrical branchings // formed like a labyrinth” (V 29). Like Sewell, Johnson eschews Bacon’s mistrust of natural forms, claiming that these amorphous shapes “are form, even as a sphere, crystal / & flower,” are (V 29). Invoking Orpheus, Johnson proceeds to paraphrase Thoreau’s description of thawing frost and sand in Walden.23 And Orpheus, the metamorphosis before us of coral, acanthus, leopard’s-paw, bird’s-foot, ‘sinuosities of meadow’ & rock as it moves quietly beneath lichen. ‘For where the figure is, the answer is’. (V 29–30) Quoting Sewell’s phrase—“Where the figure is, the answer is”—Johnson asserts the existence of order and coherence amid what otherwise appears to be a selection of arbitrary forms existing independently of one another in an unordered universe. This notion is also reinforced by the invocation of Orpheus. As well as being an onomatopoeic depiction of metamorphosis itself, with the name and sound of “Orpheus” morphing through the words “metamorphosis” and “before us,” the Thracian singer also becomes the measure of a teleology of proportion and harmony that the natural world, through metamorphosis, strives to manifest.



things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those enquiries he would put. (N 35–36)

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But can a poet, writing in the latter half of the twentieth century, still chart plausible cosmographies and write about the possibility of a holistically congruent universe? Johnson’s ideas in A Line of Poetry might seem at least one hundred years too late. Emerson and Thoreau, for example, make similar claims about cosmos. Does this mean, then, that Johnson is simply going over old ground when he evokes these cosmological visions? To a degree, the answer is “yes.” Johnson is reiterating basic principles informing not only Transcendentalism but also European Romanticism and the Western philosophical traditions informing those literary movements. But, rather than simply seeing this as Johnson going over old ground, it is more constructive to assess these early poems as the groundwork for the foundation of Johnson’s own poetic edifice, ARK. Johnson’s groundwork recalls Stephen Fredman’s theory of “grounding,” which he believes is a fundamental trait of all American poetry. “Grounding,” Fredman explains, “seeks to reinvent context, to dig down into the site of [modern] rupture in the hope of finding, not the old or new tradition, but the basis of tradition.” 24 “Lacking the authority a longstanding tradition confers,” Fredman suggests, “American poets have had to invent alternative, provisional ways of grounding their poetry, thus assuring the work of tradition in the absence of a unified context.” 25 It is significant then that Johnson makes Thoreau the cornerstone of ARK, and by extension (considering the prominent position he affords ARK in his work as a whole), his entire poetic project. In the context of Fredman’s “grounding,” Johnson’s recourse to Transcendentalism is one of the many layers inscribed in a palimpsest recording his own Orphic genealogy. Another important aspect in Sewell’s Orphic postlogic with regard to Johnson’s poetry is the reappraisal and re-examination of what initially appear as anachronistic or archaic modes of thought. Indeed, Sewell’s predication that “where the figure is, the answer is,” and her belief in pattern, figure, order, and harmony rehearse older epistemologies informing a number of scientific, philosophical, and theological traditions. It is not surprising, then, that Sewell should advocate “a kind of passionate conservatism” that renews old modes of knowledge and forgotten voices: Far from a general course of debunking, we shall find ourselves launched on a reaffirmation of old wisdoms, a kind of passionate conservatism (which may in its turn prove to be one of the characteristics of mythical



Groundwork: Transcendental Cosmographies


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In this spirit Johnson harvests Transcendentalism for “the seeds of newness” it offers his own writing. Sewell’s assertion that, “Tradition is not a handing down of dead fixities, but an invitation to further development” is something that is as applicable to Transcendentalism as it is Johnson’s own poetry (OV 22). When Sewell says of tradition “Make of it what you can” (OV 22), she not only recalls Pound’s dictum, “MAKE IT NEW” (C 265), but also the Transcendentalists’ resourceful and creative fostering of “new world artefacts out of original collages incorporating old-world traditions.”26 It is Johnson’s later work, particularly Radi os and ARK, that most explicitly shows similar resourcefulness for creating new artefacts out of pre-existing material. But Johnson’s magpie instinct is also evident in A Line of Poetry when he draws on the writings of Thoreau and Emerson for his Orphic “reaffirmation of old wisdoms.” In evoking Emerson and Thoreau, Johnson not only reappraises Transcendentalism but also the “old wisdoms” that it, in turn, appropriates. Johnson is especially receptive to the old wisdoms informing various strains of Western esoteric theosophy that Transcendentalism revives. The ideas found in this tradition—which, as the word “theosophy” denotes, are concerned with wisdom of the divine—equip Johnson with a number of epistemological strategies that assist his own inquiries into Orphic postlogic. This results in a rich confluence of Hermetic wisdom and Transcendentalism that enables Johnson to begin charting his singular twentieth-century cosmographies. Johnson is particularly receptive to Transcendentalist insights concerning cosmos—the manifold nature of the world and the relationship the individual has with it. At the heart of Transcendentalist cosmology, Conrad Edick Wright explains, is a “belief in the immanence of the divine” that made faith “personal and immediate.”27 This belief in divine immanence underscores an anthropocentric concept of life, in which the individual is at the center of the universe. The world is explained and understood predominantly with reference to the individual located at the center of it, much in the way that God is conceived “as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere” (N 225). The centripetal stance of the individual means the self is seen as holding the clue—the figure and answer—for understanding Nature and history and culture. “To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself”: “All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.”28 The centrality of the



thinking), letting these antiquities which have in them yet the seeds of newness guide and help us. (OV 21)

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He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren like a single sex. But marry it to human history and it is full of life. (N 50) According to Emerson (and as Whitman reiterates), the most trivial of facts, “the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable manner” (N 50). Seen from this anthropocentric perspective, Nature preaches a moral law, as Emerson proposes, existing, ultimately, for human benefit and insight. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. (N 59) As well as expressing the tutelary capacity of Nature, Emerson expresses another key Transcendentalist notion: the belief of unity-amid-diversity and order-within-chaos. Emerson’s enumerative “catalogue rhetoric,” as Buell explains, plays a significant role in the Transcendentalist’s belief that the world, despite its rich manifold phenomena, maintains an underlying cohesion or unity. As well as expressing this in his assertion that “the moral law [. . .] is the pith and marrow of every substance,” relation, and process, Emerson enacts this concept by enumeration, listing a range of diverse yet interrelated phenomena. The farm unifies the subsequent allusions to “chaff and the wheat” grown on it, whereas “sun,” “weeds,” “insects” “blight,” and “rain” are all factors that determine the success of a crop. And “the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes” sketches out in microcosm the season’s cycle and the ensuing growth of plant stock: from seeds being sown in the furrows to the grown plants being harvested and set in haystacks in the field. In



self in Whitman’s poem, with all the objects of the universe converging on the deciphering subject, reiterates Emerson’s belief that “man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects”:

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instances such as this, as Lawrence Buell suggests, the catalogue “becomes a microcosm of a fluid but cohesive universe.”29 Nothing is incongruent but proportionate to every other object in a universe where “all organizations are [perceived] radically alike.” Johnson, however, does not display the same level of anthropocentricism as the Transcendentalists, but is keen that his work should convey the impression of being “play’d by the picture of No-body” (BEAM 5, The Voices). This is as much a consequence of his reading of Sewell and other Orphic voices (such as the biologist Agnes Arber), as it is his familiarity with the poetics of Pound and Zukofsky. In his 1974 interview with Barry Alpert, Johnson reiterates the Transcendentalist notion of introspection, emphasizing empirical observation as the prerequisite for inner speculation. Johnson tells Alpert: “I’ve come to think it is necessary to look at the outside world a long time like Thoreau and Emerson before entering the mind” (RJ 550–51). For Johnson, the mind is more a general principle—the inner equivalent of the natural world, or an inner microcosm of outer space—than it is a subjective state. Thus, Johnson’s interest is not in the conscious thinking subject, the ego or lyric “I,” but in the objective mind as a biological process; something that is studied in the exacting, scrupulous way a biologist might study a plant. Johnson is concerned primarily with gaining insight into the mysteries of mind, not the mysteries of God. “I don’t believe necessarily in God,” Johnson remarks in conversation with Stan Brakhage and Jim Shedden: “I believe in a transcendence or something. I believe that brains were made to communicate with the universe. Life was always tending towards the human brain, so that the universe could start talking to itself.”30 Johnson phrases the same principle in the context of light in “BEAM 4” in ARK: “After a long time of light, there began to be eyes, and light began looking with itself.” The universe, then, comes to know, realize, or manifest itself through its own innate faculties: light and matter. Recalling the Orphic metamorphosis of “Four Orphic Poems,” form assumes central importance in the morphology and metamorphoses the universe undergoes to realize its evolutionary potential: “Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” Johnson writes in “BEAM 7”: “Its dreams are the abyss and empyrean, and to that end, may move in time, the stones themselves to sing.” The implicit Jungian tone underscoring this passage—with the abyss implying the unconscious and the empyrean, psychic wholeness—reiterates Johnson’s secular interpretation of Transcendentalist spirituality. According to Boller, the Transcendentalists were concerned with finding “meaning, pattern, and purpose in a universe no longer managed by a genteel and amiable Unitarian God.”31 Although Buell maintains that




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“the Transcendentalists were primarily children of the Puritans rather than children of nature,” it is the natural world they turn to for meaning, pattern, and purpose.32 The writings of Emerson repeatedly demonstrate this turn to Nature for insight and guidance, favoring it over institutional creed or doctrine. Emerson, for example, sees guidance as arising from a direct individual relationship with the world that is not mediated by institutional doctrine. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? (N 35) To achieve this original relationship with the world, to learn and receive instruction from it, requires attentive observation. For the Transcendentalist, the implications of this mean reading the world and intuiting its divine scripture. Perhaps thinking of Jean Francois Champollion who, in 1822, deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Emerson proposes in “The Poet” that “Nature is the symbol of spirit,” and “the world [. . .] a temple whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity” (N 268). It falls to the individual to decipher these texts and “get what the writing means.” Johnson would appear to agree with Emerson that, “there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature” (N 268). But, rather than being analogous for comprehending the invisible spirit of God, Johnson’s cosmology is essentially isomorphic and secular. Where the Transcendentalist finds herself, to quote Thoreau, “in the midst of the affairs of nature and God,” Johnson’s poetry follows Sewell’s Orphic concerns— “the matching of two moving processes, one in nature, one in the mind and language, whereby reality may be altered and controlled” (OV 144).33 Like fractals, natural phenomena in Johnson’s cosmology reveal the larger secrets—patterns, figures, and orders—of Nature itself. Microcosm and macrocosm mutually disclose one another without any suggestion of hierarchy. This is evident throughout A Line of Poetry but is most apparent in ARK ’s “Foundations.” For example, in “BEAM 4” when Johnson proposes: Mind & Eye are logarithmic spiral coiled from periphery. This is called a ‘spiral sweep’—a biological form which combines (as do galaxies) economy with beauty. (We define ‘beauty’ from symmetrical perceptions): subjects observing a flickered pulsation of light have seen something like a Catherine-wheel reversing rotation, with a center of fine detail.



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The Mind & Eye, the solar system, galaxy are spirals coiled from periphery i.e., Catherine Wheels – of their worlds. Whorls. Johnson emphasizes the prevalence of this geometric form, presenting the text in a conical form whirling down the page in its own “symmetrical” beauty. Importantly, however, in both poems, mind, eye, and galaxy are equal and reflective of one another with no suggestion of a unilinear scale of being. These “Whorls” occur throughout the “The Foundations.” For example, in the fingerprints of Johnson’s own Xeroxed palm in “BEAM 18,” which, as Eric Murphy Selinger notes, recall the “spiral sweep” described in “BEAM 4” and “BEAM 11.”34

In “BEAM 18” Johnson presents a visual equivalent of the question he posed in “Still Life”: “What hand will reach out to see the world?” (V 52). Here the world is imprinted on the hand in one of its primary forms, the circle. “We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms,” Emerson proposes in “Circles” (N 225), and in “BEAM 18” it appears in the



Johnson condenses most of this information in “BEAM 11, Finial” making the correspondences between mind, eye, and galaxy even more explicit:

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whorls or spiral sweeps of the fingerprints. Facing Johnson’s palm on the opposite page in the North Point Press edition of ARK: The Foundations, is the concluding section of “BEAM 17, The Book of Orpheus.” Alluding to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Johnson’s “MEMORABLE FANCY” concludes: That clockwise, counterclockwise, as blue bindweed to honeysuckle, the cosmos is an organism spirally open on itself, into the pull of existence. In the beginning there was the Word—for each man, magnetized by onrush, is Adam to his Tyger. With the poet’s fingerprints presenting a similitude of the universe’s whorls, the hand becomes the means by which “the pull of existence” is achieved at the level of the human microcosm. Indeed, this “pull of existence” pertinently recalls Brown’s earlier assertion that “Vision has a hands-on dimension [. . .] in which worker and material come together.” Furthermore, the unique pattern of the fingerprints—the inviolable signature marking the individuality of each person—reasserts Johnson’s claim that the Word exists “for each man.” “That palmprint is me and nobody else,” Johnson tells Brakhage.35 From a Transcendentalist perspective, “BEAM 18” presents an innovative example of how humankind and the physical universe are, to quote Buell, “parallel creations of the divine spirit,” with everything essentially nonhuman holding some deeper significance, or resemblance, for humankind.36 A similar sentiment is implicit in “BEAM 4” when Johnson proposes that: The human eye, a sphere of waters and tissue, absorbs an energy that has come ninety-three million miles from another sphere, the sun. The eye may be said to be sun in other form. In “BEAM 4,” however, the sun is not an analogy for God as it is in Transcendentalism and Christian and Neoplatonic speculative traditions. Instead, it maintains a reciprocal, not hierarchical, relation with its microcosmic form: the human eye. On a similar note, Johnson writes in “BEAM 12” that the “mind is a revelation of matter.” Thus, matter is not the revelation of God but the revelation of its own innate laws and processes. In other words, Nature (including humanity) is its own teleology, not the analogy or cipher of divinity or spirit. Despite these differences between Johnson’s secular cosmology and the Transcendentalist belief in the divine, Johnson’s methods owe a considerable debt to Emerson and Thoreau. “Through Thoreau,” Johnson claims, “I was



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seduced into cosmology as reflected in nature, on all levels” (U 115). ARK ’s “Foundations” are the pinnacle of Johnson’s cosmological speculations— with Nature and mind, quite literally, providing the very “foundations” of his major poem—but the provenance for Johnson’s approach to cosmology can be found in A Line of Poetry where Johnson initially articulates his speculative, cosmological, interpretation of Nature. Johnson’s cosmology is stated quite clearly in “Four Orphic Poems” and articulated via a number of allusions to Transcendentalism. In the second of his four Orphic poems, for example, Johnson writes: There is an exquisite movement, like it were chaos, but of a sweet proportion & order: the atoms, cells & parsley-ferns of the universe. (V 25) The word “proportion” and its suggestion of relation and harmony convey the Greek sense of the word kosmos which, James Hillman writes, “was an aesthetic idea, and a polytheistic one. It referred to the right placing of the multiple things of the world, their ordered arrangement. Kosmos did not mean a collective, general, abstract whole.”37 Cosmos “is lucid as Euclid,” as Johnson writes in “BEAM 20, Labyrinthus” and, from a geometrical perspective (as a measurement of earth), takes account of the shape and relative arrangements, properties, surfaces, solids, and higher dimensional analogues of the world and its various parts or facets. Indeed, sharing the same etymological root as “cosmetic,” “cosmos” is closely connected to notions of beauty, order, and arrangement. Johnson gestures toward this in “Landscape With Bears, for Charles Olson” when he claims: “What we know of the world is physiognomy, ‘face’ ” (V 74). It is a sentiment echoing Emerson’s belief that “All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight” (N 47). Reading Nature’s Green Script But how is one supposed to see the face of the world and intuit Nature’s cosmetic beauty? How can one discover implicit order amid the manifold opulence of the universe and find unity within the confusions of the world? In “Four Orphic Poems,” Thoreau provides Johnson with a method. For, as Kenneth W. Rhoads notes, Thoreau bridges the concrete and the abstract, “starting with a specific, literal fact or phenomenon of the physical world, he




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could progress to an intuitive perception of the underlying and all-pervading spiritual reality.”38 It is this kind of empirically grounded intuition that Johnson adopts in “Four Orphic Poems.” Following Thoreau’s example, evidence of unity-in-diversity is found through the close and meticulous observation of natural phenomena, “where nothing / is seen in isolation” (V 29) but in “sweet proportion.” Deciphering the signs and glyphs of Nature’s “green / script” (V 24), the speaker in Johnson’s poem rehearses a speculative and metaphysical tradition at the very heart of Transcendentalism and implicit in Sewell’s Orphic thesis. The tradition in question is the Western philosophia perennis, an “eternal philosophy” occurring throughout the history of Western thought. An eclectic tradition, much like Transcendentalism, this philosophy is not exclusive of any one doctrine, but draws on a diverse body of knowledge found in a number of ancient theo-philosophical traditions including Neo-Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism, Alexandrian Hermetism, Christian Gnosticism, and Jewish Kabbalah. Not comprising a rigid doctrine, Antoine Faivre notes, the philosophia perennis is more “representative of a common attitude of mind” than any specific movement in history.39 Michel Foucault identifies what are essentially the same principles in his episteme of resemblance. However, where scholars of esotericism and Hermeticism such as Faivre, recognize this tradition enduring throughout the ages as a perennial attitude of mind, Foucault sees it as indicative of a specific epoch in the history of Western thought. According to Foucault, this epistemological system of knowledge that he calls an “episteme of resemblance,” “played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture” as the dominant mode of inquiry for both scientific knowledge and theological speculation up until the sixteenth century when it was superseded by the advancement of modern science and Enlightenment thinking. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organised the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.40 The rudiments of this resemblance are evident in “The Foundations” when Johnson calls the human eye a “sun in other form” or identifies the mutually corresponding form of a galaxy’s spiral sweep and the ridge patterns of the fingers and palm.



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The Western philosophia perennis was especially prominent in the latemedieval period, playing an integral role in the science, theology, natural philosophy, natural magic, alchemy, medicine, and theosophy of the time. Its most famous exponents include Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (whom Sewell briefly discusses in The Orphic Voice), Giordano Bruno, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, and Jacob Boehme.41 A number of writers, including Blake, Coleridge, W.B. Yeats, Mary Butts, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and Diane di Prima, have tapped into this rich tradition. Emerson was also familiar with many of these thinkers and adopts a number of their theories in the exposition of his own ideas about Nature, the cosmos, and humanity’s relationship with the divine. One theory of which Emerson makes extensive use is the doctrine of signatures, which denotes the means by which the invisible (the divine, spirit, the numinous) becomes visible by manifesting its latent virtues in concrete phenomena. Chiromancy or palmistry, the art of reading the lines of a hand, which “BEAM 18” suggests, is an obvious example of this doctrine. This form of divination holds that that the lines, bumps, and ridges of an individual’s palm hold the blueprint of that person’s character and their fate. Therefore, to read the lines of a person’s palm is to read the buried similitudes of their invisible character, signified by the surface appearances of the hand. For the Transcendentalists, the signature has a more significant role for understanding divine immanence. And in this respect, the ideas of the seventeenth- century German theosopher, Jacob Boehme, are particularly important. Titling one of his books, De Rerum Signatura (1622), The Signature of All Things, Boehme utilizes the signature in his complex meditations on Divine emanation, maintaining that: “All whatever is spoken, written, or taught of God, without the knowledge of God, without the knowledge of the signature is dumb and void of understanding.”42 God or spirit speaks through the phenomena of creation—through external appearances, sounds, and even language—making, through the signature, the world the Book of God: “Everything has its mouth to manifestation, and this is the language of nature.”43 To ensure his theosophy is not misconstrued as simply setting up false idols in Nature Boehme insists that the signature itself “is no spirit, but the receptacle, container, or cabinet of the spirit, wherein it lies.”44 The influence of Boehme’s theosophy on Emerson, mediated through his reading of Coleridge and Emanuel Swedenborg, is evident in much of his writing, particularly Nature. There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali,




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“By degrees,” Emerson goes on to write, “we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause” (N 54–55). Emerson reiterates many of his ideas in Nature in the later essay “Goethe, or the Writer” from his 1850 collection, Representative Men. Again, Emerson expounds on the revelatory capacity of Nature and its pantheistic potency. “All things,” he writes, “are engaged in writing their history”: “The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent” (W 497–498). “Nature conspires” to be “articulated” through its manifold “rude and stammering organs” (W 497–498). As well as perceiving signatures in Nature’s “green / script,” in “Four Orphic Poems,” “where nothing / is seen in isolation,” Johnson also discerns signatures in musical proportion and the contemplation of “ ‘harmony’, music of the spheres,” which symbolizes a concord and congruity sounded “in a measure / hidden, ineluctable // to an ear” (V 27). The invisible (yet audible) harmony of the spheres leads to the visible equivalent of the musica mundana: the circle. Johnson cites the opening sentence of Emerson’s essay “Circles,” which is followed by “instances” that verify Emerson’s claim. ‘The Eye is the first circle— & the horizon which it forms is the second.’ These are instances, signs: the ring, the crown, the wreath, the blood-red eclipse of suns, the New Moon with the Old in her arms, & subtler harmonies, coming of growth & of death. (V 27–28) In these evocations of the circle there is also an echo of Emerson’s poem “Uriel,” which, Selinger notes, informs Johnson’s ideas in Radi os. The Angel’s “sentiment divine / Against the being of a line. / ‘Line in nature is



preëxist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world. (N 54)

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not found / Unit and universe are round’ ” not only adumbrates Radi os, but Johnson’s poetics more generally.45 Indeed, Johnson rehearses Uriel’s “sentiment divine” in an exchange with Ian Hamilton Finlay on the subject of abstract form. Arguing against the “horizontal/vertical” abstractions of Mondrian and their “limited reality,” Johnson advocates the primacy of the circle in a series of letters written to Finlay in 1967:46 Lines, even most Concrete ones (except for, I suppose, Apollinaire [)] are so damn linear & Mondrian! Not that that bothers you, but I cannot reconcile myself to all that inevitable, dreary square & rectangle tango over & over. How lovely to be able to make moons at will—or even Mary Ellen [Solt]’s marigolds . . . ! As you know I do not object to abstraction but for me it must be the natural abstraction of the circle, the plowcontour, spiral shell. As Frederic [sic] Sommer said once: “They talk of a return to Nature. I was not aware that we were ever away.”47 Although three months later Johnson claims he is “a bit kinder to Mondrian” after reading Toward the True Vision of Reality (1942), he still asserts the primacy of the circle. Actually the whole universe down to the atom is built on circles or O’s [sic] (warped circles). Even space itself is curved we believe. I agree with you absolutely in that form is not squares or circles, etc. And that a circle as such is not sun or eye or moon. But it is the business of the poet to make it so. [. . .] And there is such a thing as natural abstraction—that is my point, man himself is nature therefore how could he abstract anything out of nature?48 Johnson’s ideas recall Emerson’s in “Uriel” as well as his thesis in “Circles”: “We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms” (N 225). As Jena Osman suggests, Johnson sees Finlay’s squares as “forms of exclusive finitude” whereas the circle “allows for inclusive regeneration” (RJ 238). But crucially, the circle, as it does for Emerson, also permits and underscores the epistemological play of resemblance and the signature. For, as Emerson proposes, the circle is “the highest emblem in the cipher of the world” (N 225). This is especially evident in “Four Orphic Poems” when Johnson intimates harmonic verity by indicating correspondences among the circle, the eye, and the planets. But Johnson also invokes the signature in “Emerson, On Goethe” which forms the fourth and final section of the longer sequence, “When Men Will Lie Down as Gracefully & as Ripe” (V 41–50). “Emerson,




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On Goethe” is an abridged portion of Emerson’s text from “Goethe, or the Writer,” concerning Nature’s green script and the need for a subject to read and report it. “Nature will be reported,” Emerson writes, “All things are engaged in writing their history” (W 497). Johnson reconstructs Emerson’s prose as Modernist verse in a manner that recalls W.B. Yeats’s treatment of Walter Pater’s prose in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.49 According to Jerome McGann, “The format of Yeats’s text from Pater is a bibliographically coded message drawing a historical relation between Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, and modernism,” which speaks “on the one hand about the coming of modernism, and constructs on the other Yeats’s version of its prehistory.”50 In the case of “Emerson, on Goethe,” the transposition of nineteenth-century prose into twentieth-century verse indicates continuity between Transcendentalism and Modernism, and tacitly asserts it as the touchstone or “grounding” of Johnson’s poetics. “Emerson, on Goethe” also makes important claims about the “Orphic” tradition and Johnson’s own position within it. Indeed, it is significant that Johnson’s source for “Emerson, on Goethe” is not Emerson’s own text but The Orphic Voice. Johnson uses the same abridged passage of text (with the same ellipses) that Sewell quotes in her discussion of Goethe. Sewell becomes the mediating figure of a tradition very much alive and relevant in which Emerson’s Transcendentalism assumes a significant position. Johnson situates his own poem in this tradition by presenting a palimpsest of Orphic voices: Emerson, Goethe, Sewell, and the philosophia perennis that speaks through them all. In this respect, “Emerson, on Goethe” is the “revaluation and making explicit of a long tradition” of Orphic sensibilities (OV 49). Capitalizing the first three words of Emerson’s sentence, and breaking the line at “reported,” Johnson makes Emerson’s text assert a number of claims: NATURE WILL BE reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda & signatures & every object covered over with hints



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which speak to the intelligent.

Whatever can be thought can be spoken, & still rises for utterance, though to rude & stammering organs. If they cannot compass it it works and waits, until at last it moulds them to its perfect will, & is

articulated. (V 49–50) In capitalizing Emerson’s words Johnson emphasizes the ontological autonomy of Nature and its tenacious “will” to form: “Nature will be” regardless of impediment or obfuscation. Coupled with the capitalized “NATURE CONSPIRES,” Johnson’s poem emphasizes the proactive—not passive— dynamics of Nature, conveying it as hylozoistic, alive, and sentient. Meaning to breathe, blow gently, and come forth or out as breath, Nature “spires” in a way that recalls the spirit or breath of God stirring the face of the waters in Genesis.51 And, if we recall Olson’s ideas in “Projective Verse,” then “conspires” also reiterates the lines “NATURE WILL BE” and “& is.” Olson (paraphrasing Ernest Fenollosa) indirectly reiterates Emerson’s idea of conspiring, breathing, and growing natural forces when, in “Projective Verse,” he proposes that, “ ‘Is’ comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe,” and “ ‘Be’ is from bhu, to grow.”52 Nature’s objects breathing and blowing together in purposive union also recalls Edward Dahlberg’s image of the universe as “a slumbering animal that has visions” that Johnson uses as the epigraph for “The Foundations.” But, as Emerson stresses, it is the individual who brings such somnambulistic visions into the wakeful light of day. Clearly, “Emerson, on Goethe” develops the theme of the signature and Nature’s “green / script” that Johnson engages in “Four Orphic Poems” (V 24). However, Johnson only intuited the “truth” of such an approach



NATURE CONSPIRES.

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to Nature when he wrote the poem because, as he explains to Alpert ten years later in 1973, it took time for him to comprehend the full extent of Emerson’s pronouncements: “Emerson says Nature ‘conspires’ to speak, and though I only intuited it at the time, I have come to understand it after all these years as a fact” (RJ 550). This might explain why “Emerson, on Goethe” is not an entirely convincing poem. For example, many of the scattered lines, the breaks and indents, of Johnson’s poem appear arbitrary with the reformatted verse doing little to extract or amplify the latent music of Emerson’s text or offer new perspectives on its themes. There are, however, a few exceptions. One can read the poem’s truncated lines as an attempt to enact the “stammering / organs” of Nature. Thus, for the poem to finish on the single word “articulated” is apt for such a mimetic depiction of what Emerson describes. Furthermore, Johnson’s line breaks do occasionally offer new perspectives on Emerson’s text, such as when he isolates “& is” on a single line between “articulated” and the longer clause, broken across two lines: “at last it moulds them // to its perfect will.” Isolating “& is,” the clause reiterates the ontology implied in “NATURE WILL BE”: Nature simply “is” through its own assertive will. And in certain lines, it seems that Johnson attempts to indicate the mutual assonance discernible in particular pairs of words—“though to rude,” for example, or “covered over with hints.” But these effects are so subtle in Johnson’s poem that they appear more coincidence than design. These misgivings about “Emerson, on Goethe” raise questions about the epistemology the poem advances and the type of vision it is dependent on. Just as one might tenuously read more into Johnson’s poem and find qualities that are not necessarily there, it is possible that the signs inscribed in Nature are not objective verities but merely exist in the eye of the beholder. Is the cosmos latently imminent and precipitous of manifestation, or does the perceiving subject actually project a cosmos onto what is essentially a random, disproportionate universe of phenomena? As Thoreau writes: “The question is not what you look at but how you look & whether you see.”53 “Emerson, on Goethe” signals these problematic implications of the signature by stressing the importance of individual vision. In capitalizing Emerson’s assertion that “NATURE CONSPIRES,” Johnson stresses the collaborative effort of Nature’s will to form, as well as implying the subtle ways it does. On the one hand, the word “conspires” evokes the invisible, secret, or occult processes that operate covertly through the visible appearances of Nature. But when understood in the context of its other meaning—“to act in purposive combination, union, or harmony” as the Oxford English Dictionary states—“conspires” also suggests a cooperative action, something undertaken or enacted in conjunction with something



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or someone other. In Nature, Emerson maintains that, “Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us” (N 64), whereas in “Goethe; or, the Writer” it is with the individual that Nature conspires. In order for Nature to perfect its will, a capable perceiving subject has to report it. When Johnson capitalizes, “NATURE WILL BE REPORTED,” he emphasizes Emerson’s point that Nature requires a “writer or secretary who is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works” (W 497). Referring to Emerson’s essay on Goethe, Swell suggests that “The task of Nature’s secretary, however, is never just that of taking dictation” because “The speculative mind of the poet comes in also,” as part of the process (OV 222). Sewell adumbrates Johnson’s similar claim “that brains were made to communicate with the universe” and that life is “always tending towards the human brain, so that the universe could start talking to itself.”54 This notion is also in keeping with the Romantic notion of inspired vision, so that the deciphering of Nature’s manifold glyphs, ciphers, and signatures falls on the individual and his or her capacity for perception and interpretation. Only then, Sewell suggests, is the “Orphic mentality [. . .] seen in its fullness, [as] part of the evolutionary process of nature which is to interpret under the joint forms of poetry and natural science” (OV 222).







Luminous Detail: Ezra Pound and Collage

We are all myopic in an accelerating time, but Pound’s question— though he failed to answer—“CAN YOU ENTER THE GREAT ACORN OF LIGHT” is a question as inescapable as Einstein’s. —Ronald Johnson1

J

ohnson’s examinations into the “situation of the eye” in A Line of Poetry are just the beginning of his scopic explorations. For all the insights they offer about his “New Transcendentalist” and Orphic visions, these early poems show Johnson tentatively utilizing a collage poetic (indebted to Olson) in the attempt to establish a form capable of enacting the visionary modes and ideas they describe. In other words, and despite the strong presence of Olson, form is not an extension of content in A Line of Poetry. It is not until The Book of the Green Man that form and content become integrated more thoroughly. But in order to understand how Johnson achieves this, it is first necessary to consider the role Pound plays in the direction Johnson’s collage poetics take. Johnson would no doubt agree with Pierre Joris that The Cantos are “the master collage poem of the [twentieth] century.”2 The extent to which Pound has influenced Johnson’s poetry is apparent in Johnson’s comment in “Up Till Now” concerning Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting: “Except for the late Bunting, I have learned most from Louis with Pound always in their background” (U 113).3 Johnson would eventually question Pound’s high modernism, finding more instructive examples in the work of Zukofsky, Moore, Charles Ives, and a host of vernacular artists.



CHAPTER 2

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Nevertheless, as Johnson’s remark indicates, Pound remains an important reference point for his collage aesthetics. Indeed, Johnson only comes to these later models by first schooling himself in two major collage principles innovated by Pound: quotation and the “ideogrammic method.” Johnson is interested in the Pound that David Antin describes as “an inherent modernist committed to the philosophical bases of collage organization, both as a principle of discovery and as a strategy of presentation.”4 But these “philosophical bases of collage organization,” as “a principle of discovery and as a strategy of presentation,” not only provide a valuable context for assessing Johnson’s own collage poetics within the current of New American Poetry, but also elucidate the integral function collage performs for articulating Johnson’s Orphic, “New Transcendentalist,” sensibilities. Pound: “Channel of Traditions” According to Cid Corman, “It is still inadequately grasped how central Pound was—at St Liz—to all that was alive on the American poetry scene in the wake of the war.”5 Pound was particularly central for many of the poets writing after World War II that were affiliated with Black Mountain, not only the College itself in North Carolina—where Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, and Jonathan Williams either taught or studied—but also in the journals closely associated with it: Creeley’s Black Mountain Review and Cid Corman’s Origin. For these Black Mountain poets, Christopher Beach suggests, Pound was instructive in “forming their sense of poetic inheritance and in establishing their own poetic theories.”6 This influence was as much because of Pound’s innovations as a translator, editor, critic, and cultural historian, as it was as a poet. Johnson never attended Black Mountain College, nor was he published in Origin or Black Mountain Review. It was through meeting former Black Mountain student Jonathan Williams that Johnson was introduced to the poetry and poets associated with Black Mountain. Living in New York with Williams, Johnson also “visited non-bar-type writers like William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and Edward Dahlberg.”7 Albeit indirectly, such meetings, as Guy Davenport suggests in his “Afterword” to Radios, put Johnson in close proximity to Pound: The world into which he came (out of Kansas) offered encounters with Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky, who had both been friends of Ezra Pound, channel of traditions (from him you could be one remove from James, Yeats, Ford, Joyce, or if you were so minded, Brancusi,



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Luminous Detail

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Be it via Olson, Zukofsky, or Bunting, all roads lead to Pound. Guy Davenport is another important lead. Davenport’s career, John Shannon writes, “began with an interest in Pound and Frobenius, or loosely, poetry and anthropology, myth-making and myth-finding.”8 Davenport had befriended Pound during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths, visiting him annually from 1952 to 1958 and, later, visiting him in Rapallo, using the experience as the basis for “Ithaca,” one of the short stories included in Da Vinci’s Bicycle. Johnson met Davenport through Williams in the mid 1960s, establishing one of his most important and influential friendships. According to Johnson, Davenport was one of the most acute readers of Pound: There are few enough people who learned what Pound was really getting at. Olson did, and Hugh Kenner and Guy. They became men of great culture and went back into time to find what was live. They learned that an anecdote or a fact can tell more than many books. (RJ 549) It is notable that Johnson should mention Davenport in the same breath as Davenport’s close friend Kenner, whose books The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) and The Pound Era (1971) promoted Pound as the major innovator of early twentieth-century American modernist poetry. Davenport has called Kenner “my own spiritual brother and sheet anchor;” a testimony borne out by his dedicating The Geography of the Imagination (1981) to Kenner, perhaps in response to Kenner’s dedicating A Homemade World (1974) to Davenport.9 Clearly, Johnson shares Davenport’s sentiments about Kenner. “Find any books you can learn from and re- and re-read,” Johnson advises in “Hurrah for Euphony”; “I never am without Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. With only that as a map you could find your way.”10 That both Davenport and Kenner are included in Johnson’s eclectic list of influences in “Planting the Rod of Aaron” indicates the extent to which his evaluation of Pound is informed by these two figures.11 Another notable figure in this Poundian nexus (and a mutual friend of Davenport, Kenner, Jonathan Williams, and Johnson) is Margaret Fuller’s grandnephew—inventor, architect, and mathematician R. Buckminster Fuller.12 Along with Fenollosa and Pound, Fuller’s theories helped Kenner re-conceive Aristotle’s theories of mimesis and metaphor in The Pound Era and A Homemade World. According to David Fite, Kenner revises “Aristotle’s



Gaudier-Brzeska, Cocteau, Gourmont, or again, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, H.D., John Quinn). (R 95)

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mimesis and notion of metaphor in the altered referential terms of Pound, Fenollosa, and R. Buckminster Fuller.”13 In The Pound Era, for example, Kenner elucidates the idea of “patterned energies” and “patterned integrity,” which he finds central to Pound’s poetry, via Fuller’s analogy of a rope knot: “The knot is neither hemp, nor cotton, nor nylon: is not the rope. The knot is a patterned integrity. The rope renders it visible.”14 Likewise, the “Luminous Details” in Pound’s poetics are, according to Kenner, “ ‘patterned energies’ which transferred out of their context of origin retain their power to enlighten us. They have this power because, as men came to understand early in the 20th Century, all realities whatever are patterned energies.”15 Fact and Imagination Kenner’s explication of Pound, Fite proposes, is based on these “elegant and tense Fullerian knot[s] of generalization,” combined “with “observed particular” details.16 Kenner’s method of reading Pound follows the methods that Pound engages to articulate his own subjects, seeking a balance between the accuracy of fact with the creative permission of imagination; between “multitudinous detail [. . .] and generalisation” (SP 21). In The Senses of Walden Stanley Cavell identifies a similar concern for reconciling fact and imagination in Thoreau’s work. The human imagination is released by fact. Alone, left to its own devices, it will not recover reality, it will not form an edge. So a favourite trust of the Romantics has, along with what we know of experience, to be brought under instruction, the one kept from straining, the other from stifling itself to death.17 Cavell’s suggestion that imagination and experience are both “released” and “brought under instruction” by fact is echoed in Pound’s epistemology. Indeed, Pound’s negotiations of “detailed actuality” and “homeomorphic structures” arise from a similar desire to reconcile two conflicting interests: fact and imagination, or what in The Cantos he terms “Truth and Calliope” (C 28). Whereas the former can all too easily lead to solipsism and abstraction, the latter, if unchecked, denies the “sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”18 Pound brings fact and imagination “under instruction” in The Cantos via a complex set of collage strategies. As well as affording him the means to import a heterogeneous body of cultural knowledge—history, religion, economics, art, and politics—into his poem, quotation is also the principle



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informing Pound’s “philosophical bases of collage organization.” For Pound, collage answers a rhetorical and ideological need, allowing for what appears as the direct presentation of impartial facts. Upon closer examination, however, Pound’s collage organization reveals a more subjective, more imaginatively motivated, agenda that uses the apparently objective treatment of facts to assert Pound’s own pedagogic and restorative vision of Western culture. At the crux of Pound’s collage praxis is the method of “Luminous Detail,” which he first advanced in “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” an essay published serially in The New Age between 1911 and 1912. [T]he method of Luminous Detail, a method most vigorously hostile to the prevailing mode of today—that is, the method of multitudinous detail, and the method of yesterday, the method of sentiment and generalisation. The latter is too inexact and the former too cumbersome to be of much use to the normal man wishing to be mentally active. (SP 21) Pound’s method proposes to present only the essential facts of a given subject: “The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment” (SP 23). Luminous Detail avoids the sentiment and generalization of Aestheticism, “the method of yesterday,” perhaps best exemplified by Walter Pater’s The Renaissance. But it also responds to “the prevailing mode” of the day: philology and its pedantic emphasis on “multitudinous detail,” something that Pound experienced firsthand as a graduate student of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania from 1905 to 1906. The Ideogrammic Method Luminous Detail is key to the “ideogrammic method,” a rather nebulous term that Pound began to use from 1927 onward to formulate his poetics.19 As Ronald Bush suggests, Pound uses the term to redefine “his intuitive affinity for description by particulars.”20 More generally, the ideogrammic method is an interchangeable term denoting a number of interconnected aspects of Pound’s poetics: his collage praxis, the strategies implemented to assert pseudo-philological “facts” in his poetry and prose, as well as the mode by which he presents his own vision or interpretation of culture and history. As Bruce Comens notes, “the use of a single term [‘the ideogrammic method’] makes Pound’s thought and poetics appear the pure natural outgrowths of an intuited or directly perceived reality.”21 Thus, as Kenner points out, the material that Pound presents via the ideogrammic method is validated “not by his opinions but by the unarguable existence of what



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exists.”22 In other words, Pound’s Luminous Details appear to validate themselves. Describing the ideogrammic method in ABC of Economics as “heaping together the necessary components of thought,” Pound emphasizes one of its major principles: juxtaposition (SP 209). Using disjunction, parataxis, truncation, fragmentation, and polyvalence, Pound presents his Luminous Details without discursive bridges. As he writes in Guide to Kulchur, the aim is revelation—“a just revelation irrespective of newness or oldness”—and putting “ideas in action.”23 Rather than assimilating these “ideas” into a homogenous whole, Pound’s method establishes relations between different elements (images, voices, quotations, languages, and other cantos), presenting his details contiguously, letting them accrue in the reader’s mind. Rather than seamlessly weaving the poem’s elements together, Pound presents them as congeries, “a heaping together,” of juxtaposing images. Hugh Kenner calls these images “subject-rhymes” or “culture-rhymes,” which together create “multiple planes of time.”24 Pound’s method emphasizes “relation” over “connection,” an idea derived from Ernest Fenollosa’s work on the Chinese ideogram. Fenollosa had completed a manuscript on Chinese ideograms before his death in 1908, which Pound later edited and published as The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry in Instigations in 1920. In his preface for Fenollosa’s thesis, Pound stresses the important breakthroughs Fenollosa advanced in his study, stressing Fenollosa’s insights into “the fundamentals of all aesthetics”: In his search through unknown art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and principles unrecognised in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in “new” Western painting and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known as such.25 Fenollosa’s thesis is based on the idea that meaning and action in Chinese ideographs are created though the compounding of otherwise detached and individual “concrete images,” which together form composite ideographs. For example, the ideograph meaning “to speak” is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it. The sign meaning “to grow up with difficulty” is grass with a twisted root [. . .] But this concrete verb quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, original pictures to compounds. In this process of compounding, two things added



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Meaning results from a dynamic process in which “Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots.”27 “The eye sees noun and verb as one,” Fenollosa argues, “things in motion, motion in things.”28 Similar dynamic relations ensue from the assemblages of Luminous Detail in Pound’s ideogrammic method. Fenollosa writes: “Relations are more real and more important than the things [to] which they relate.” And it is via the suggestion, not explicit assertion, of fundamental relations existing between two or more elements within a canto (or across a number of cantos) that constitutes the poem’s collage praxis.29 A canto becomes a field of fundamental relations, with one phrase, image, or line potentially resonating or “rhyming” with others, as Kenner suggests.30 Because the artist never comments, the reader has to make the necessary connections. This, however, requires some knowledge about the material related. Through the tacit promise of revelation the reader becomes implicated in Pound’s “New Learning,” inadvertently becoming schooled in Pound’s own cultural canon and the values it promotes.31 “New Learning” The Cantos, Jean-Michel Rabaté proposes, “opens the way to an entire ‘education,’ in the etymological sense of ‘leading someone’ to a personal development through knowledge and interest, and modification of character.”32 This education, Joseph Conte suggests, is both pedagogic, “draw[ing] the reader into the cultural values of the tribe,” and polymathic in the way this pedagogy is implicated through a syllabus of “multiple subjects, not always correlated.”33 Being encouraged to read Pound’s criticism, track down his sources, and read around the subjects of The Cantos, Pound’s values become subtly impressed on the reader in a kind of osmosis. Thus, not only is Pound a “poet-historian” as George Dekker suggests, but the reader, in his or her exegetical search for answers and knowledge, becomes a neophyte-cum-historian.34 “The lack of coherence at the exoteric level,” Anthony Mellors proposes, “leads to the expectation that the text must cohere in another, esoteric, way.”35 In other words, the reader seeking coherence inadvertently becomes initiate to a whole body of knowledge—a cultural canon or index—inscribed throughout The Cantos. “My first response,” Guy Davenport writes regarding his first encounters with Pound, “was to learn Italian and Provençal, and to



together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them. 26

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paint in the quattrocentro manner. All real education is such unconscious seduction.”36 The resolution of meaning can never be fulfilled in The Cantos. If it were fulfilled, the ideogrammic method would cease to function. As Fenollosa insists, poetics such as Pound’s are concerned with suggesting the fundamental relationships that exist between two or more elements. “It is the juncture of the suspension of decision of conclusions at the point of decision,” Robert Duncan believes, “so that all decision moves forward toward a totality that is pending, rather than reinforcing the prejudice of an established totality.”37 If it were fulfilled, a totality of meaning would negate the very possibility of such “suggestions,” which operate through variance and indeterminacy rather than certainty and conclusion. If the poet simply commented and explained (rather than presented), the reader would have no reason to become actively involved in learning Pound’s curriculum. Without the pending promise of revelation, Pound could not tacitly coerce his readers into a new program of education and instruct them in things they should know. The claims that Pound makes in The Cantos rest on a belief that textual evidence—the proof of one’s knowledge—is the essential means for asserting and verifying one’s position. This is especially significant in the context of Pound’s pedagogic strategies that are articulated by a body of knowledge located beyond the parameters of his own texts. Pound writes in ABC of Reading that, “A general statement is valuable only in REFERENCE to the known objects or facts.”38 In other words, referencing enables a text to be verified by values existing independently of it. Direct quotation provides the means for presenting necessary evidence, thus alleviating the burden of comment. The most efficient way to indicate that Pound has gone directly to a text—for example, the letters of Sigismundo Malatesta—is to quote that text verbatim. Not only does this display evidence of significant cultural and historical moments, it also helps the poet avoid the pitfalls of “retell[ing] in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.”39 Truth and Calliope To reiterate Kenner’s earlier point, the material Pound presents in The Cantos is “meant to be useful,” validated “not by his opinions but by the unarguable existence of what exists.”40 But what appear as self-evident facts tacitly enforce Pound’s own agenda. Pound’s manipulation of “what exists” is particularly evident in the Malatesta Cantos, first published in The Criterion, in 1923. This series of cantos running from Canto VIII to Canto XI depicts the Renaissance ruler, condottiere, and humanist Sigismundo Malatesta as a cultural hero as vital in the present instant as he was in his own time. Not



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only is Pound’s citation of prose documents in these cantos a major advance in his collage praxis but, as Rainey points out, they are “a reference point for all his subsequent thinking about civilization and cultural politics.”41 The method of the Malatesta Cantos is stated in the opening line of Canto VIII: “These fragments you have shelved (shored)” (C 28). The “you” refers to the speaker of Eliot’s The Waste Land: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”42 That is, cultural fragments shored against a Western civilization in ruin. But rather than “shelve” these redemptive fragments as Eliot does, Pound wants to put those fragments into action. Doing so, however, requires navigating that Scylla and Charybdis: fact and imagination. Hence the subsequent line in Canto VIII: “ ‘Slut!’ ‘Bitch!’ Truth and Calliope / Slanging each other sous les lauriers” (C 28). Pound envisages a slanging match ensuing between the two competing aims of his poetry: factual accuracy, personified by Truth, and visionary interpretation (poetic license) personified by Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. As well as a pastiche of Eliot’s use of French in The Waste Land, “sous les lauriers” (“under the laurels”) refers to Édouard Dujardin’s novel Les Lauriers sont Coupés (1888). Additionally, however, Pound’s allusion to laurel emphasizes the extent to which Truth and Calliope are competing for the thing that laurel symbolizes: victory. Pound’s use of historical documents in the Malatesta Cantos serves both “Truth and Calliope.” On the one hand, Pound’s quoted fragments display written proof of events and characters that have occurred in history. On the other, the manner in which Pound manipulates this material means it serves his own ideological vision. Pound develops his method on the assumption that facts, in the form of historical documents, provide impartial evidence of true historical events. Therefore, real historical figures such as Confucius or Malatesta are historical precedents for Pound’s own utopian aspirations in The Cantos. Measuring himself and his work against these cultural exemplars, Pound references these individuals in his own work by presenting factual evidence of them—their writings, reported conversations, or biographical accounts—directly in his text. These citations mean that Pound appears to be presenting objective “facts” when really he is asserting his own interpretation of them. Pound’s quoting strategies, according to James Longenbach, are “predicated on the questionable belief that anything we could call a ‘fact’ exists independently from the interpretive strategy that presents it.”43 If these “facts” are impartial, as Pound proposes, then there is no need for the artist to comment. By not commenting on his luminous details, Pound creates the illusion of impersonal historical objectivity in The Cantos, supplementing the absence of one identifiable authoritative voice with a range of historical



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facts. But these impartial facts are the result of considerable editing and manipulation. What may at first appear to be impartial facts taken directly from historical sources turn out to be the pre-emptive components of a discrete interpretive strategy in Pound’s “New Learning.” “Pound’s removal of the signs of authorial presence” is, Longenbach claims, “finally a political strategy designed to make his idiosyncratic interpretation of history and economics seem as inevitable as nature itself.”44 Thus, ordering appears as “natural occurrence,” Bob Perelman notes, because Pound’s method “grants complete authority to the ideogram’s fashioner, who is backed by the irrefutable singularity of the singulars,” the Luminous Details and emphatic facts, Pound presents.45 Pound’s totalitarian voice may be displaced through the material citation—the “murmur of old men’s voices” (C 6)—nevertheless that quoted material ultimately betrays “one man’s interpretation” of history.46 Pound uses historic documents in such a way that they continue to instruct measures of conduct in the present. This is evident in Canto XI, which demonstrates how Pound’s philological appropriations underscore his assertions about culture and history. And they want to know what we talked about? “de litteris et de armis, praestantibusque ingeniis, Both of ancient times and our own; books, arms And men of unusual genius. Both of ancient times and our own, in short the usual subjects Of conversation between intelligent men.” (C 51) Pound takes a historical incident concerning the Italian humanist and Papal dissenter Bartolomeo Sacchi, also known by his Latin name “Platina.” But Pound presents this incident in such a way that it speaks for a transhistorical verity as well as depicting a specific moment in history. Along with other humanists such as Conrad Celtes and Peter of Calbria, Platina was a member of the Roman Academy, originally established by Cosimo de Medici following the suggestion of Gemistus Plethon, the Byzantine Platonist and humanist, celebrated by Pound in Cantos VIII and XXIII. For Pound who believes “that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy,” the Neoplatonic sympathies of the Academy plays a significant role in the transmission of that “light” (SP 53). Condemned by Church authorities “For singing to Zeus in the catacombs,” the Academy was eventually abolished by Pope Paul II (C 50). Platina was jailed on suspicion of conspiring against Paul II, and it is this episode in his life that the passage from Canto XI engages. Malatesta had



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visited Rome and liaised with Platina with the intention of assassinating Paul II. When asked by his inquisitors what he and Sigismundo had talked about, Platina replied: “About scholarship and war, and men of outstanding genius.”47 As well as rendering Platina’s answer in English as, “Both of ancient times and our own; books, arms / And men of unusual genius,” Pound also quotes the Medieval Latin: “de litteris et de armis, praestantibusque ingeniis” (C 51). To juxtapose the original text with an English translation is a way of presenting the “facts” authentically. The Latin fragment reinforces the notion that this episode actually occurred, adding credibility to the canto’s tacit claim about the transmission and reception of knowledge. The transhistorical verities these strategies imply underscore Pound’s elitist claims about culture and tradition. According to Michael Andre Bernstein, Platina’s comment in Canto XI lucidly encapsulates the “princely modes of cultural transmission,” and the “usual subjects” occurring throughout The Cantos: war, political and economic matters, books, knowledge, and men of unusual genius.48 However, the demarcation Canto XI draws between “us” and “them” indicates that those with such cultural knowledge are select and few. The pronoun “we” (in the specific historical context, referring to Platina and Sigismundo) also refers to a transhistorical elite celebrated throughout The Cantos that includes Henry Adams and C.H. Douglas. Furthermore, the pronouns “we” and “ours”—contrasting with “they”—encourages the reader to identify themselves with this caste of exceptional individuals, becoming neophyte to their lessons. Thus, Canto XI is specific in its reference to a particular moment in history, but also articulates an eternally present moment. Comprising “the usual subjects”—books, arms, men of genius—the passage implies that the same conversation has been had, and continues to be had, by a clique of exceptional individuals throughout history. Despite this specific historical context, Pound’s citation lacks temporal fixity, suggesting that the sentence could have been spoken by anyone at any moment in history. It is a pertinent example of what Davenport calls Pound’s “spatial sense,” which sees “the past [. . .] here, now,” and believes that “its invisibility is our blindness, not its absence.”49 The temporal implications of Pound’s collage mode pertinently anticipate John Dewey’s assertions about the present and the past, the old and the new, in Art as Experience (1934): The junction of the new and the old is not a mere composition of forces, but is a re-creation in which the present impulsion gets form and solidity while the old, the “stored,” material is literally revived, given new life and soul through having to meet a new situation.50



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When old material is situated in a new context not only is it “revived” in conjunction with other material, but it also, Dewey writes, creates “a double change which converts an activity into in an act of expression.”51 As well as reiterating a basic principle of collage praxis (context changes meaning), Dewey’s ideas resonate with the underlying expressive intent of Pound’s presentation of Luminous Detail. That is, the artist can manipulate material to speak in new ways and reify present impulsions and tacit agendas. For Pound the conjunction of the old and the new in the multilingual montage of Canto XI enacts at the microcosmic level the overarching transhistorical scope of The Cantos, negotiating particular detail (i.e., historical facts) and universal truths or grand narratives (mythic, cyclical, and ahistorical conceptions of time). Thus, the Platina quote displays what MingQian Ma describes as the representational bounds of quotation whereby “a quotation circumscribes a representational bound of two mutually reciprocal levels: local/microcosmic and universal/macrocosmic.”52 Historic and mythic time intersect in the historical specifics of quotation. Thus the reiteration of the phrase, “Both of ancient times and our own,” in Canto XI emphasizes the Janus-faced nature of the quote, signaling the particular historical context of Platina and the eternally present time of the “idea” that it conveys to the reader. Pound and Johnson The Malatesta Cantos are a salient example of how “the ‘rush of experience’ opens into history” via collage methods.53 As “the basic organising principle,” behind Pound’s Luminous Details, collage praxis makes what Jerome Rothenberg calls “synchronicity (the simultaneous existence of all places and times)” a tangible experience for poet and reader alike.54 It is because of these formal innovations that Pound is such an important model for Johnson’s own collage poetics. In particular, it is Pound’s negotiations of Truth and Calliope, fact and imagination, and his incorporation of detailed actualities into broader, more generalized, patterned integrities to which Johnson responds in The Book of the Green Man. The book’s interest in “changes of focus and the multi-dimensional” draw considerably on the multi-spatial, multi-temporal weave of Pound’s collage model (RJ 547). For Johnson, The Cantos exemplify the possibility of using “chunks and snippets, artefacts and re-creations, past and present, to put another sense of time and space into poetry” (RJ 547). In The Book of the Green Man, Johnson follows Pound’s emphasis on observed, particular details and adopts his ideogrammic method as part of his own attempt to reconcile scientific observation



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and imaginative speculation in the wider pursuit of an integrated vision of “the round earth / on flat paper” (BG 65). However, as much as Pound provides Johnson with valuable methods for advancing his own multi-focused poetry, Johnson increasingly comes to question the referential and pedagogic implications of Pound’s collage mode. Johnson is aware that in seeking out all the references in The Cantos, one runs the risk of sacrificing one’s own mind and vitality in the pursuit of Pound’s “New Learning.” Peter Riley, in his assessment of The Waste Land and “the whole tenor of The Cantos,” acknowledges this problem: They were instances implying entire belief structures or systems. Olson too—and those enormous volumes of annotation people have compiled are in fact necessary if you’re going to be led into these labyrinths; most of what was intended is lost without them.55 This is one of Johnson’s main misgivings about Pound’s idea of the epic as a “poem containing history.”56 Guides, such as Carroll F. Terrell’s Companion to The Cantos or George F. Butterick’s Guide to The Maximus Poems, are invaluable for understanding and explicating these poems. But too much emphasis on source material detracts from the poems. By the time Johnson completes his own “epic” ARK, he is predominantly interested in language as a subject and keen to stress that his poem does not rely on reference the way that The Cantos does. The theme of ARK is that of the language itself, as a thing which could be examined as galaxies, through a telescope, or matter through electron microscope. Though the text necessarily spirals and impacts, it is always informed by music, and nowhere does it require arcane learning like The Cantos, Maximus, “A,” etc.57 Johnson comes to favor vernacular and demotic references—especially the Americana associated with his own Kansas background—over the specialized “arcane learning” epitomized by The Cantos. Even Olson, Patrick Pritchett notes, was “unable to escape the gravitational pull of modernism” (RJ 27), which is reflected in the overwhelming quantity of allusion in The Maximus Poems. In this respect, the democratic scope of ARK, coupled with its strong Transcendentalist affinities, makes it more a late-twentieth century equivalent of Leaves of Grass than another Cantos or Maximus. However, it takes a long time for Johnson to reach such a conclusion. Indeed, Johnson arrives at this juncture in his poetics because he did, as we shall see, initially take



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Pound as prime master for his collage poetics. In fact, tracing the trajectory of Johnson’s poetry, from A Line of Poetry to ARK, it is evident that Pound’s influence never completely leaves Johnson’s work. As we will see in the following chapter, Pound’s influence is most evident in The Book of the Green Man and its ambitious use of ideogrammic methods to “make new” the British seasonal poem. But, throughout his poetry, the lessons Johnson takes from Pound are always applied in unprecedented ways—for example, conflating Pound’s collage principles with Milton, Blake, and Emerson—in the endeavor to answer Pound and “ENTER THE GREAT ACORN OF LIGHT.”



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Visual Integrity in The Book of the Green Man

. . . he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. —Ralph Waldo Emerson (N 38)

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he Book of the Green Man was published in 1967 under the auspices of Norton’s then poetry editor, Denise Levertov. Published by Norton in the United States and Longmans Green in the United Kingdom, the book’s trans-Atlantic distribution reflects the Green Man’s own mix of British tradition and American sensibility. Johnson’s booklength poem garnered considerable praise from notable figures including Herbert Read and Harold Bloom. Bloom even wrote a “fan letter” to Johnson expressing his admiration: Dear Mr JohnsonI found your poem, The Book of The Green Man, in a bookstore today, purchased it, and have now read it a number of times. I hadn’t heard of it, and was delighted it found me. I don’t know that I’ve ever written a fan letter before this, but it is a long time since I’ve read a new major poem as beautiful and moving as this. I thank you for much pleasure and insight, and think that you have renewed vision. Sincerely—Harold Bloom1 Bloom’s remark about “renewed vision” highlights the ongoing ocularcentric concerns of Johnson’s poetry and the questions it raises regarding the dual concepts of vision—subjective and objective, speculative and



CHAPTER 3

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empirical—initially introduced in A Line of Poetry. The Book of the Green Man develops these concerns by attempting to integrate these dual modes of vision into a more comprehensive visionary scope. The Book of the Green Man is the first instance of Johnson implementing collage and quotation within a book-length poem comprised of individual poems. The plethora of quotations and allusions Johnson employs maintains resonance and establishes relationships across the book’s separate poems, cohering dynamically as interactive elements within a much larger structure. Rather than simply supporting the claims of the poem’s speaker as they do in A Line of Poetry, quotation in The Book of the Green Man compensates the limits of individual vision by presenting a range of observations and impressions that exceeds the capacity of any single perceiving subject. Quotation becomes a way of presenting an image of the British landscape larger than the sum of its multifaceted parts. Pound’s collage model assumes a significant role in this, allowing for the converging or focusing (and re-focusing) of the disparate perceptions and perspectives of a heterogeneous assortment of individuals into one environing ideogram of the landscape. “Of the seasons, / seamless, a garland”: Form and Structure Developing a number of subjects from A Line of Poetry—the landscape painter Samuel Palmer, for example, in “Samuel Palmer: The Characters of Fire” (V20–22) and Alexander Pope’s topiary garden in “Shake, Quoth the Dove House” (V17–19)—Johnson turns his attention to Britain in The Book of the Green Man, writing his own seasonal long poem in the tradition of James Thomson’s The Seasons or John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar.2 The poem was prompted by Johnson’s visit to the United Kingdom with Jonathan Williams in the early 1960s. Like The Seasons, The Book of the Green Man comprises four sections, each of which is devoted to one of the four seasons. Additionally, each of the four sections—Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn—presents a specific mode of perception. Lofty Romantic vision occurs in Winter; idiosyncratic vision complements Spring; scientific empiricism, Summer; and a syncretic vision assimilates all three preceding modes in Autumn, bringing the poem to a transcendent climax. Furthermore, a specific individual, locality, and species of bird complements each season and its visionary mode.3 Winter is concerned with the visionary intimations of the poet, the somnambulant visions of the “mind’s eye” (BG 17), and takes William Wordsworth as its principal figure. Appropriately, the location is Wordsworth’s Grasmere in the Lake District and the blackbird is the representative bird. Indeed, it is one of the few birds that can be heard singing throughout the winter months and seen eating holly and mistletoe winterberries.



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Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it, as one eminently poetical, because passionate. But I believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness—that it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it.5 Ruskin elaborates on this distinction between first- and second-rate poets by proposing “three ranks” of men: [T]he man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be that crowd around it.6 Spring’s figure, the Victorian clergyman and author of the Diaries, Francis Kilvert recalls Ruskin’s second example: the inferior poet possessed with pathetic fallacy. Throughout the 1870s, Kilvert kept a record of his daily experiences of rural life as a curate in and around the picturesque Wye Valley located on the Wales–England border, which provides the locale for Spring. There is a level of idiosyncrasy in the subjective perception in Spring that sets it apart from the more mysterious intimations and “Visionary powers” of Wordsworth in Winter (BG 13). Such vision is evident in “Apparitions” when Johnson takes a passage from Kilvert’s diaries and rearranges it into a poem suggestive of Blake’s Memorable Fancies in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘I thought I saw an angel in an azure robe coming towards me across the lawn, but it was only the blue sky through the feathering branches of the lime’. (BG 41)



Spring is heralded by the season’s most evocative harbinger, the cuckoo, and takes the principle of pathetic fallacy as its visionary mode, which John Ruskin describes as the effect of strong emotions that “produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things.”4

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Kilvert here momentarily “perceives wrongly,” as Ruskin would say, allowing his emotions to color the impressions made by an external object. Nevertheless, Kilvert’s impressions enliven and animate the scene before him. In comparison to the Wordsworthian aspirations in Winter and the transfiguring visions in Autumn, these unusual moments of perception do not consciously intimate or even aspire toward mystical or exalted vision but record the impressions of an individual preoccupied by everyday occurrences. Unlike the other sections in The Book of the Green Man, Summer has no bird (save a dissected cuckoo) because, as Johnson explains in a letter to Guy Davenport, “both summer and mid-day are the times birds stop singing.”7 Johnson introduces scientific perception—“taking things apart [. . .] to see how they work”—in Summer, drawing on the observations of Gilbert White who wrote one of the first books on natural history, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789).8 Not surprisingly, then, Selborne is the location for this section of the poem. Johnson amplifies this scientific mode of “taking things apart [. . .] to see how they work” by alluding to George Stubbs’s anatomical studies of a dead horse and Frederick Ruysch’s Anatomical Museum in Amsterdam (BG 60). The poem culminates with Autumn, evoking the transcendent visions that Samuel Palmer drew and painted in his “valley of vision” during the 1820s and ‘30s in and around Shoreham in rural Kent.9 Autumn’s visionary mode is a fusion of all the other seasons’ modes, which, combined together, create “a kind of transcendental dawn-dusk including everything, even the winter blackbird & spring cuckoo,” as Johnson explains to Davenport: “a world of pure metamorphosis where there is no Wordsworth to worry about dim presences but it is taken for granted both earth & sky have symphonic, intelligible voice.”10 The bird that represents this “transcendental” perception is the turtledove. Johnson explains to Davenport, the bird holds “personal” associations: Then in Autumn the key is the turtle. It begins in the first section with the turtle in a hybernacula [sic], but with red eyes. So is this a turtleturtle or a turtle-dove? It is probably a completely personal thing, but it dates back to my childhood where I first misunderstood “The voice of the turtle in the land” as being the usually voiceless turtle— not a turtle-dove—so that it became for me a visionary rather than a descriptive experience. At the end of the first section Kit Smart’s “cherub-turtles” are also mentioned to further clarify the befuddled metaphor. They are even more visionary, mixing turtles, doves, and red-cheeked cherubs.11



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Johnson’s subjective turtle/dove experience effectively demonstrates how different modalities of vision and perception can both enhance and “clarify” or obstruct and “befuddle” one’s apprehension of an object. The point that Johnson stresses throughout The Book of the Green Man is that different ocular modalities are not necessarily exclusive. Johnson demonstrates this by insisting on what Norman Finkelstein calls “the intimate linkages of the subjective world of myth and poetry to the objective world of the empirical sciences.”12 These “linkages” and the interactions they permit offer new perspectives on the same subject, be it something as specific as the cuckoo, or as broad and general as the British landscape. Johnson incorporates these contrasting perspectives in order to realize a more comprehensive vision of his subject. If one is to achieve the kind of transfiguring vision that Johnson celebrates in the Autumn poems, then all these modalities of vision are required: the exacting eye of scientific perception, the introspective powers of the visionary poet, and the singular impressions of the journal writer. These are all interrelated facets of the transcendental visions depicted by the likes of Palmer—visions that “not only thrill the optic nerve, but shed a mild, a grateful, an unearthly luster into the inmost spirits” of the perceiver (BG 63). The contrasting “worlds of perception” that Johnson employs in The Book of the Green Man become ways of getting beyond the restrictive scope of singular vision, allowing him to write “a many focused-poetry, one which sees the minutiae with as much clarity as the hill it subsists on.”13 In order to achieve this visual integrity in The Book of the Green Man Johnson adopts Pound’s ideogrammic method. Pound’s method provides an effective way of juxtaposing the poem’s different visionary modes in order to create a multifaceted image of the British landscape. Johnson is quite clear about the influence of Pound on his British poem when in “Up Till Now” he acknowledges Pound by describing The Book of the Green Man as his “attempt, as a brash American, to make new the traditional British long seasonal poem” (U 115). In doing so, Johnson tacitly asserts the poem’s position within a distinctively modernist American tradition by evoking Pound’s directive to “MAKE IT NEW” (C 265). Alongside the poem’s British subject matter and modernist form, a continuing influence of Transcendentalism is evident as part of the poem’s ocular concerns. Again, this is implicit in Johnson’s attempt “to make new the traditional British seasonal long poem” by reasserting the kind of Adamic vision seen in Transcendentalism. Throughout The Book of the Green Man there is an implicit desire to see and start from scratch—to perceive one’s subject without preconception and behold it with the innocent eyes of an American Adam. Johnson’s attempt “to make new” the British seasonal poem provides an opportunity “to look at the world with new eyes”—as Emerson



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exhorts his fellow Americans to do in Nature (N 80)— simultaneously evoking and subverting the image of the American Adam so proliferate in nineteenth-century American literature. In Johnson’s case, however, it is not the “brave new world” of his American forbears that he confronts, but the tame Old World of Britain that is steeped in history and sedimented with innumerable layers of tradition, culture, and custom.14 It is Johnson’s desire to apprehend this Old World with the eyes of discovery, re-seeing centuries of tradition in refreshing new light, finding new vistas and curiosities in the old and familiar, and perceiving the extraordinary in the ordinary. Noting the presence of Transcendentalism in The Book of the Green Man, Mark Scroggins suggests that Thoreau is “the key to Johnson’s affectionate end run around the traditions of English romanticism” (RJ 162): “Johnson has come to the British countryside, and the British literary tradition, with eyes trained not by Coleridge and William Wordsworth but by Thoreau and Whitman” (RJ 165). Scroggins, however, overlooks the presence of Johnson’s friend Geoffrey Grigson, whose influence is evident throughout the poem’s notes. As well as a respected poet, Grigson was also a controversial literary critic who, for a period in the 1930s, edited the journal New Verse and promoted the work of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. As a noted anthologist, Grigson edited some exceptional anthologies including The Romantics: An Anthology (1942) and Before the Romantics: An Anthology of the Enlightenment (1946). He also wrote a number of influential books on Samuel Palmer, as well monographs on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, and Henry Moore. As a cultural historian, Grigson wrote numerous books on the English countryside, travel, and botany. “In a writing career spanning nearly sixty years,” C. C. Barfoot and R. M. Healey write, “he is unmatched by any one of his contemporaries for his range, and in the history of English literary criticism perhaps only Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis have had comparable general influence, reaching well beyond the academic world.”15 Compared to Johnson’s New American sensibilities, Grigson’s poetry is rather conventional, if not conservative. What Johnson seems more responsive to is Grigson’s intuitive grasp of a British visionary tradition that shapes the British landscape and informs its cultural history. Indeed, Grigson’s influence is not only evident in the Grigson titles that Johnson references—“one should read all of Grigson; his book are seminal and essential,” he advises (BG 85)—but more widely in the sources he uses. Palmer, for example, Smart, Pope, and Stukeley, all of whom are staple features in the anthologies Grigson edited—particularly The Romantics—and the subjects of his writings on literature, art, and cultural history.



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Furthermore, Grigson’s writing expresses considerable interest for vision and observation. Indeed, Grigson sharpens Johnson’s eyes considerably in The Book of the Green Man. According to Barfoot and Healey, “whether as critic or poet, [Grigson] asks us to use our eyes. He exhorts us to see. For him observation is the starting point.”16 Grigson stresses as much in The Private Art: The ordinary [. . .] is inexhaustible and sufficiently surprising and bizarre, when extraordinarily seen. Each poet, experiences the ordinary like an Adam, as if it were a proverb heard for the first time.17 Recalling the Transcendentalists and their emphasis on the ordinary, Grigson wants to recover the innocent eye and look “about the earth before [. . .] with Adamic Wonder.”18 The Adamic vision and wonder that Johnson proposes in The Book of the Green Man is a notable precursor for the appropriations of literature, music, science, and art in ARK, a poem that also endeavors to “see the world from scratch,” as Johnson writes in “BEAM 17.” There is, however, a notable difference in the formal methods and quoting strategies that Johnson uses in The Book of the Green Man compared to those in ARK. Reference and allusion play a more active role in the former’s rhetorical strategies as Johnson, drawing on the principles of Pound’s ideogrammic method, engages his subject by referencing and cross-referencing a broad range of sources. Indeed, The Book of the Green Man is the first and last instance of Johnson writing a poem that explicitly references it sources. This makes reading the poem a different experience from reading ARK and its eschewal of reference. In Johnson’s early poetry, Steve McCaffery notes, quotation functions “hermeneutically” beyond “concrete properties of tone and texture,” creating dense intertextual webs of reference.19 In the case of The Book of the Green Man, this is due to the notes accompanying the poem and the spirit in which they are deployed. It was Denise Levertov who first suggested that Johnson provide notes to The Book of the Green Man when he submitted his manuscript to her in 1965. “I do feel there should be notes appended with all the sources given for quotations and adaptations,” Levertov writes: “The way you use them does send one back to the sources, with affection or curiosity.”20 Johnson complied with Levertov’s request despite his worry (thinking perhaps of The Waste Land) that such an inclusion could appear as too “pompous” for some readers:21 I agree that with the great quantity of allusions and quotations, it would be fine to have a section of notes. But often others seem to think it



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Johnson conveys this bibliographic “spirit” by quoting from Thoreau’s Journals in the notes to The Book of the Green Man. Thoreau writes in his Diary for March 16th, 1851 [sic]: “When I looked into Purchas’s Pilgrims, it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat. Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils. (BG 83) Thoreau effectively summarizes the fecund intertextuality underwriting Johnson’s poem. Following Thoreau’s example, Johnson hopes that his notes will not burden the poetry, “but indicate where, I too, have heard the bullfrogs and out of what earths I have tried to cultivate new growth” (BG 83). Cultivating new growth out of decaying literature—what Jed Rasula, following Whitman, calls “compost poetry”—dovetails pertinently with the Adamic concerns engaged in The Book of the Green Man.23 For, it is not just the poem’s main subjects that Johnson presents in new light, but the entire material that the poem draws upon. Levertov touches on this when she remarks on how Johnson’s literary sources encourage the reader to see them “with affection or curiosity.” Indeed, the bibliographic curiosity that Johnson’s poem elicits is especially effective when deployed in conjunction with the juxtapositive strategies of the ideogrammic method, permitting a level of integrity and authenticity otherwise beyond the realization of the foreign eyes of an American in Britain. Visual Integrity A principal concern in The Book of the Green Man is the search for “All things ‘most rich, / most glittering, most strange’ ” (BG 69). It is something that Christopher Middleton notes when he praises the way Johnson “presents an image of England, or, to be precise, of sundry English scenes, with a vividness and a strangeness beyond the reach of any English poet, I venture to say, since the days of Blake, Calvert and Palmer” (BG dust jacket). The vividness



pompous, etc [. . .] I of course love books which are full of indications leading to other, unknown, books—and that is exactly the spirit, at its best, of this book.22

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and strangeness of these scenes is largely the result of Johnson’s situation as an American poet writing on a British subject, seeing and reporting it with the eyes of a stranger. As an American in Britain, Johnson finds much of his subject hidden from his eyes. Indeed, restricted vision is a salient theme that runs throughout The Book of the Green Man. It is also a theme that is exacerbated considerably by Johnson’s situation as “a brash American” writing on a British subject. Jeremy Hooker notes that Johnson observes “the mysteries of England with the eyes of a stranger.”24 Johnson takes advantage of this situation, however, using it as an opportunity to see his subject with a clarity and lucidity—“a vividness and strangeness,” as Middleton writes—that moreaccustomed indigenous eyes lack. Grigson stresses a similar point in The Shell Country Alphabet when, to his British readers, he proposes: “We accept familiar sights with only half the answer about them.”25 Often it takes the stranger to see the anomalies, the mysteries, and the exceptional. Indeed, to see in the estranged light of the tourist is to see with a clarity, freshness, and vitality that native eyes may have lost through habit and indifference. Thus, The Book of the Green Man becomes the record of seeing things as if for the first time, without the blinkers of familiarity and prescription. However, in The Book of the Green Man, Adamic vision is not simply about reclaiming “original” vision but about seeing old things in a way that imbues them with new significance. Thus, the images that Johnson presents of the British landscape are inextricably bound up in, and mediated by, other people’s observations and visions. Adamic vision becomes a matter of negotiating and reflecting upon the possible ways that phenomena can be perceived and observed. It also becomes a question of how individuals choose to position themselves against extant traditions and modalities of sight, and how they use or reject those optic modes to enhance their own visionary scope. Guy Davenport’s claim that Johnson’s “newness is a reseeing of things immemorially old,” conveys this endeavor to see what is already there in new ways, new contexts, and new light (V 13). Adamic vision is not simply a matter of perceiving the world without the lenses of culture and history, but seeing it self-consciously using those lenses in order to see more intensely and accurately. According to Jonathan Crary, “There never was or will be a self-present beholder to whom a world is transparently evident.”26 For to perceive the self-presence of the world and possess “an unmediated visual access to a plenitude of being” is an impossible ideal that ignores the historical character of vision and the “forces and relations of power” shaping and mediating it.27 Every vision and observation is symptomatic of a confluence of determining forces that permit and restrict how we see, including how we “see” sight itself.



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In order to articulate “the round earth on flat paper” in The Book of the Green Man, Johnson endeavors to see and present his subject from all possible perspectives. To achieve this integrity of impression, Johnson “sees” with the eyes of different individuals. A collective vision—comprising William Wordsworth, Samuel Palmer, Francis Kilvert, and Gilbert White, among many others—becomes the means for overcoming the limitations of a single, subjective perception, and allows for the integration of all aspects of a multifaceted subject in Johnson’s renewing vision of the British landscape. Johnson’s England Notebook The Book of the Green Man is the result of an extensive tour that Johnson made with Jonathan Williams in several parts the United Kingdom between 1962 and 1963. Williams recounts the itinerary in an obituary he wrote for Johnson: In the spring of 1963 we walked from the mouth of the River Wye at Chepstow, up its long, winding valley, to its source high on the flanks of Great Plynlimon. We hitched a few rides to allow us to add Kilpeck Church to Francis Kilvert’s at Bredwardine along the route. And Strata Florida and the site of Hafod House further into Wales. And more pilgrimages that summer. To Nottinghamshire to Southwell Minster and the amazing foliate heads and plant carvings in the Chapter House. To Gilbert White’s Selborne in Hampshire. To Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham in Kent. To the Cerne Abbes Giant in Dorset. To Compton in Surrey for the Watts Mortuary Chapel. To Brighton for John Nash’s Royal Pavilion. We were looking for all things, as RJ said, “most rich, most glittering, most strange.”28 Many of these locations feature in The Book of the Green Man. The Wye Valley occurs in the Spring section of the poem, Selborne in Summer, and Shoreham in Autumn. This would suggest that the essential structure of Johnson’s poem stems from his own firsthand observations and experiences while walking parts of Britain in quest of “lost romantic / promontories, prospects, vapors & auroras” (BG 45). One surviving notebook from Johnson’s British trip demonstrates how his own observations provide a loose narrative for the Spring section of his poem.29 Clearly, a considerable portion of the material in Spring comes courtesy of Johnson’s own field notes. For example, much of what Johnson records in his notebook for April 8th reappears in the poem “April 8th” that describes the journey he and Williams made from Chepstow to St. Briavels



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on the River Wye. Johnson’s description of the Castle at Chepstow in his notebook—“its solidity [. . .] a continuation of the cliffs”—is reworked in “April 8th” as: “Its castle, an extension of the cliff, / / an eyrie of / rock” (BGM 33).30 Likewise, the “hoarse cries of rooks” noted by Johnson on April 12th are later described as “the harsh clamour of rooks” in the poem “April 12th” (BGM 35).31 The flowers that Johnson notes in the same entry are also listed in the poem’s concluding line, “daffodil, primrose, snow-drop, white violet” (BGM 37), although the “wild flower called locally ‘Joseph & Mary,’ ” also recorded on April 12th, is omitted. Johnson is not committed to faithfully replicating his notebook entries but is more concerned with manipulating the material to meet the needs of his poem. For example, the “daffodil, primrose, snow-drop, white violet” listed in “April 12th” reiterate the quote, “ ‘bright / shootes’ ” from Henry Vaughan’s “The Retreat” and appear at Francis Kilvert’s grave in Bredwardine. In the notebook, however, the white violets are noted before Johnson and Williams arrive at Bredwardine. Other notable inconsistencies include the dead sheep that appear in the “April 12th” poem, floating downstream in the Wye (BGM 35). Johnson actually mentions the sheep, along with the Hereford cattle and “shadowy / swans” in his notebook entry for April 10th. Two days of mist-everything muted, even the urgency of spring. All buds rounded, little knots, hardly any bursting yet. The banks of the river are green, closely cropped turf. Sheep giving way to Hereford cattle. Swans on the river in many places rather grey like the sky—long snaky necks with which they reach under the edges of the banks for fish. Saw a dead sheep floating in the water like a heap of dirty foam— its legs & head seen under the surface like a withered apple & gnarled bough.32 Johnson’s reasons for conflating two days worth of notes into the one poem are self-explanatory when we note that there is no poem for April 10th. The brief journal entry for April 10th suggests that the day did not yield enough material to warrant a poem. Or, perhaps Johnson lacked sufficient eyes to observe the “ ‘most rich, / most glittering, most strange’ ” events of that particular day. Johnson’s manipulation of his own field notes in The Book of the Green Man and their rhetorical embellishments—especially when furbished with quotations—indicate the limitations of his observations. Indeed, the constrictions of individual perception, along with the ways in which they can be overcome, are issues repeatedly addressed by Johnson in The



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“All eyes” in Albion The Book of the Green Man begins in what Elizabeth Sewell would call a state of “Orphic Darkness”: “a darkness which is its own light [. . .] a labyrinth which is its own clue,” where “enfoldment and enlightenment are one and the same thing” (OV 98). It is an Orphic Darkness containing within it, “statement, question, and method” at the same time (OV 4). In the very first poem of Winter, the speaker finds himself in a state of restricted vision, straining to form a clear image of the “shadowy things” and ambiguous “Presences” in Wordsworth’s Grasmere (BG 13, 15). A “blinding / darkness” obfuscates the poet’s sight, bringing a confusion of ambiguous sounds to the fore of his perceptual field (BG 15). The poem does not begin in a moment of lucid or exalted vision but with an auditory experience as the poet hears the song of a thrush (Turdus merula) in the darkness. Tchink! Tchink! Tsee! Then low, continuous warbles pure as a Thrush. A maze of sound! (BG 15) These sounds, heard in the darkness, hold the key to enlightenment. With their chiming directive to think (“Tchink!”) and see (“Tsee!”), the thrush’s calls—merging with the “hissing” Rothay and “sinuous yews” of Grasmere graveyard—exhort the poet to thought and vision. In his letter to Guy Davenport, Johnson explains how “the blackbird’s tchink at the beginning is a key to the ‘shadowy things,’ ‘mysterious words’ of Wordsworth—the whole world only seen as a presence, the blackbird singing ambiguously in the blackness of the night.”33 In this darkness, the poet cannot bring thought and intimation to light. The “inarticulate // warble and seething” (BG 17) cannot be clarified: “I see only the descent / / to this darkness—// the rest vanishes” (BG 18). The poem’s speaker announces his own aspirations in response to these dim presences arising “out of this soil, once / Wordsworth.” A soil, to recall



Book of the Green Man. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that the poem begins in a state of obfuscation only to finally climax in transcendent revelation.

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O, let us give stems to the flowers! Substance to this fog: some subtle, yet enduring mold, a snare for bird-song, night, & rivers flowing. (BG 19) But what is the most effective way of creating this “subtle, yet enduring mold”? How can the poet, to quote Blake, “work the thing up to Vision” and bring these observations into the light of day?34 The plural pronoun “us” implies that the solution is a collective one; an undertaking beyond the capacity of any one individual and beyond any one sole voice, or pair of ears or eyes. To make the earth speak and “issue some dark, meditated // syllable” (BG 17) necessitates a discerning regard for what other people— other voices, ears, and eyes—have witnessed and reported. This is evident in Johnson’s description of his compositional techniques in The Book of the Green Man: I read all British naturalists I could get my hands on, while also walking, with fellow poet Jonathan Williams, every inch described for months on end. The result is a constant refocusing of eyes: mine, others, mine through other, on and on.35 It is not just British naturalists, however, that Johnson consults in The Book of the Green Man but a rich and diverse “visionary company”—to use the title of Harold Bloom’s book—that helps the poet “work the thing up to Vision” and see with limpid clarity from multiple perspectives and foci.36 The twin fonts of this British visionary company are Dorothy and William Wordsworth. These two people—the first eyes and voices that Johnson evokes in his poem—represent two complementary modes of observation and vision that continue to interact throughout the poem. Representing what is a subjective mode of vision that sees imaginatively with the mind’s eye, Johnson writes how William “could not see / daffodils / only // ‘huge



Johnson’s allusion to Thoreau, that is as much bibliographic as it is the earthy loam of Grasmere graveyard.

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It was Dorothy who lies at his side, who brought home lichen & cushions of moss, who saw these Lakes in all their weathers— ‘dim mirrors’, ‘bright slate’ —the sheens like herrings & spear-shaped streaks of polished steel. (BG 16) Meena Alexander praises Dorothy’s “visionary eye” for observing “the ordinary objects of perception, grass, insects, tree trunks, clouds,” in her Journals.37 Grigson makes a similar assessment when he acknowledges Dorothy’s “extraordinary perceptions of scene and being”: “The circumstance and detail of English landscape are conveyed uniquely by Miss Wordsworth, with a force of sensibility equalled by no English painter and perhaps by only four English poets.”38 Thus, Dorothy provides a pertinent example of what Agnes Arber describes as “the chastening of the mind through the discipline of the eye.”39 But, for Grigson, the qualities of the Wordsworths’ visionary modes are most effective when combined together. [A] pietas towards England, or for an Englishman towards the world as environment, needs knowledge of her Journals—“A fine moonlight night. The moon shone like herrings in the water” (31 October 1800)—coupled with knowledge of her brother’s poems, which round off recognizing and appreciating with intellection.40 Johnson reiterates this assessment in the Winter section of The Book of the Green Man by implying that the combination of the two modes of vision that 10.1057/9780230115552 - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, Ross Hair


forms’, Presences & earth ‘working / like a sea’ ” (BG 15–16). Dorothy, by contrast, in her scrupulous observations of Grasmere, epitomizes the qualities of empirical observation and objective vision:

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Dorothy and William represent creates a visual integrity capable of perceiving and apprehending the manifold mysteries of the British landscape. Dorothy’s exacting eye for detail gives substance and form to her brother’s “inner country / of deep, clear Lakes” (BG 16) and “viewless winds” (BG 25, emphasis added), whereas the imaginative breadth of William’s speculations and reflections imbue Dorothy’s observations with transcendent or transfiguring resonance, so that the specific phenomena of the Lakes and Grasmere—moss, lichen, even the Lakes themselves—are made into the “Windermeres / of his mind’s eye” (BG 17, emphasis added). Thus, the Grasmere poems establish a syncretic visionary mode that Johnson continues to engage throughout The Book of the Green Man. The Ideogrammic Method Quotation is the sole means for achieving a more encompassing mode of vision in The Book of the Green Man. We’ve already seen this, in the poem “April 12th” when Johnson quotes a salient phrase from Henry Vaughan’s “The Retreat” to embellish the description of the flowers recorded in his notebook. But to fully exploit and amplify the ocular scope of observations such as these, Johnson incorporates them into a collage mode that adopts aspects of Pound’s ideogrammic method. The way in which Johnson applies the basic principles of Pound’s method can be seen by tracing the interactions of a particular line that first appears in the poem “Upon First Opening a Cuckoo” from Spring. The line in question from “First Opening a Cuckoo” is: “I saw the sweetbriar & bon-fire & strawberry wire now / relaxed into intricate thicket” (BG 51). Johnson quotes the same line in a later poem entitled “What the Light Told Me,” that concludes Summer: Within and out, round as a ball— With hither and thither, as straight as a line. With lily, germander And sops-in-wine. With sweet-briar and Bon-fire and strawberry wire And columbine. (BGM 62) The italics indicate that this is a quoted source that Johnson references as “an anonymous song culled from Edith Sitwell’s Book of Flowers” (BGM 86). The song, however, has a much older history and derives from an obscure and anonymous seventeenth-century poem entitled, “Robin Goodfellow: Commonly Called Hob-Goblin, With His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests.” Robin Goodfellow is the mischievous character of British folklore usually portrayed as a fairy, imp, or goblin. He is also sometimes associated with Robin Hood and, more tenuously, is sometime seen as variant of the Green 10.1057/9780230115552 - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, Ross Hair


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Man (BG 89). Most famously, this trickster appears in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Puck, “that merry wanderer of the night,” who causes mischief wherever he goes.41 The British composer Peter Warlock (nee Philip Heseltine) uses the same text for his song entitled “Robin Good-Fellow.” And can the physician make sick men well? And can the magician a fortune divine— Without lily, germander, and sops-in-wine, With sweet-briar and bonfire And strawberry wire and columbine. With in and out, in and out, round as a ball, With hither and thither, as straight as a line, With lily, germander, and sops-in-wine, With sweet-briar and bonfire And strawberry wire and columbine. When Saturn did live, there lived no poor, The king and the beggar with roots did dine, With lily, germander, and sops-in-wine, With sweet-briar and bonfire And strawberry wire and columbine.42 The text’s meaning is obscure but may refer to the medicinal properties of plants. John Gerard, for example, in Gerard’s Herbal: The History of Plants (1597), lists columbine, lilies, the sweet-briar (“wilde Roses”) and Sops-in-Wine (Cariophyllus) and their medicinal “Vertues.”43Johnson, however, uses the text to convey the impression of the sun being a form of light that is “round as a ball” (BG 62). When all the sources of this quote are considered in the broader context of The Book of the Green Man, its significance is amplified considerably by the poem’s complex intertextual strategies. As Steve McCaffery notes, the quotations that Johnson uses in A Line of Poetry, The Book of the Green Man, and The Different Musics will often create compound echoes of “absent, yet potentially present, voices.”44 When Johnson quotes Thoreau, McCaffery suggests that “you also pick up the echo of all other texts that could have functioned there,” such as Emerson, Whitman, or fellow nature writer, Gilbert White.45 Rather like a ripple effect, the resonance of a quote is potentially limitless as it radiates from its initial reference point. This is evident in Johnson’s use of the line—“I saw the sweet-briar & bon-fire & strawberry wire”—which resonates with both the actively present



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voices (those which Johnson acknowledges through reference) and those absent echoes implicitly evoked throughout the poem. For example, in knowing that the source of Sitwell’s song is from “Robin Goodfellow,” it is hard not to invoke Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Therefore, by association, “Robin Goodfellow” discretely invokes what is perhaps the most famous British literary figure in Johnson’s “British” poem: Shakespeare. A hidden reference to Robin Goodfellow seems especially appropriate for “that shrewd and knavish sprite / Called Robin Goodfellow,” whose modus operandi is one of stealth, guile, and subterfuge.46 What better way to evoke this legendary character of folklore than by the subtle means Robin Goodfellow is noted for? Johnson uses the same quote to develop and amplify the trope of the cuckoo, introduced in the first Spring poem, “Evocations.” ‘Rise and put on your foliage’. Come as the Green Knight to Gawain at the beginning of the new year— out of his oaken crevice: lhude sing cuccu! (BG 31) Summer’s famous herald is conflated with that other harbinger of new life and fertility, the Green Man, by assimilating an allusion to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with a line from Robert Herrick’s poem about May Day celebrations, “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.” In Herrick’s poem, the plea to “Rise, and put on your foliage,” is addressed to Corinna and meant as an invitation to go “a-Maying.” Johnson, however, manipulates the quote so that Herrick’s line becomes an invocation to Spring itself as personified by the Green Man. Johnson also quotes the thirteenth-century rota, “Sumer Is Icumen In” (“Spring Has Come In”), which celebrates the arrival of spring with the refrain: “lhude sing cuccu!” This refrain is also echoed by the anonymous Welsh poem Johnson quotes from Kenneth Jackson’s Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry: (I have listened to the cuckoo in the ivy-tree, I have listened to the note of the birds in the crest of the rustling oak, loud cuckoo’) cuckoo! cuckoo! (BG 31)



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As an evocative emblem of spring and summer, it is not surprising that the “penetrant” call of the cuckoo should resound throughout Spring (BG 47). In “Upon First Opening a Cuckoo,” these associations are further elaborated when Johnson inserts the line, “I saw the sweet-briar & bon-fire & strawberry wire,” into the contents of a cuckoo’s gut. I saw the sweet-briar & bon-fire & strawberry wire now relaxed into intricate thicket. It was as if seen in strong sunlight, flat & tapestried, all edge & definition. (BG 51)47 The absence of quotation marks or italics in this citation from “Robin Goodfellow” diminishes any sense of incongruity, encouraging us, instead, to read and accept the line within the new context of the cuckoo. This reading is reinforced considerably when one notes that the “intricate thicket” of the cuckoo’s guts presented here adumbrates the preceding quote from Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (describing the stomach contents of a dissected cuckoo) in the epigraph to the poem’s Summer section. This stomach was large and round, and stuffed hard, like a pincushion, with food, which upon nice examination, we found to consist of various insects, such as small scarabs, spiders, and dragon-flies; the last of which, as they were just emerging out of the aurelia state, we have seen cuckoos catching on the wing. Among this farrago also were to be seen maggots, and many seeds, which belonged either to gooseberries, currants, cranberries, or some such fruit . . . . (BG 49–50) In addition to referring to White’s Natural History of Selborne, the title “Upon First Opening a Cuckoo” puns On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, the title of a composition by Frederick Delius, who is “the quintessential English musician,” according to Jonathan Williams.48 Johnson alludes to this particular piece of music in the poem entitled “April 19th,” which compounds Delius’s evocation of the cuckoo with the description that Kilvert provides in his diary: Cuckoo . . . cuckoo . . . cuckoo . . . I had been listening for the first cuckoo, Delius’ cuckoo— but the sound is softer, more penetrant. ‘Calling about the hills’, Kilvert says. Yes, it is that. An echo . . . : this green source, this welling-forth in ever widening circles, this ‘spring’. (BG 47)



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Is it simply coincidence, then, that Warlock was a keen promoter of Delius’s music and even wrote the first biography of him? It seems appropriate that Johnson should indirectly invoke Warlock in a poem that puns the title of a Delius composition. For the cuckoo’s song, indeed, now echoes throughout The Book of the Green Man by establishing the polyphonic compound echoes of what McCaffery calls “absent, yet potentially present, voices.”49 Johnson achieves this complex polyphony by appropriating the collage strategies Pound deploys in The Cantos. Following Pound’s methods, Johnson sets a range of images concerning spring renewal and the cuckoo into an “intricate pattern” of relations that resonate like Pound’s “subject rhymes” throughout the individual poems. Consequently, the cuckoo is seen from multiple perspectives, glimpsed and heard in ancient and traditional spring rites, folklore, song, and poetry. It is also observed with the scientific eyes of Gilbert White and the subjective impressions recorded in Kilvert’s diary. Additionally, the elusive summer herald is heard in the music of Frederick Delius and Warlock, its song and legend “welling-forth in ever widening circles” as an integral component in The Book of the Green Man. Original Vision, Authentic Voice Because Johnson draws so liberally upon this broad visionary company to enhance his scope in The Book of the Green Man, some readers have questioned the extent to which Johnson’s quoting practices compromise his own voice. Denise Levertov, for example, in her assessment of Johnson’s poem shows misgivings about his “excessive” use of quotation and allusion, believing that such excess has the adverse effect of diminishing Johnson’s own “original powers” in the poem. You write so well that I wish in general, you would write more and quote less. I feel it is a kind of modesty in you, and I like that; but it is excessive. I wish you would be more confident in your original powers—even tho’ you quote beautifully too, and put one onto, or send one back to, many neglected paths.50 Levertov contrasts Johnson’s collage techniques with those of another poet for whom quotation and collage is a key strategy—Robert Duncan. Duncan quotes, alludes to, derives in homage—but there is so much of his own along with it. In your work the proportions of your own speech to the reverently or delightedly quoted speech of others are not quite right I feel.51



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But Johnson’s extensive use of quotation and his ability to break down commonly held distinctions regarding subject and object are an accomplishment, not a flaw, of his collage mode. The difficulties that Levertov finds in The Book of the Green Man, such as the lack of demarcation between the poem’s chorus of quoted voices and what can be attributed as Johnson’s own voice—his “original powers”—actually indicates the extent to which Johnson successfully integrates the eyes and voices of numerous individuals into a coherent whole. As McCaffery points out, what initially appears as the absence of the author’s voice is actually a “periodic voicelessness that leads, however, not into silence but into diachronically contoured polyphonies.”52 As “the spectator of his own readings,” Johnson’s voice is “recalled to the page’s surface” by his quotations.53 In other words, other voices pass through Johnson’s and appear to assert themselves in the poem. These quoted voices do not simply reinforce or compensate Johnson’s, but establish intellectual or aesthetic genealogies relevant to the poem. For example, a distinctive Blakean genealogy runs throughout Johnson’s poem, taking in Milton and Thomas Gray on the one hand (BG 40, 84) and, on the other hand, Samuel Palmer and his fellow Ancients. This genealogy continues in other material used by Johnson, such as Grigson (who wrote two monographs and a series of articles on Palmer) and Ruthven Todd. As well as being dedicated to Grigson, Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art, the book of Todd’s that Johnson references (BG 85), also examines the intersections of science and art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by consulting, among other relevant sources, the work of Palmer and Blake. In this way Johnson’s quotes function hermeneutically. Each quotation is interpreted within and against specific contexts, asserting pertinent connections and affinities that amplify across time and space. Like Pound in The Cantos, however, Johnson is tacitly manipulating these materials via a “periodic voicelessness” in order to assert what is ultimately his own vision. It is understandable that Levertov voices concerns about The Book of the Green Man. It is, after all, difficult to identify a singular voice in Johnson’s poem. This differs from Duncan’s poetry in which his own voice distinctly speaks above the material he collages into his poems. For example, in “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” Duncan quotes a variety of texts including Pindar, Pound, John Byron, nursery rhymes, and, in the following passage, Whitman: It is across great scars of wrong I reach toward the song of kindred men and strike again the naked string



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old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake! that cried:

I see always the under side turning, fumes that injure the tender landscape. From which up break lilac blossoms of courage in daily act striving to meet a natural measure.54 Although there is a hint of Whitman’s prophetic voice in these lines, the idiosyncrasies of Duncan’s voice are discernible throughout. The short interjectory clause, “Glorious mistake!”—here acting as a kind of evaluative aside on Whitman’s poetry—and the exclamation mark, are typical of Duncan. Solemn and vatic pronouncements, as in the first lines “It is across great scars of wrong / I reach toward the song of kindred men,” are also distinctly Duncan, as is the idiosyncratic and complicated syntax.55 A good example of this occurs in the line “From which up break,” where the placement of the verb “up” complicates what would otherwise be a straightforward clause. Omitting the verb “up,” so that the line reads, “from which break” or placing it at the beginning of the clause to form, “Up from which break” would be more conventional. But Duncan’s awkward syntax mimetically performs the travail of the Whitmanesque lilacs—here symbolizing courage—to bloom amidst the turmoil and injuries of war. Johnson is closest to Duncan’s quoting practices in the poems from A Line of Poetry, such as “Four Orphic Poems” where quotation remains distinct from the poem’s speaking voice. By contrast, the first-person pronoun in The Book of the Green Man is never as clearly demarcated. Stemming largely from Johnson’s own firsthand observations of the British landscape it is presumable that a consistent voice, referring back to those experiences and impressions, narrates the poem. In other words, the lyric “I” narrating the events and impressions in the April poems correlates with the poet who recorded similar observations in his notebook. However, the porous nature of Johnson’s voice in The Book of the Green Man creates an indeterminate and evasive speaker that undermines such assumptions. This is evident in the poem's concluding Autumn section that takes place in Shoreham. More specifically, it is the Shoreham Samuel Palmer saw— “Shoreham. Autumnal, mercurial”—that Johnson presents in these poems (BG 66). In contrast to the “blinding / darkness” witnessed in Winter’s Grasmere poems, the poem’s speaker in Autumn has made “A circumambient



“The theme is creative and has vista.” “He is the president of regulation.”

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I saw ascensions, transformations & flights ‘from a leaf of kale, across the disc of a planet’. I saw a world of Leviathan & the thousand repetitions of spore & insect intermixed. (BG 66) The lyric “I” in passages such as these seem, on first appearances, similar to Duncan’s. But despite the repeated assertion in the first person singular, these moments of visual intensity cannot be easily ascribed to one individual. For a start, Johnson quotes Samuel Palmer’s son, A. H. Palmer, to describe the transfiguring “ascensions, transformations / & flights” that the poet’s speaker has seen in Shoreham. Furthermore, the refrain “I saw that at Shoreham” are the words of Samuel Palmer who, A. H. Palmer notes, wrote them on a paper portfolio of his etching The Rising Moon (1857).56 ‘Thoughts on RISING MOON with raving-mad splendour of orange twilight glow on landscape. I saw that at Shoreham’. (BG 65) “I saw that at Shoreham” also recalls the testimony of St. John of Patmos in Revelation: “And I John saw these things, and heard them” (22:18). H.D., in Tribute to the Angels, also cites this: “I John saw. I testify.”57 While these echoes enhance the revelatory tone of the poem, they also complicate the identity of the voice. Is this the same narrating voice that first appears in Winter? Or is it Palmer who speaks? Maybe it is St. John. Or is this a palimpsest: St. John speaking through Palmer, speaking through Johnson? Ultimately, it does not seem to matter. The poem makes such questions largely redundant. Johnson is less concerned about the identity of perceiving subject as he is about the objects being perceived and the processes that enable such perceptions to occur. Integrating all the visual modes used throughout The Book of the Green Man, the concluding pages of Autumn present a fusion of object and subject. Once again, the distinctions between original and secondary visions become blurred and unclear. Whereas many of the Spring poems grew out of Johnson’s firsthand experiences walking the River Wye, the final vision



voyage into the visible” and can repeatedly assert: “I saw that at Shoreham” (BG 65).

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The field, with its broken fence, slopes down to where a thatched barn is half hidden among the beeches. This is a plain structure, shaped like a hill. Its roof sags, encrusted with that emerald-green moss, Tortula ruralis: smooth, rounded clumps— now in the dryness of harvest, partly shrunken, & of a yellow-stained olive. Three large rooks move slowly above the ripe stalks unperturbed by the reapers. A white owl leaves the barn—whiter still against the dark valley. (BG 79) Ekphrasis, Hart notes, “animates the picture” that Johnson presents (RJ 186). Thus, after describing the basic details of The White Cloud, Johnson proceeds to embellish Palmer’s painting just has he does his notebooks. For example, Johnson adds precision and detail to Palmer’s rendering of a dilapidated barn roof in the scene by using Grigson’s book An English Farmhouse and its Neighbourhood to identify the moss Palmer paints as Tortula ruralis (BG 87).58 Johnson also projects his own speculations on to the painting as he begins to hear phenomena such as “a brook / audible” far behind the barn (BG 79), and imagines all the small details and phenomena that Palmer’s painting suggests. It is possible that Johnson is reversing the process he implemented in Spring, imbuing The White Cloud with his own first-hand experiences of Shoreham. In either case, distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity become blurred. It is difficult to ascertain whether it is Palmer’s painting being described or Shoreham itself, as witnessed by Johnson’s—or the speaker’s—own eyes. This ambiguity only increases when Johnson presents two stanzas enumerating a range of Shoreham phenomena that elaborate The White Cloud: Insect wings. Light feet of squirrels in the beeches. Rustling of dry leaves on the oak.



that concludes The Book of the Green Man stems from a detailed description of painting: Palmer’s Shoreham harvest scene entitled The White Cloud (c.1833–4):

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Dry scrape of grasshoppers. Quick patter of squirrels. Wind in the oak leaf & water on stone. A maze of sun dappled over earth. The straw whispering as it is scythed. Wings of the blackbird’s glistening as they settle. The thunder barely to be heard. (BG 80) The short clauses and use of parataxis suggest that these could be observations jotted down in a notebook. While these stanzas evoke the subjective impressions of the diarist in Spring, the details that they record also recall the scrupulous scientific perceptions in the poem’s Summer section. Focusing on details, Johnson notes the wheat, the beech trees, and the hues and dapples of the autumn sunlight. But even at these moments of intense perception, phenomena still resist being limited by one perspective. Therefore, Johnson presents two stanzas that provide variants on the same phenomena. The “sheen” on blackbird’s wings in the first stanza is “glistening” in the second, and the ambiguous “Insect wings” in the first stanza (are these wings seen or heard?) are presented more evocatively as the “Dry scrape of grasshoppers” in the second. Together, the two stanzas assert that every thing is multifaceted and evasive of monocular vision. The increasing level of tactility and audibility in these stanzas and the preceding one—where, we are told, the “straw [is] warm / to the touch, earth / hot beneath the / foot (BG 79), “& far / behind the barn a brook / [is] audible” (BG 79)—gives further impression that the poem’s speaker has stepped into the painting, taking the reader with him: “At our backs, surrounding the picture / is the whole world,” Johnson writes, evoking the Claude glass that was instrumental for picturesque aesthetics in the late-eighteenth century (BG 80). These imaginative embellishments also create a sense of portentousness. Perhaps nodding to the “dry sterile thunder” that concludes The Waste Land, Johnson draws attention to the imminent threat of thunder.59 Palmer indicates this in The White Cloud with the voluminous cumulonimbus that looms ominously over the reapers scything wheat “in the heavy / air” full of dust and “hidden electricity” (BG 79). Thunder rumbles as a portent of the transfiguring vision that the poem is slowly working up to. Thus, in the



Waters. The sunlight in rippling spots as it plays on the ground. Hues of the swaying wheat from palest yellow to the ruddy gold. Sheen on the blackbirds. Undertone of thunder.

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First, stones underfoot in a sound like muffled sheep-bells. Then the roots of the trees clanged: rooks, rooks, blackbirds. Cuckoos awoke in the tubers —earth-worm & mole & turtle— all dances to the thunder, the peal & thunder. (BG 82) In this “diapason” (BG 82), this grand burst of visionary harmony, blackbird and cuckoo appear together in what is at once a “dissonance / & musical order” (BG 82). Converging in the transcendent twilight of Palmer’s “Mercurial” Shoreham, the simultaneous appearance of these birds indicates that Johnson has worked his subject up to Vision, integrating all the parts of his multifaceted subject. That Johnson claims that this diapason is both “a dissonance / & a musical order,” however, suggests that a complete synthesis of subjective and objective vision has not been achieved. There is still dissonance despite Johnson’s ideogrammic conjunctions and visual integrations. The poem’s “luminous details” retain edge and definition and assert their singularities within a dialogue of fundamental relationships articulating Johnson’s unique vision of “the round earth on flat paper.”



final movement, peals of thunder merge with the sounds/songs of the earth: “peal after peal / rang out of earth.”





Each one must work out his idea, to his taste. —Raymond Isidore1 idiom : of one’s self vernacular : of the folk —Ronald Johnson2

J

ohnson’s poetry changes significantly after The Book of the Green Man. To advance his ocular interests in his next major collection, The Different Musics, Johnson moves away from Pound’s ideogrammic method to pursue a collage mode that draws on the quoting practices of the American composer, Charles Ives (1874–1954). In The Book of the Green Man, Johnson is concerned with achieving visual integrity about one specific subject, the British landscape, by observing it from multiple perspectives and vantage points. In The Different Musics, however, Johnson wants to convey different and contrasting perceptions simultaneously. Essentially, Johnson is keen to sound “different musics” concurrently on the page so that, together, they comprise a new music. In attempting this polyphonic poetry, Pound’s ideogrammic method undergoes considerable reassessment as Johnson implements a more suitable form to allow different perceptions to co-exist simultaneously on the page. As well as indicating the changing aesthetics of Johnson’s collage poetics, Ives’s singular quoting practices, along with his innovations in dissonance and polyphony, provide a valuable model for Johnson’s desire to achieve such simultaneity of perception.



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Published by W. W. Norton in 1969, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses comprises a revised selection of work that initially appeared in A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees, in addition to an entirely new collection of poems written between 1966 and 1967 entitled The Different Musics. In its consolidation of Johnson’s early work with material following The Book of the Green Man, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses marks an important transitional moment in Johnson’s career, indicating where the poetry had been as well as intimating the new directions it would follow. In The Different Musics, Johnson both advances and revises the Poundian modernism of his previous collections by developing a collage mode that draws upon the bricolage practices of so-called “naïve” vernacular art and the musical quoting practices of Ives. Indeed, Johnson tells Alpert that the collection’s title, The Different Musics, is a reference to “Ives’ use of two tunes at once” (RJ 548). Ives’s collage methods are also attractive to Johnson because, for him, they align themselves closely with the naïve bricolage practices to which he responds in various forms of folk and vernacular art. This engagement with both bricolage and Ives in The Different Musics are integral to Johnson’s ongoing reassessment and revision of the modernist collage aesthetic informing A Line of Poetry and The Book of the Green Man, because, Ives (and bricolage more generally) both reify and advance Johnson’s strong affinities with Transcendentalism and contribute to reconciling his modernist collage sensibilities with Transcendentalist ideas of self-reliance, cosmology, and Adamic vision. Charles Ives The Different Musics marks Johnson’s first extensive engagement with the music and ideas of Ives who later exerts considerable influence on ARK. “I think the structure of Ives’ symphonies had been more of an influence on me than just about anything else,” Johnson tells Peter O’Leary in his 1995 interview (RJ 580). But Ives’s influence is already evident in several poems in A Line of Poetry. In “Lilacs, Portals, Evocations,” for example, Johnson alludes to “Ives under Danbury’s / maples,” and to fellow American maverick composer Carl Ruggles (the title of the poem refers to three of Ruggles’s compositions), along with the more familiar literary names of Zukofsky, Olson, and Williams. All these names are significant indicators of not only where Johnson’s poetry has come from—they are, he writes, “ways homeward”—but also where it is heading (V 71). This “nexus of influences,” Patrick Pritchett notes, “form[s] an overarching, yet delicate, response to the question of [Johnson’s] own location inside of a modernist poetic tradition” (RJ 31). Indeed, as Guy Davenport stresses, Ives’s disjunctive and dissonant



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Ives aligns with the most significant art of his time: with Pound and Eliot in the reuse of extant compositions [. . .] with Joyce in the hermetic diffusion of symbolism throughout a work, with Picasso in the exploring the possibilities of extending forms and techniques.3 All these modernist figures have, like Ives, utilized “the synergy of heightened quotation.”4 Picasso’s early collages are famous for their incorporation of found material and “real” objects, whereas Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land make extensive use of direct quotation and, like Joyce, pastiche and paraphrase liberally. In short, quotation in its various forms is integral to all these important works of the twentieth century. In “Up Till Now,” Johnson claims that: “From Ives, I learned how collage could be used to effect” (U 115). Ives’s musical dissonance and his method of quoting various other musics are aspects that Johnson finds particularly instructive for his own collage poetics. Following the composer’s example in The Different Musics, Johnson uses collage in the collection’s title poem and “The Unfoldings” to hold different kinds of reality—voices, perspectives, timeframes, and dimensions—together simultaneously. “Collage is a means of making all art hold more different kinds of reality,” Johnson writes in his essay on Guy Davenport: “Charles Ives asked ‘are my ears wrong?’ when he heard two things at once make music, and stubbornly wrote down what few could hear till now.”5 Here—as when he tells Alpert that The Different Musics refers to “Charles Ives’ use of two tunes at once”—Johnson is referring to Ives’s use of polyphony and dissonance, which permits the co-existence and superimposition of different musics in one composition, “blend[ing] the music of highly diverse traditions in a volatile and provocative blend,” as David Michael Hertz notes.6 This “blend” consists of popular American music (Stephen Foster ballads, college songs, hymns, marching band music, and ragtime tunes) and the European classical music of Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, and Wagner. According to J. Peter Burkholder, such musical quotation is a way of Ives “speaking for himself, in a language that is his own, one that assimilates all the musical tongues he had learned. What he has to say could not be said in any other way.” 7 Via a collage praxis essentially similar to his modernist contemporaries, Ives uses both original and found material to articulate his singular ideas about American music, his experiences as a New Englander and his Transcendentalist inflected religious beliefs.



music parallels the modernist innovations occurring in art and literature during the early decades of the twentieth century:

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“The Different Musics”

“The Different Musics” was dedicated to Robert Duncan because I had just read his poem “The Fire” which begins and ends with a grid of words like fire leaf fish which are done at exact heartbeat rhythm—that’s the way Robert reads them—in time to the heart. Though the only obvious relation of his poem to mine is the field of stars at the end. But I did want to pay homage to a poem I found so exciting and beautiful. (RJ 549) Duncan’s poem is just one of the different musics heard in Johnson’s poem. Johnson also evokes the philological strategies of Pound, phrases and images suggestive of Olson, and the cosmological speculations of Ives’s unfinished Universe Symphony. In evoking these different textual musics, Johnson’s poem follows the “quoting” practice of Ives, which, Burkholder maintains, “is not a technique at all but the result of several different ways of basing a new composition on one or more existing ones”:8 In most instances, it is clear that Ives is not adding quotations at the end of his compositional process. Rather, the existing music is where he starts: using it as a model; transcribing or arranging it; treating a given tune in variation, a new setting or a medley; creating a new melody from an existing one through paraphrase and using it as the basis for a work; or basing a cumulative setting on a borrowed or paraphrased tune.9 Therefore, unlike Pound who uses quotation as evidence for verifying and validating his own views, Ives uses found material to launch his own music. Whereas collage praxis becomes conclusive in Pound’s poetry, for Ives it remains prospective, serving as the springboard for new creative visions. Similar to Ives, Johnson’s different musics also refer to earth and air. Indeed, both natural elements are located in the word “fume” that occurs in the poem’s opening stanza. The Different Musics come simultaneously across water, accumulating fume, spray, the flex of ripple. (V 84)



Ives’s influence is most prominent in the opening title poem of The Different Musics. Johnson tells Alpert:

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“Fume” denotes both smoke and watery vapor or steam. Johnson’s use of the word would suggest the latter definition, which, in the context of “different musics” traveling across water, tacitly alludes to Ives’s experience of a Sunday morning walk taken with his wife near Stockbridge that inspired the last movement of his composition, Three Places in New England, entitled “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.” “We walked in the meadows along the river,” he writes in Memos, “and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember.”10 Johnson’s “fume,” therefore, pertinently recalls this experience of “mist” and music, suggesting a similar exhalation of vapor drifting across a watery expanse. As a phenomenon of water, “fume” is also implicit in another Ives composition, the unfinished Universe Symphony, which especially fascinated Johnson. (As we will see, Johnson returns to this symphony in a number of his poems.) In this symphony, Ives aspires to “paint the creation, the mysterious beginnings of all things, known through God to man, to trace with tonal imprints the vastness, the evolution of all life, in nature of humanity from the great roots of life to the spiritual eternities, from the great inknown to the great unknown.”11 The symphony was conceived by Ives as being “a musical piece in two parts, but played at the same time—the lower parts (the basses, cellos, tubas, trombones, bassoons, etc.) working out something representing the earth, and listening to that primarily—and then the upper (strings, upper woodwind, piano, bells, etc.) reflecting the skies and the Heavens,” (emphasis added).12 In “The Different Musics,” Johnson loosely follows Ives’s schema by presenting the evolutionary course of his poem’s musics of earth and air from “the great roots of life to the spiritual eternities.” However, there are more explicit adumbrations of the Universe Symphony throughout “The Different Musics.” For example, the different musics traveling across the water in the opening stanza suggest the first movement of Ives’s Universe Symphony and its evocation of “Chaos, and the formation of the Waters,” as well as the spirit (breath) of God moving upon the face of the waters in Genesis. This evolution continues when Johnson consults Webster’s Dictionary to explicate the word “fume,” finding in its etymology the different musics of his own poem: “DUST”—“’the earthy remains of bodies once alive—// a single particle, as of earth’ ”—and “thymos” (spirit), which also suggests breath or air (V 84). As fume from the Latin fumus, Greek thymos, spirit, mind. “See




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(C.f. means ‘compare’& ‘leads to useful, interesting, or related material that is not, however, essential to an understanding of the meaning’.) (V 84) Johnson’s referral to Webster’s is an example of what Michael Davidson calls “the lexical insert”: “The poet turns to the dictionary in order to provide a gloss on a word or a phrase, the etymology being included as part of the poem.”13 Johnson’s lexical inserts also recall Duncan’s “earnest mimesis of a classroom exposition” in “Spelling, Passages 15,” and his etymological explications in “The Loom, Passages 2.”14 Discernible behind this Duncanesque rhetoric, however, are the philological appropriations that Pound innovates in The Cantos and also a suggestion of Olson’s own etymological diggings. For it is difficult not to think of Olson—the archaeologist of morning, hunting among stones in “The Kingfishers”— when Johnson writes: “I find among DUST / vapor, storm, breath, smoke” (V 84). Treating words as material objects, Johnson excavates his lexical field to find and uncover the histories of words, using the dictionary to both “authenticate meaning” and defer meaning by “deflecting the original intention onto a new process of speculation and conjecture.”15 “After writing the first lines I looked up the word ‘fume’ and found the whole poem there,” he tells Alpert (RJ 549). “Dust” and “Theism,” along with “February,” “Fury,” “Perfume,” and “Thyme” are motifs occurring throughout “The Different Musics.” These lexical inserts do, as Davidson suggests, instigate “a new process of speculation and conjecture” for the poem, but they also give the poem thematic coherence. The poem consistently refers back to these words and, ultimately, to the master trope of smoke, which assumes a significant role as the mediator of air and earth. Indeed, Johnson evokes an Ivesian “confusion” to indicate that the musics of the earth and air are not mutually exclusive but continually interacting in a rich “cacophony” (V 87). He does this by quoting from Ives’s Essays Before A Sonata: ‘An apparent confusion if lived with long enough may become orderly’. Charles Ives . . . accumulating, a humus! (V 85)



DUST, THEISM: c.f. FEBRUARY, FURY, PERFUME, THYME”.

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Johnson employs the imagery of compost, a theme especially popular with the Transcendentalists. We have already seen Johnson cite Thoreau’s words about “Decayed literature” in The Book of the Green Man (BG 83), and Emerson, in his essay “Quotation and Originality,” employs similar imagery proposing that, “The old forest is decomposed for the composition of the new forest. The old animals have given their bodies to the earth to furnish through chemistry the forming race” (E 286). Whitman also uses the image of humus and decay in “This Compost,” which, Ed Folsom suggests, self-reflexively comments on his poem’s own intertextual layerings: When Whitman entitled a poem “This Compost,” he was referring not just to the ecology of life cycles but to his very poem, which was itself a construct of words that had been commonly used in the poetic constructions of other poets but which he had now broken down and reorganized into a new structure.16 In a similar spirit Johnson amplifies Ives’s idea of confusion and order by way of the compost. This compost, however, not only breaks down and confounds its eclectic content but also reforms and renews it. In short, the compost acts as a cosmological principle that composes an idea of organic order and unity, and reiterates Ives’s concern in the Universe Symphony for “the evolution in nature and humanity.”17 In Essays Before a Sonata, Ives’s comment is made in the context of Emerson’s writing and its “imperfect coherence and lack of unity.”18 In “The Different Musics,” the quote serves to acknowledge the reconciliation that Ives’s music makes between chaos and unity, discord and concord. Discussing Ives’s capacity “to demonstrate unity beneath all manner of variety,” Rosalie Sandra Perry recalls Emerson’s confession “to Carlyle in 1838 that his paragraphs were only collections of ‘infinitely repellent particles.’ ”19 These “repellent particles,” according to Perry, are also evident in Ives’s music: The same repellent particles are evoked in “General Putnam’s Camp,” from Three Places in New England, where several military and rag-time tunes are played together in different keys, different rhythms, and different tempi accompanied by rhythmic nonmusic, representing perhaps the shuffling of the crowd. All is present at once; the flux of life and chaos is part of the music in an attempt to describe unity within chaos.20 Out of the “apparent confusion” of dissonance, an order will, for the diligent listener, reveal itself. This Ivesian notion of unity-in-diversity or unity-within-chaos—depicted by Johnson as “A choric turbulence, to which the





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world keeps time”(V 88)—finds an equivalent in the image of the compost, “the earthy remains of bodies once alive,” that Johnson describes in exquisite detail. Although the compost represents the music of the earth—in Ives’s schema, the “evolution in Nature and Humanity”—it also generates the music of the air with the “rich, dark / mold” of its humus producing aerial vapors, fumes, and the “Odors of rotted leaves” (V 85). Thus, from the compost proceed the different musics of the earth and the air. Johnson presents these simultaneously on the page in two parallel columns: each, a small voice, slightly out of tune, A cow lows,

rejoicing

& the vibrant whorl swirls!

in earth.

Sounds come to the ear,

I put my ear to the ground, & heard

transformed: pulling themselves up

the blood rush to my head

by the boot-straps: thundering where the roots as if a new critter

drummed

altogether, created

& whispered as they grew: new delicacies, new

out of the marvellous canaries tangle. of the air.

And the blood whispered new delicacies, new tangle.

This exquisite & unending cacophony, sweet roar upon roar swelling, out of the silent shell.

New extremities, new labyrinth & branching, new inextricable windings. A new foliage of sensings: sings & sings . . . (V 86–87)



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Here we have two columns and two musics. The left, presenting the music of air where intangible acoustics—“lows” and “overtones”—come to the ear “out of the marvellous canaries / of the air,” and cacophonous roars swell “out of the silent / shell.” The right, conveying the music of the earth, where small voices “slightly out of tune” rejoice “in earth” and manifest in palpable material phenomena: “roots,” “tangles,” and “foliage.” Reading this section of the “The Different Musics” the tendency is to read across the page in the usual left-to-right manner rather than down each column of text. Reading the columns this way, however, a loose sense of meaning is apparent: “A cow lows, / rejoicing,” and there are “swirls! / in earth.” Instead of being separate from one another, Johnson demonstrates how the air and earth are continually interacting and converging. The convergence of these voices “slightly out of tune” is further emphasized toward the end of the passage by the gradual overlapping of the two columns, which suggest the emergence of something new and orderly arising from the confusion and dissonance of the different musics. As these tangible “sensings” of earth morph into aerial song (“sings”), an avian collage of birdsong announces itself, “wreathing in sibilant expansions // outward” (V 87). the reiteration of a red-eyed vireo, wren & thrasher & thrush – the wood-thrush pushing its err-o-lay through the dusk – err-o-lay-ro-lay-ro – pee-wee, pee-ur-wee, pee-wee – thin scissorings of black & white warblers & whistling robins, (V 87) Although “messages of the air,” these birds also signify the medial space between earth and air by deftly traversing both elements. That this chorus signifies a liminal time, a point of transition, is suggested by the wood thrush pushing its song “through the dusk.” The birds merge into the darkness of night, “opening its arms like smokes to enfold us,” to finally metamorphose into the mysterious “DANCERS” concluding the poem. Johnson again implicitly draws on Duncan’s poetry, this time, “The Dance” from The Opening of the Field. The capitalized exclamation “THE DANCE!” reiterates the title of Duncan’s poem and Johnson’s repetitious use of the word “THE DANCERS” mimics Duncan’s similar reiterations in “The Dance” (V 87). Likewise, when Johnson writes how the dancers’ “feet touch the earth” and “struck the earth,” Duncan’s similar line is evoked: “Lovely their feet pound the green solid meadow.”21




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Further suggestions of Duncan are evident in the phrases, “THE DANCE! THE DANCING OUTWARD!” and “A spreading effulgence! / A ‘hood’ of light!” which recalls Duncan’s exclamatory tone (V 88). Johnson even picks up on Duncan’s allusions to Olson’s Maximus in “The Dance” by, in turn, evoking Olson’s “Figure of Outward” in the refrain, “OUTWARD” (V 88).22 But, again, it is Ives’s musical paraphrases that provide the model for Johnson’s allusions here. Rather than directly quote Duncan, Johnson suggests Duncan’s poem by echoing and paraphrasing some of its key tropes and images. Like the dancers in Duncan’s poem, whose “circulations sweeten the meadow” until the early hours of the morning, Johnson’s dancers dance through the night to greet the “spreading effulgence!” of dawn (V 88).23 And always the full-winged nights advance: a field of robins erect their red breasts facing east, into the rising sun, OUTWARD! FIRE IN FIRE, A DANCING FLAME, REDOUBLED LIGHT. * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * * * (V 88)

Johnson calls this grid of asterisks “a field of stars” (RJ 549). However, it is also a concrete representation of the “field of robins” whose “red breasts fac[e] east” to greet the dawn.24 If “The sun is but a morning star” as Thoreau writes, then Johnson has seventy microcosmic forms of it in this concluding image.25 Seventy robins singing, “A choric turbulence, to which the worlds keep time” (V 88); their red breasts reflecting back the “spreading effulgence” of the rising sun. It is “A REDOUBLED LIGHT,” ad infinitum, that heralds, as Ives writes in his notes for the Universe Symphony, “the rise of all to the spiritual.”



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Although Ives’s collage strategies resemble the modernist art and literature of its time, it also extends and enhances a number of the principles underpinning Transcendentalism. Guy Davenport stresses this connection when he suggests that Ives “was staging, almost alone, a transcendental movement in music paralleling the same movement in literature.”26 According to Burkholder, there are “two meanings of the term Transcendentalism” applicable to Ives: [O]n the one hand it represents a literary tradition, limited in Ives’ experience to virtually only two writers, Emerson and Thoreau; on the other it signifies a set of beliefs, centering on the ideas of the divine presence in nature and humankind and immediate access to the divine through intuition, simplified in Ives’ view to the idea of humanity’s innate goodness.27 It is also the American grain of Ives’s music, particularly its references to New England and its democratic “Yankee” fervor, that indicates, in particular, the influence of Emerson’s Transcendentalism: “Emerson,” as Burkholder notes, “provided a philosophical justification for Ives’ vast eclectic approach” to music.28 Although, as Burkholder stresses, Transcendentalism should be seen as “the capstone of Ives’ philosophy, not its foundation,” this Emersonian eclecticism also contributes considerably to the vernacular nature of Ives’s American music and the ambivalent relation it maintains with European classical music.29 At the heart of Ives’s music is Emerson’s principle of self-reliance, which, Paul F. Boller proposes, stresses the need for “basing one’s thoughts and deeds on resources growing naturally out of the depths of one’s own personality and not drawn from one’s peer group.”30 Donald Pease defines selfreliance as the desire “to be independent of a majority holding the same opinion,” and a “recovery of a free inner existence from the claims of majority opinion.”31 This majority opinion encompasses numerous spheres and activities from institutional law and religion to the oppressive shadows cast by European culture on the American nation. Emerson presses this latter point in “The American Scholar” when he proclaims: Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. (N 83–84)



Ives and Self-Reliance

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American self-reliance, however, is not simply a rejection of European inheritance; neither is it the expression of ignorant, provincial American pride. Rather, Emerson’s self-reliance stresses a pragmatically eclectic and cosmopolitan use of the past. As Lawrence Buell notes, although Emerson’s subject matter and loyalties are often local, his “eclectic heterodoxy”—the voices that he employs to articulate and amplify his thoughts—are far more “cosmopolitan” than is often given credit.32 Buell insists that in Emerson’s writing there is “a pertinacious insistence on the benefits of one’s own time and place versus an anxiously eclectic quest for conceptual models far afield,” that betrays “a ‘postcolonial’ condition, a mark of the hopeful anxiety of the intellectual in a new nation,” which is countered “by an independentminded ransacking of all available traditions that will not succumb to any form of traditionalism and least of all to provincialism.”33 Lessons learned from Europe are applied pragmatically to meet the needs and demands of authenticating American experience. If it is to be sincere and maintain integrity, as Emerson stresses, art and thought has to grow out of, and respond to, the local and regional. Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to us as any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also. (N 199) Ives does so by developing a vernacular idiom in his music that stems from his own experiences as “a white Anglo-Saxon old-family Protestant from the northeast, a member of a particular class and clan born and raised in a smallish city.”34 Consequently, Burkholder stresses, Ives’s vernacular musical references reflect the specific circumstances and details of his life, family, and social background. Ives used the music of white Americans, rather than that of Indians or blacks, because it was the flavour of his own people and region that he sought to capture. He used popular music, rather than genuine folk music (except for some fiddle tunes), because that was the music of small-town and urban America. In order to portray these people in music, he used the music they were familiar with, from hymns and Stephen Foster ballads to the Tin Pan Alley hits of his own time, and he attempted to reveal the power this music had for him.35



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103

This does not mean that Ives, as Eric Salzman believes, “stand[s] essentially outside the mainstream of European culture.”36 Despite invoking demotic American music, Ives’s compositions are deeply entrenched in a European tradition of classical music, “working in European genres, using European procedures, and conforming to European ideas about the nature and purpose of art music.”37 Nevertheless, Ives’s relationship with this tradition is ambivalent. Ives begins, Burkholder writes, “by imitating what has come before, proving his connections with the European Romantic tradition, and gradually asserts his individuality within and ultimately against that tradition.”38 Just as Emerson appropriates European and Eastern traditions to advance his American aspirations, Ives uses the European classical tradition to meet his own needs. Such negotiations of tradition are, however, backhanded compliments: “A characteristic of rebellion is that its results are often deepest when the rebel breaks not from the worst to the greatest, but from the great to the greater,” Ives proposes in Essays Before a Sonata, noting that there is “a natural tendency to undervalue the great in that which is being taken as a base of departure.”39 Far from readily eschewing (or accepting) the European art music tradition, Ives discriminately appropriates aspects of it in his music in conjunction with American musical idioms. Ives discusses the use of American vernacular music at length in Essays Before a Sonata: The man “born down to Babbitt’s Corners” may find a deep appeal in the simple but acute Gospel hymns of the New England “camp meetin’ ” of a generation or so ago. He finds in them—some of them—a vigor, a depth of feeling, a natural-soil, rhythm, a sincerity—emphatic but inartistic— which in spite of a vociferous sentimentality, carries nearer the “Christ of the people” than does the Te Deum of the greatest cathedral. Those tunes have, for him, a truer ring than many of those groove-made, even– measured, monotonous, non-rhymed, indoor-smelling, priest taught, academic, English or neo-English hymns (and anthems)—well written, well harmonized things, well-voice-led, well counterpointed, well corrected and well O.K’d, by well corrected Mus. Brac. R.F.O.G.’s— personified sounds, correct and inevitable to sight and hearing; in a word, those proper forms of stained-glass beauty which our over-drilled mechanisms—boy choirs—are limited to.40 The spirit, the idealism, the soul that music conveys—its integrity and substance—is as important as technical proficiencies. It is a point Ives




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stresses when he proposes that “if local color, national color, any color, is a true pigment of the universal color, it is more a divine quality, it is a part of substance in art—not of manner.”41 Ives wants an authenticity that accurately reflects and communicates the idiom of a certain place, time, and people. For him, that idiom is found in the vernacular culture and spiritual consciousness of a particular place and is reflected in its music, people, and customs. This does not mean music should assert narrow-minded provincialism. As Ives stresses, if the Yankee “can reflect the fervency of such spirit” that he experiences in the New England Gospel hymns, then “he may find there a local color that will do all the world good.”42 Ives’s sentiments and the language he uses to convey them—“a vigor, a depth of feeling, a natural-soil, rhythm, a sincerity”—recalls Emerson in “Self-Reliance”: “Speak your latent conviction and it shall have universal sense” (N 175). Experience, if it is to have “universal sense,” must first and foremost ring true at the specifics of the local. According to Ives, “whatever excellence an artist sees in life, a community, in a people, or in any valuable object or experience, if sincerely and intuitively reflected in his work—his work, and so he himself, is, in a way, a reflected part of that excellence.”43 Experience has to be rendered or reported authentically, making integrity and sincerity as important as affectation. This is something that Ives identifies in Emerson who, he believes, “is more interested in what he perceives than in his expression of it.”44 Although Ives at first may seem outside tradition and convention, he is actually operating well within it, critically unlearning and revising the values and principles he has already perfected. Guy Davenport identifies this principle as a key trait of “the real Transcendentalism” that “flows from Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman” and continues in Ives, R. Buckminster Fuller, and Johnson, who “went back to the beginning of their arts as if time did not exist, and began anew” (V 14). Davenport restates this idea in an essay on Ives, comparing him to “R. Buckminster Fuller, fellow transcendentalist and spiritual twin: their content goes back to archaic beginnings, their methods are profound inventions.”45 In both instances, Davenport emphasizes creative sincerity and integrity. However, for the likes of Ives who possesses a substantial musical education, this “emphatic but inartistic” sincerity is achieved through considerable effort and work. The implications of such a stance dovetail notably with Emerson’s desire in Nature to “enjoy an original relation to the universe” and experience one’s immediate world with fresh eyes, responding to it without the preconceptions of an imposed, or imposing, tradition.



104


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105

Following Ives’s example, Johnson adopts a similar faux-naivety in the poetry following The Different Musics. This faux-naïf stance becomes, for Johnson, an equivalent or continuation of Emerson’s self-reliance. The Transcendentalist desire to begin anew, as if from scratch, is already evident in the Adamic aspirations of The Book of the Green Man. However, Ives’s example gives Johnson a more effective way of realizing this kind of selfreliance. Speaking of Ives in his 1995 interview with Peter O’Leary, Johnson remarks: Ives is not that different from the Watts Towers. He was like me–he knew a lot about music, but he wanted to appear a naive, to get back to where you don’t know anything about art. And then you construct something. I was trying to forget about music and then start all over again. (RJ 580) Johnson expresses a similar desire to undo his learning in order to become innocent of the rules that restrict or limit one’s creative vision. It is striking that Johnson should compare Ives to the Watts Towers, the vernacular environment that the Italian bricoleur Sabato Rodia built in the Watts district of Los Angeles between 1921 and 1954. The Towers, “America’s most familiar yet most enigmatic visionary construction,” comprise three spires and a series of smaller towers, gazebo, and numerous sculptures.46 These are all constructed from an assortment of salvaged material—broken bottles, ceramics, and shells—that Rodia cemented and tessellated into bright and colorful mosaics. Comparing himself with Ives and Rodia, Johnson establishes some pertinent connections between these two disparate spheres of artistic activity. Ives not only represents both classical and avant-garde musical traditions, but also makes implicit connections with nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism. Rodia, on the other hand, invokes a whole subcategory of artistic practice commonly known as “vernacular,” “outsider,” or “folk” art, which figures prominently in Johnson’s work following The Different Musics and the transition it makes from modernist collage to faux-naïf bricolage. But in many ways, the outsider tradition of naïve vernacular art is the unwitting inheritor of Transcendentalist self-reliance. At the heart of self-reliance is a belief that intuition is the primary wisdom, “the fountain of action and thought” that cannot be instructed but only realized via the inner resources of the individual (N 187). “We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition,” Emerson proposes, “whilst all our teachings



The Naïve and Vernacular

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are tuitions” (N 187). Intuition implies a creative spontaneity and integrity, easily diminished by more self-reflexive creative practices. “Leave your theory,” Emerson advises, “as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee” (N 183). Intuition is a prominent feature of the self-taught artist who, working “innocent of rules,” unwittingly perpetuates Transcendentalism’s “ethico-spiritual case for the superiority of intuition to formal learning.”47 It is not surprising, then, that Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh should identify in folk art a “naïve” quality reflective of the artists’ lack of formal skills. Specifically this means an ignorance of artistic credos, tenets, and theories; and practically it means that this ignorance frequently results in an esthetically [sic] productive freedom of expression. The folk artist, not hampered by preconceptions that a painting must be executed on a flat two-dimensional plane, blithely sticks on objects, builds up bas-relief, or even creates free-standing “pictures” in three dimensions.48 Janis and Blesh offer “tinsel pictures, valentines, elaborate paper cut-outs [. . .], cigar bands symmetrically pasted on glass bowls and dishes, boxes, and even articles of furniture, and arrangements of Indian arrowheads glued to panels that were framed and hung like pictures” as examples of American folk art.49 Patchwork quilts, memory jugs, and constructions such as the Watts Towers can also be added to this list because all these art forms and practices display a collage aesthetic that utilizes juxtaposition and appropriation.50 And because it uses a similar collage aesthetic and adopts a similar, albeit faux-naïf stance, the “high” art of Ives’s music, as Johnson notes, also bears considerable similarity with this folk art. The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk As well as making its way into The Different Musics via Ives and Transcendentalism, naïve art, also announces itself in the sequence of poems entitled “Assorted Jungles: Rousseau,” first printed by the Auherhan Press in 1966. These poems take the paintings of the French self-taught artist Henri Rousseau as their subject and “try to use words in the naïve and exotic way Rousseau painted his jungles” (RJ 551), celebrating the imaginary jungles, beasts, and enigmatic figures populating paintings such as The Dream (1910) and The Snake Charmer (1907). These paintings also portray Orphic dimensions as “tree limb & tassle bend to other rains” (V 101), and the



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107

Is it he who has quelled the birds & who beckons each lioness, on stealthy paws, uncoils the snake & motions both elephant & flower to a glistening music? (V 104) Orpheus’s legendary charm is also evident in the title of Johnson’s slim pamphlet entitled The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk: Eccentric Translations from Two Eccentrics, published by The Jargon Society in 1969. The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk comprises Johnson’s own “eccentric translations” of the autobiographical writings of two French naïve artists: Ferdinand “Le Facteur” Cheval and Raymond Isidore. “The poems are direct translations from inscriptions on Le Palais Idéal of the ‘Facteur Cheval,’ ” Johnson tells Alpert, “or from his and Raymond Isidore’s little autobiographies, which I picked up while travelling in France” (RJ 553). Like Rodia, both men created single-handedly “out of found objects and honest cement” vernacular environments that express their visions and dreams (U 116). Jargon published this pamphlet in a limited edition of five hundred copies, which were distributed mainly to friends and patrons. Sporting marbled covers, red and blue letterpress type on orange paper, and vignettes of Cheval and Isidore by Guy Davenport—the “word-builder” to whom Johnson dedicates his poem—The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk is as every bit as “eccentric” as its subject.51 The poem was later reprinted, without the eccentricities of the Jargon edition, in the summer 1973 edition of Tutara and has subsequently been reprinted in the journal FlashPoint.52 The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk owes its inception to the time that Johnson spent in the United Kingdom. During part of their visit to the United Kingdom in 1962, Johnson and Williams rented the top two floors of a house in Hampstead belonging to the writer and artist Barbara Jones who would influence Johnson’s poetry considerably by introducing Johnson to the world of “eccentric [. . .] gardens, follies, and grottoes” (RJ 553). At the time Johnson met her, Jones had already written a book on British vernacular art, The Unsophisticated Arts (1951), and a comprehensive gazetteer, the first of its kind, entitled Follies and Grottoes (1953), which lists and describes all the eccentric architectures situated in the British Isles. Johnson claims that “it was [Jones] who first made me notice the work of naïve artists who built palaces out of found objects” and, with Williams, even accompanied



“dark piper piping out darkness,” is depicted “ ‘charming’ a moon of purest whiteness / into the sky”:

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her to a number of these sites (U 114). It therefore is not surprising that Jones’s influence is discernible in The Book of the Green Man, which refers to a “grottoesque folly” that Johnson visited with Jones and includes Follies and Grottoes in its notes (BG 67, 86). On a subsequent visit with Williams to the United Kingdom during 1965–6, Johnson traveled to France, visiting the vernacular environments of Cheval and Isidore. Built by self-taught artists, these vernacular environments manifest in concrete, stone, and found objects the dreams and visions of their “naïve” creators. Where the eccentric follies and grottoes are largely the fancies of wealthy landowners providing “both an ornament for a gentleman’s grounds and a mirror for his mind,” environments constructed by the likes of Cheval, Isidore, and Rodia tend to be built single-handedly over decades.53 These artists also tend to be socially marginalized and disenfranchised individuals. Consequently, their visions are often built using the most humble of resources such as “found objects and honest cement” (U 116). The Palais Idéal of Ferdinand “Le Facteur” Cheval, located near Hauterives in France, was already on the literary map when Johnson visited the site. Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein had made a pilgrimage there, as did many of the Surrealists, including André Breton who celebrates the Palace in his poem “Facteur Cheval” and in his book L’Amour Fou (Mad Love). What had attracted these literati were the array of fantastical statues, grottoes, and facades that Cheval had sculpted out of local rock and stone and ornamented with collected shells and fossils. While walking his more than eighteen-mile postal route, Cheval would daydream about a fairy palace, surpassing anything ever imagined: everything that the genius of a humble man could conceive (with grottoes, towers, gardens, castles, museums & sculptures), seeking to bring back all the ancient architecture of primitive times; the whole so pretty, that the image kept alive in my head during at least 10 years.54 Fifteen years later, Cheval’s fading vision was rekindled after tripping on some unusual looking tufa stone. It presented a sculpture so bizarre that it is impossible for man to imitate it: it represented all kinds of animals, all kinds of caricatures [. . .] I told myself: since nature wants to make sculpture, I myself will construct architecture.55 Out of this stone Cheval finally realized his dream, endeavoring to construct his Palace from it over the next thirty-four years.



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While in France, Johnson also visited Raymond Isidore’s La Maison Picassiette, “the house of the plate stealer,” which is situated just outside Chartres. The name refers to Isidore’s local reputation for collecting shards of glass and ceramic. In 1938, chancing upon some broken glass and ceramic, Isidore decided to use this found material to decorate the small family home he had built on a small plot of purchased land near the cemetery where he worked. This would possess him for the next thirty years as Isidore continued to adorn the exterior and interior of his house (including furniture and utensils) with intricate mosaic designs depicting flowers and picturesque scenes. Not content with simply decorating the exterior and interior of his house, Isidore proceeded to construct several tombs, thrones, and a chapel, all of which articulate his intuitive sense of spiritual reality: “My garden is a Dream, realized, the cream of the life where one sees the spirit in eternity.”56 In The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk, Johnson treats his subjects in the spirit of the “picassiette,” constructing poems from the fragments of his translations.57 Sometimes Johnson simply transplants sentences from his translation: After me, nothing dies. I made it alone. In this poem Johnson does not elaborate on Isidore’s text but simply presents two separate sentences that are taken from his translations of Isidore’s guidebook. In other poems, Johnson embellishes the translated text with his own interjections: Slowly, a man makes (a mosaic of earth and sky) his house. The parenthesized italics indicate Johnson’s own loose interpretation of the two “thrones” that Isidore built in his garden. According to Isidore “there are two thrones: one opposite the tomb, the black chair, that of the ‘sweeper’ the man of the cemetery, where I sit to see my city without leaving my house, & the throne of the spirit of heaven, of Jerusalem. I made it blue, Chartres




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in black, which is on the earth.”58 Johnson’s interjections emphasize that Isidore’s house is not only a dwelling for the body but also a habitation for its enduring creative spirit. Johnson has compared Cheval and Isidore with William Blake, claiming that “they both spent their lives constructing an edifice comparable to Blake’s homemade cosmology” (RJ 553). Johnson may have in mind Los’s declaration in Jerusalem: “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.”59 Blake created his own “System” by appropriating numerous classical, religious, and literary sources in order to construct his own edifice—his own complex system of beliefs—that asserts his conviction that, “He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God.”60 As Johnson sees it, Cheval and Isidore exercise a similar kind of resourcefulness, utilizing what already exists in order to bring their own unique cosmologies into existence. Like Blake, these naïve visionaries are compelled not to reason and compare but to create. The Spirit Walks may appear somewhat slight or insignificant compared to the poetry of Johnson’s major collections. However, The Spirit Walks is an early example of the bricolage method that Johnson uses extensively in ARK and marks a breakthrough in his poetics. As Dirk Stratton points out, it is the praxis of Cheval and Isidore, “their methods of finding and building, that truly help us understand ARK.”61 This is especially so if we note how ARK is modeled on these naïf, vernacular, architectures. Johnson claims that his visit to Cheval’s Palais Idéal, followed by a later visit to the Watts Towers, marked “a crucial turning point” for his poetics, giving him the inspiration for planning his major long poem which “is fitted together with shards of language, in a kind of cement of music” (“A Note”).62 Wor(l)ds and Songs of the Earth ARK started life around 1970, shortly after the publication of The Different Musics and The Spirit Walks, sporting the title, Wor(l)ds. Around the same time Johnson moved to San Francisco: “I felt that I’d finally made it to Emerald City, and indeed I wrote all of ARK there” (U 117). In 1978 Johnson changed the title from Wor(l)ds to ARK after Davenport voiced misgivings about the awkwardness of the title Wor(l)ds, finding it difficult and clumsy to pronounce.63 Heeding Davenport’s advice, Johnson eventually settled on ARK. It is worth stressing that the title discreetly nods to Johnson’s home state Arkansas, because Johnson initially envisioned this location as the site of his poem. Inside these covers is a model for a monument to be dedicated Bison bison bison (imagine it so carved), at its base. Located, if place could be put,



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on those shelving prairies between Ashland and Dodge City, Kansas, as a span between Big and Little Basins, centering over St. Jacob’s Well. This near legendary “bottomless” pool can be looked up in National Geographic, but as I knew it in my childhood it was a real magic place tales were told of as exciting as those from the Brothers Grimm.64 The title ARK, however, also yields other insights about the nature and preoccupations of Johnson’s poem. There is also an allusion to L. Frank Baum’s series of Oz books (beloved by Johnson) in the poem’s title, which conjures up the word “arc” and the suggestion of a rainbow; perhaps the one evoked by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. With this allusion to Oz in mind, ARK also recapitulates the poem’s emphasis on Johnson’s Kansas origins by suggesting the Ozark Mountains that traverse southeast Kansas. Furthermore, ARK also suggests a chest or receptacle, in the vein of the Ark of the Covenant and Noah’s Ark, encouraging us to see the poem (much like the humble memory jug) as the site for the collection, preservation, and display of sacred acquisitions. By the late 1970s Johnson had produced a typescript for Book One of Wor(l)ds and published some of the poems in journals. “Wor(l)ds 22, Charles Ives: Two Eyes, Two Ears,” an experimental collage-prose piece that uses Ives’s notes for the Universe Symphony, was published in Parnassus.65 In emulation of Ives’s own musical dissonance and superimpositions “Wor(l)ds 22” comprises a patchwork of voices, stitched together to articulate a synaesthesia of sight and sound. Quotes from Louis Agassiz, John Ruskin, Walt Whitman, Samuel Hearne, Isaac Newton, Thoreau, Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata and Memos, Francis Scott Key’s poem-turned-national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” and an entry in Webster’s Dictionary for “node” are spliced together to form a kind of meta-commentary on Ives’s Universe Symphony. IVES: “I started something I had in mind (THOREAU: “Who placed us with eyes between a microscopic and telescopic world?”) for some time: trying out a parallel way of listening to music suggested by looking at a view. First, with the eyes toward the sky or tops of trees (THOREAU: “The trees stand like great screens against the sky. But near, the crickets are heard in the grass, chirping from everlasting to everlasting.”) taking the earth or foreground subjectively (that is not focussing the eye on it) . . .66 The voices approximate Ives’s “uneven and interlapping counterpoint” and complex polyphonies, speaking on behalf of, or amplifying, other voices




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in the text.67 The text refocuses itself via its different voices, oscillating between microscopic and telescopic worlds of vision and the vistas of Earth and Heaven proposed by Ives in his Universe Symphony. The theme of eyes and ears in “Wor(l)ds 22” is prominent throughout Wor(l)ds, especially “Wor(l)ds 33,” the concluding poem of Wor(l)ds: Book One, which replicates in its entirety Johnson’s Songs of the Earth. Published in 1970 by Grabhorn-Hoyem, Songs of the Earth (subtitled, “twelve squarings of the circle”) is Johnson’s response to Jonathan Williams’s book, Mahler. Initially published as a limited edition in 1965 by Marlborough Fine Arts Limited, a revised and expanded edition of Mahler was later published in 1969 by Cape Goliard. Johnson believes that Mahler, which comprises a sequence of forty-four poems written in response to Gustav Mahler’s ten symphonies, is “perhaps [Williams’s] best work” (U 117). In a similar spirit to Williams, Johnson’s Songs of the Earth convey his response to Mahler’s six-part song symphony Das Lied von Erde (“The Song of the Earth”) that he composed around 1908 and based on Hans Bethge’s loose translations of Li Po, Ts’ien Ts’i, and Wang Wei’s poetry, entitled Die Chinesische Flöte (“The Chinese Flute”). According to Marjorie Perloff, the Chinese poems used for Das Lied von Erde possess a “minimalist/imagist base” that are reflected appropriately in Johnson’s twelve “minimalist concrete poems” (RJ 215). The poems that, Johnson claims, are “in the spirit of the work” loosely appropriate the six songs of Das Lied von Erde: “The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow,” “The Lonely One in Autumn,” “Youth,” “Of Beauty,” “The Drunkard in Spring,” and “The Farwell” (U 117). Evidently Johnson thought highly enough of these poems to include them in Wor(l)ds and later used some of them in ARK ’s “Foundations.” However, the initial Grabhorn-Hoyem edition was a huge disappointment for Johnson, which effectively ended his friendship with the San Francisco publisher, Andrew Hoyem: Glenn Todd set this at Dave Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press, now taken over by Andrew Hoyem as Arion Press. It was one of the most perfect collaborative experiences I’ve ever had with a printer. Handset type, which can achieve effects now unknown with computer-generated stuff, is mostly a lost art. Songs of the Earth was to be published by Hoyem, without consulting me, in a tight, hard binding with a cover, like wallpaper, of pastel balloons reminiscent of the nursery and completely opposed to the openings of my text. We quarrelled over this unfortunately, as we had been friends from my first days visiting San Francisco. (U 117)



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“If I had legal recourse I would, myself, stop you from circulating Songs,” Johnson writes in a letter to Hoyem: “I trust you will not also forget to send me the 20 copies promised. If I can’t prevent the book at least I can sit on a few of them. In twenty years they may have become ‘camp’.”68 Despite its troubled history, Songs of the Earth marks an important stage in Johnson’s bricolage poetics by building on the The Different Musics and laying the groundwork for ARK. Mahler, a European composer, might seem at odds with the Ivesian Americana of Wor(l)ds. However, the two composers display similar approaches to their music, particularly in their use of use of parody, pastiche, and musical quotation. Robert P. Morgan, in an insightful essay on Ives and Mahler, explains how both composers “shared common assumptions regarding the materials and techniques, as well as the underlying aesthetic, of musical composition” and how it “relates to the surrounding world, the types of materials that are appropriate to it, and the way these materials are to be combined and organized.”69 But where Ives represents the possibility of “different musics” simultaneously co-existing in a composition, Mahler represents “the musics of silence.” Notably, however, it is a music that Johnson traces back to one of Ives’s touchstones, Thoreau. Thoreau, as he walked year after year the Concord woods, was the first to record the musics of silence . . . These songs are listening, as poems must listen and sing simultaneously. They are a progression of hearings of Mahler’s ‘Song of the Earth’ on records, in concert and in my head.70 For a poem that places so much emphasis on listening and singing, it may come as a surprise that The Songs of the Earth should exploit the visual possibilities of typography and orthography—particularly its exaggerated tracking and kerning and use of capitalization and italics—so extensively. Even if they are “the most lyric work in all of Concrete Poetry,” as Johnson claims, his songs still rely heavily on the visual properties of language in order to “sing.” The first poem from Songs of the Earth (which Johnson later uses in ARK ’s “BEAM 24”) demonstrates the visual emphasis of these concrete “songs”: earthearthearth earthearthearth earthearthearth earthearthearth earthearthearth earthearthearth71




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Repeating the word “earth” three times in each of the poem’s six lines, Johnson discloses a series of interrelating words. Indeed, the poem reiterates (or perhaps prompts) Jonathan Williams’s observation that there are a “multitude of warming particles in the word hearth: hear, heart, ear, earth, art.” “They are,” Williams suggests, “what [the hearth] is all about.”72 There is also, according to Perloff, the word “arth [which] suggests arthography, the radiographic examination of a joint—what lies behind the surface” (RJ 218). These words rehearse longstanding themes in Johnson’s work. For example, the idea of a conspiring nature in “Emerson, on Goethe” is recalled here in the idea of the earth’s heart. If we put an ear to the earth (nature’s own hearth), Johnson implies, we can hear its heartbeat—the very source, heart, or hearth, of its conspiring breath. Indeed, we might also note how close “breath” is to permuting all these “warming particles.” The poem, however, resists being spoken aloud. It is, as Johnson proposes in his introduction to Songs of the Earth, a “strain” to recite. A strain, that is, in the sense of “strains of music or poetry,” on the one hand, but also a strain in the sense of “those words & notes which strain their limits toward the unutterable.”73 Indeed, “earthearthearth” is “unutterable.” Repeating “earth” in either quick succession or with regular pauses does not demarcate the poem’s latent words but muffles them. It is only with the eye that the other concealed words and even pertinent sentences (such as “hear the art”) can manifest. Clearly, Johnson’s music depends on the visual impression the poem makes on the eye. Only the eye, it seems, can distinguish the nuances of Johnson’s song. Thus, it is in these ambiguous straining spaces, in the conjunction of eye and ear (of semantics, visual image, and sound) established by Johnson’s Songs that “the silent musics” of Thoreau and Mahler are discernable. The mutual dependency of ear and eye in Johnson’s “silent musics” is also evident in Johnson’s spring “song”: s s s s s S

P P P P P P

r r R R R R

i i I I I I

n n N N N N

g g G G G G

be l l to l l be l l to l l be l l to l l74



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Bells “ring” discernibly throughout “S P R I N G,” and “S P R I N G,” in turn, rings vibrantly with new life as the bells toll: “to [. . .] be.” In fact, these bells carry a number of suggestions including a flower in the form of the English bluebell (also known as “ring-o’-bells”). Although this spring “song” may seem easier to pronounce than that of “earthearthearth,” to get the most from this song, ear and eye still have to cooperate. Only then is it possible to see in the block of tolling bells a visual pun with the bells tolling specifically at eleven (“ll”) o’clock. Indeed, if Johnson’s “song” is seen as his response to Mahler’s “The Drunkard in Spring,” then the bell may be signaling time at the bar. And while “ring” is clearly audible in the word “spring,” it is amplified considerably by the eye, via which “R I N G” is distinguishable as the only nonitalicized block of text in “S P R I N G.” And the italics serve to amplify the peal and resonance of the bells, as well as suggest the energy and vibrancy that “spring,” as verb and noun, connotes. Thus, the arrival of spring is presented by aural and Perloff suggests, “visual means” (RJ 219). As with all the “warming particles” in “earthearthearth,” “R I N G” and “S P R I N G” can only be sounded simultaneously as the eye’s silent music. The Foundations The “musics of silence” in Songs of the Earth are a primer of sorts for reading the later bricolage poetics of ARK. The achievement of Songs of the Earth, as Perloff maintains, is Johnson’s “insight that the semantic is only one element in poetry, that poetry is to be seen and heard rather than seen through, heard through” (RJ 225). It is an insight that Johnson puts to full use in “The Foundations,” the most visual and aurally complex book of ARK. “The Foundations” begin in “BEAM 1” with an invocation of the rising sun “pinwheeled in a sparrow’s // eye,” which establishes a principal theme: “VISION [and] seeing as the sun sees” (“BEAM 11, Finial ”). Indeed, “The Foundations” conclude in “BEAM 33” with a Kansas prairie vista full of Adamic implication: “High noon stands still as a just picked apple.” But vision is not an exclusive theme in “The Foundations.” “BEAM 1” also invokes “White Throat song” (Zonotrichia albicollis), establishing a parallel interest in music, song, and sound, which is engaged in subsequent BEAMS such as “BEAM 7”: “Sound is sea: pattern lapping pattern.” But vision and sound are not always parallel concerns. They also overlap in “The Foundations,” recalling the bat in “BEAM 7” that “uses its ears to see” (“BEAM 7”), as well as the “silent musics” of Songs of the Earth. Indeed, after considerable editing and revision, much of the poetry comprising Wor(l)ds, including some of Songs of the Earth, provide a number of the




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poems in “The Foundations.” Notably, the poems in “The Foundations” are called “BEAMS” that, suggesting both architectural structural supports and shafts of light, reiterate two of ARK’s most prominent themes. The first of ARK ’s three books, “The Foundations” was published by San Francisco’s North Point Press in 1980 as ARK: The Foundations.75 Jacket endorsements are provided by Hugh Kenner (who calls Johnson’s a “religious poetry”), R. Buckminster Fuller (who terms it “Philoverse”), and Thom Gunn, who writes: “I have always thought Ron Johnson a terrific poet: everything he has written has surprised and delighted me.” 76 Additionally, Robert Duncan provides an insightful commentary on the cosmological scope and nature of “The Foundations.” This book stirs thought and long-stored feelings of the radiant structural beauty and mystery of the universe our contemporary sciences of cosmos, of geology, of biology, physics and chemistry, have brought into the lore of what we imagine ourselves and the on-going to be. Reading Ron Johnson’s ARK—both the ark of a new covenant in poetry and the arc-en-ciel of a new promise ever before me as I read—I think and feel anew, but more, I wonder, for the consciousness he writes from not only springs from the revelation present in the creative imagination we draw from the realms of science and of poetry, but (it is the significance of the “node and gyre” the poet proposes as directive thruout) that consciousness goes forward: it “launches” thought and feeling upon the arc of an apprehension of vision beyond its own vision.77 Duncan’s “lore of what we imagine,” the “apprehension of vision beyond its own vision,” and his faith in enduring creative processes and directives of revelation—“the on-going to be” of discovery—make ARK sound similar to a Duncan poem. Notable in Duncan’s assessment, however, are the connections he makes between the imaginative quests of “contemporary sciences of cosmos, of geology, of biology, physics and chemistry” and poetry. Both realms, in their own (but not necessarily exclusive) ways, encourage a launch of thought and feeling that discloses the beauty and mystery of the universe. In being encouraged to “think and feel anew” Duncan reiterates the Adamic Transcendentalism of “The Foundations” in which esoteric notions of correspondence intersect with contemporary scientific knowledge, driving consciousness forward. Duncan’s blurb, however, does not acknowledge the way in which Johnson employs vernacular references as part of his poem’s cosmology. In other words, Duncan does not address the Ivesian Americana of “The Foundations.” This is surprising considering that Ives’s Universe Symphony, or rather, the notes Ives “left for its architecture were one of the early models for ARK ” (RJ 610). In what way, exactly, however, Johnson never elaborates. 10.1057/9780230115552 - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, Ross Hair


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Elsewhere he explains that with “Most composers you only learn their music. You do with Ives, but a lot of the music had ideas behind it, which were structural ideas. Ives I think has been a very central figure for me. I mean ARK is an Ivesian symphony. It’s got three movements” (RJ 580). But it is in terms of the poem’s Americana and patriotic zeal that Ives’s influence is most apparent in ARK. In “A Note” Johnson writes that, “certainly Charles Ives who wove patriotic anthem and church hymn into his work, like breathing, was a major influence.” Ivesian Americana is evident in “BEAM 25, A Bicentennial Hymn,” which Johnson calls his “response to Charles Ives” (U 119). The poem begins with an exhortation: “prosper / O / cell // through where the forest is thickest.” These lines suggest epigenesis, with the “O” representing a cell itself, pregnant with possibility in the form of embryonic life. Following these lines is a series of illustrations taken from Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Science, which depict the division of cells by mitosis. Read against these illustrations, the “O” in “prosper / O” visually rhymes with the series of circles that frame these images, so that the “O” itself prospers. Clearly, Johnson also puns on the name, “Prospero”: the magus in Shakespeare’s Tempest who is “master of a full poor cell.”78 Thus, Johnson combines science and magic in the opening page of his poem with the implication that natural processes of epigenesis and cell division are as remarkable as the “high charms” of Prospero’s magic.79 This confluence of cell and magic also recalls another American maverick, Harry Partch, who, in his notes for his dance-satire The Bewitched (1955), suggests that, “The first animate magic,” occurred “when the first single cell moved itself in such autoerotic agitation.”80 The wonder that Prospero’s magic elicits assumes a more everyday form in the guise of a fireworks display. Taking a second look at Asimov’s illustrations, it is possible to see a fireworks display taking place in the mitosis. The cells, Joel Bettridge notes, “have antenna-like shoots coming out of them that look like fireworks exploding” (RJ 355). These fireworks seem to evoke Memorial Day commemorations and the dramatic light and sound shows associated with the occasion. However, the actual subject of these celebrations is the sun and the “Golden” Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos). Aquila chrysaetos, I have seen Him in the watchfires full sail in the Ruffles & Flourishes sifting out a glory loosed lightning to answer arching on A FIREWORKS MUSIC 10.1057/9780230115552 - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, Ross Hair



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Johnson presents a “twentyonegunson&lumieresalutetothesun” and the majestic bird—the Golden Eagle—that symbolizes it. Thus, the pomp and ceremony of American patriotic commemorations, a staple of many of Ives’s compositions, are used to celebrate America’s natural wonders: the sun and the Golden Eagle. Likewise, Julia Ward Home’s lyrics for the Battle Hymn of the Republic are used to depict the eagle—“I have seen Him in the watchfires”—sailing, soaring, and “arching” close to the sun. The “Ruffles & Flourishes” of ceremonial fanfare are also transformed into the ruffle and flourishing plumage of the eagle. And later in the same poem, punning on the name of two of the nation’s most celebrated Presidents—“(link on washing tone)”—Johnson associates the ideals and aspirations of these men with an egalitarianism that the sun itself represents. Indeed, Lincoln and Washington, Johnson implies, exemplify the dicta that, “VISION is seeing as the sun sees” (“BEAM 11, Finial”). Elsewhere in ARK, the sun is referred to as “This, gold ball / (some numen common to all men) / windmill,” which suggests that this symbol of divinity is innate in, or illuminates, every person regardless of creed, color, or class (“ARK 35, Spire Called Arm of the Moon”). Thus, the America that Johnson celebrates and commemorates is, as Eric Selinger suggests, “modeled on nature” (RJ 331) and endowed with a natural beauty and majesty that assumes cosmological proportions. Indeed, the sun is the source of all life in “BEAM 25” and makes the poem’s cells “prosper” as form and energy. For, as Johnson writes in “BEAM 4”: “The last nerve cells to develop are those farthest from light.” And if “VISION is seeing as the sun sees,” then all “perception is a slingshot drawn back to first plasm” (“BEAM 12”). The Americana in “BEAM 25” mixes the American pomp and bluster that Ives weaves into his music (marching bands, martial music, patriotic and protestant hymns, rowdy college tunes) with the visionary patriotism that characterizes much American vernacular art. According to Beardsley: Visionary artists are typically quite patriotic but it is the idea of America— the land of freedom and opportunity—to which they are loyal, not always the reality. In fact, they often explicitly or implicitly criticise social and political norms (emphasis added).81 Erika Dross reaffirms Beardsley’s claims, proposing that the “creative difference” of vernacular art “challenges the presence and authority, the predictability of the nation’s cultural mainstream. Yet it also enlivens it, reshaping and regenerating—reinventing—American culture, and America itself.”82 Like the vernacular artists, Johnson reinvents America by presenting “the palpable stuff of the nation’s soul”—patriotic hymns, ceremonies,



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rituals, and popular images or references—giving vernacular expression to what is both a socially egalitarian and cosmological verity.83

“The Foundations” pertinently recall the Tower Carl Jung built in Bollingen between 1923 and 1955. Considering the prominence of Jung in “The Foundations”—quotes from Psychology and Alchemy are used in “BEAM 16, The Voices,” for example, and Man and His Symbols in “BEAM 26” and “BEAM 27”—this comparison seems apt. Recalling Cheval and Isidore’ similar anecdotes, Jung writes: I built the house in sections, always following the concrete needs of the moment. It might also be said that I built it in a kind of dream. Only afterwards did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.84 As his “place of spiritual concentration,” the Tower afforded Jung a perspective for reflecting on his own interconnectedness with things, both material and immaterial.85 At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world’s and the psyche’s hinterland.86 Jung’s reflections not only recall the isomorphic tenets of Transcendentalism but also conflate them with the visionary, cosmological implications of vernacular environments. Jung’s Tower is imbued with a cosmological significance similar to that of “The Foundations,” throughout which Johnson, like Thoreau and Emerson, draws attention to the correspondences and patterns of resemblance occurring between the individual and the universe. Jung pertinently prompts consideration of how similar a vernacular artist such as Rodia is to Thoreau in Walden. After all, Thoreau, with the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the bricoleur, constructs his own dwellings out of a reclaimed shanty and trees from Walden’s own woods. And Stanley Cavell, reflecting on the pun of “Walden” and “Walled In,” believes that Thoreau constructs Walden as an enclosed space and “an image of Paradise.”87 It is



Conditions of the Present

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The surrounding wall is high enough to dismiss the outer world from one’s consciousness; the array of disparate parts takes on an extraordinary coherence and forms a harmonious space set apart, a closed garden which nourishes the sense of wonderment and refuses the ordinariness of its suburban context.88 Both Thoreau and Rodia establish a space that, in being set apart from the world, allows them to see and respond to it all the more intensely. Both Walden and the Watts Towers become closed gardens that not only nourish the sense of wonderment, as Cardinal writes, but also the senses themselves, making “SENSE sings,” as Johnson writes in “BEAM 8.” This is a point that Thoreau stresses toward the end of Walden as he reflects on his two-year “experiment” in self-reliance: I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the licence of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.89 Thoreau’s humble edifice has given him perspective and insight on how to “earn life,” as Cavell phrases it.90 “All and only true building is edifying,” Cavell writes: “All and only edifying actions are fit for human habitation. Otherwise they do not earn life.”91 Thoreau and Emerson propose that one earns life by simplifying it and realizing one’s latent convictions. “Act singly,” Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance,” “and what you have already done singly will justify you”: Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you. Greatness appeals to the future. (N 184)



an idea that resonates poignantly with Roger Cardinal’s observations of the Watts Towers and their enclosure walls:

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Ives, Cheval, Isidore, Rodia, Emerson, and Thoreau have all appealed to the future by heeding what Cavell calls “the conditions of our present,” and Emerson, in “The American Scholar,” “the near, the low, the common” (N 101).92 To varying extents, all of these figures have founded their actions on vernacular expressions—on the demotic, the colloquial, the embarrassing, the worthless, the humble, even the provincial—which nevertheless disclose “new, universal, and more liberal laws.” In appealing to the future, these artists and writers have looked back and, like Olson’s Maximus, “have had to learn the simplest things / last” and start from scratch.93 After all, as Johnson stresses in The American Table, “Anyone can make complex things, but to make the simplest ones fine is the mark of the truly expert.”94







Orphic Apocrypha: Radi os and the Found Text

One cannot reduce a text without diminishing it or, more precisely, without subtracting from it some part or parts. The simplest, but also the most brutal and the most destructive to its structure and meaning, consists then of suppression pure and simple, or excision, with no other form of intervention. The assault does not inevitably include a diminution of value; it is possible to “improve” a work by surgically removing from it some useless and therefore noxious part. —Gérard Genette1 “A dazzling light . . . aither . . . Eros . . . Night” . . . the words are just sufficiently broken to make other restorations possible . . . —W. K. C. Guthrie on a fragment from Euripides2

B

etween the publication of The Different Musics in 1969 and ARK: The Foundations in 1980, Johnson wrote Radi os, his fifth major book of poetry, which Sand Dollar Press published in 1977. “I titled it RADI OS,” Johnson writes in “Up Till Now,” “to show from the first the method of construction by extracting letters from Milton’s title” (U 118). Erasing six of the twelve letters from the title Paradise Lost and preserving the original spacing, Johnson finds the title of his own poem: “radi os.” Johnson applies this method of “inspired pruning,” as William Harmon describes it, to the first four Books of Paradise Lost, erasing the bulk of Milton’s text in the process.3



CHAPTER 5

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The poem’s beginnings date back to 1973 when Johnson temporarily relocated to Seattle to teach at the University of Washington under the auspices of the Roethke Chair for Poetry. “I had the Roethke Chair at the University of Seattle and I was interrupted in writing Wor(l)ds by teaching and I needed something to fiddle with,” Johnson tells Barry Alpert in 1974 (RJ 556). This interruption provided Johnson the opportunity for taking his collage poetics in a new direction. Out of the need for “something to fiddle with” emerged Johnson’s most audacious project: a rewriting of John Milton’s Paradise Lost by excising or omitting the majority of the poem’s words. “I just said very blithely that, I think I’ll rewrite Paradise Lost, without realizing what I was getting into,” Johnson tells Alpert: “By the time I got to the third book, I realized that it was very serious and that I was saying something which was central to my whole work” (RJ 556). Radi os plays a central role in the development of Johnson’s collage poetics, representing another stage in the bricolage praxis Johnson fully realizes in ARK. In The Different Musics we have seen Johnson strategically distancing himself from the high modernist collage model of Pound by turning his attention to the music and ideas of Charles Ives. The Americana of Ives’s music and his maverick stance make Ives something of a faux-naïf artist for Johnson, whose collage techniques offer an alternative to Pound. Via Ives, Johnson begins to hone the bricolage poetics later implemented in ARK to realize his poem “without history.” Radi os marks another important stage in the development of these methods and is the first instance of Johnson attempting to strip his source material of historical references. Thus, Radi os makes no allusion to the rebel angel Satan, “Hurl’d headlong flaming from the ethereal sky / With hideous ruin and combustion down / To Bottomless perdition.”4 Neither does Johnson moralize about the “cause” that “Moved our grandparents in that happy state / Favour’d of Heaven so highly, to fall off / From their Creator, and transgress his will.”5 There is also no mention in Radi os’s opening passage of “man’s first disobedience” or “the fruit / of that forbidden tree” from which he ate.6 O tree into the World, Man the chosen Rose out of Chaos: song, (R 3)



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The syntactic and grammatical ambiguity of this passage encourages a variety of interpretations. “Rose” and “tree,” for example, can be read as both verbs and nouns. Thus, Man is now the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil—not the naïve consumer of its fruit—rising and branching into the World as song. Johnson’s re-writing of Milton is not “bound down by theology” but, in the tradition of Elisabeth Sewell’s postlogic, finds in Paradise Lost his own Orphic poem that is concerned with cosmogenesis and the interactions of Universe, Nature, and Mind (OV 300). By taking Paradise Lost as his source text, Johnson has chosen one of Sewell’s touchstones of Orphic postlogic, which also holds particular importance for the Romantics. According to Sewell, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley saw in the author of Paradise Lost “a free spirit inquiring into the nature and status of the human spirit in the universe, natural and supernatural, writing an epic upon Genesis” (OV 300) and reinterpreted the poem as “a genetic inquiry into the human mind” (OV 301). “To turn to the exploration of the mind,” Sewell stresses, “is not to renounce epic but reinterpret it” (OV 306), which entails “the drawing-out of latent possibilities” in the poem (OV 304). Taking The Prelude as her example, Sewell explains how Wordsworth “means to take on where Milton left off, on a task as cosmic in scope and even more difficult”: When one thinks of the grandeur of Milton’s work and of his stature, this becomes audacious indeed; but we must confront the audacity. Wordsworth is claiming the direct succession; not so much, as it has been called, a “by-passing” of the thunderous and angel-beclouded Jehovah of Milton’s theology as a carrying forward, in new and yet related terms, of the selfsame task, the explanation of the universe, the Baconian work of the Interpreter. (OV 297) Sewell could as well be writing about Radi os. For, Johnson’s audacious reinterpretation of Milton presents his own cosmological vision. But Johnson’s own claim to Miltonic succession is mediated predominantly by Blake who, Dustin Griffin argues, “represents in the most visible way the powerful impact Milton made on the Romantic imagination.” 7 Particularly Blake’s visual art, which, Griffin notes, includes “some ninety illustrations to Comus, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, the Nativity Ode, two sets of watercolours illustrating Paradise Lost, and a set of designs for Paradise Regained.”8 Crucially, as Griffin stresses, “Blake’s work does not simply illustrate Milton: it also interprets it.”9



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Radi os, Johnson claims, “is the book Blake gave me (as Milton entered Blake’s left foot—the first foot, that is, to exit Eden), his eyes wide open through my hand” (R ix). Johnson “means to take on” where Blake, in Milton, left off. Indeed, Milton who “in the Zenith as a falling star” descends into Blake’s foot in Milton, at one point, appears in Radi os: “Through them I mean to pass,” Johnson writes, “like a comet burned, / In the arctic sky” (R 38).10 What Blake (via Milton) gives Johnson is a cosmology and the means by which to reveal it via the medium of Paradise Lost. In his interview with Alpert, Johnson calls Radi os “a cosmology of the mind and of a sort of Blakean exploration of the imagination”: Wor(l)ds is a structure of the universe and mind, and when I got into the Paradise Lost which when marked out is PARADISE LOST, I realized that of course Blake had done somewhat the same with Milton: Milton’s spirit entered him at one point and wrote Blake’s Milton, Blake claimed. So I went back to find out enough about Blake to be able to read his Milton and find out what he said. If we investigate the mind as physicists the outer world, Blake perhaps told us more about what goes on inside there and charted it better than even someone like Carl Jung. I found that Blake, instead of being that crazy mystic we were all told about, was saying exact truths—in a curious form sometimes, but exact truths. So in that book suddenly what happened was that I was taken over by Blake, but with my vision of the physical universe and being able to try to figure it out how we order the universe now. Blake couldn’t even look at Newton. I felt to be able to do this I would have to be a Blake who could also look at what we know of modern cosmology. (RJ 556) Johnson updates Blake, bringing his cosmology into the twentieth century via contemporary physics and cosmology. This is evident in the way Johnson acknowledges Robert Duncan for “his encouragement through my solitary quest in the cloud chamber—that place, he assured me, ‘The Authors Are in Eternity’ ” (R ix). Alluding to Duncan’s “Variations on Two Dicta by William Blake,” included in his 1964 collection, Roots and Branches—the title of which, incidentally, is especially apt for Radi os’s theme of Man as Tree—Johnson reiterates Duncan’s Romantic affiliations. Although sounding like a phrase from Blake, the “cloud chamber” that Johnson mentions actually refers to the apparatus used in physics for detecting particles of ionizing radiation. Thus, Johnson may be punning on Duncan’s lines in “The Authors Are in Eternity”—“Our eyes reflect / prospects of the whole radiance” (emphasis added)—or on the title of Radi os itself.11 Either way, a contemporary scientific reference is introduced into an otherwise Romantic



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context, indicating the way these two different subjects interact throughout the poem. To get a proper sense of the cosmology of Radi os, it is necessary to consider how Johnson reinterprets Paradise Lost—itself a complex cento of sorts due to the numerous sources Milton draws upon—by stripping back its layers.12 Again, Blake is pivotal in Johnson’s appropriation of Milton, providing a prototype for the poem’s bricolage. For Nicholas Lawrence, Blake’s illuminated books “remain perhaps the most important predecessors for Radi os” (RJ 287). Lawrence reiterates Eric Selinger’s claim that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is “Johnson’s proof text,” because it describes Blake’s “infernal method, by corrosives,” of printing, “which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.”13 This allusion to Blake’s method of relief etching—applying acids to metal plates—draw pertinent parallels with Johnson’s deletions of history and theology in Radi os, as Steve McCaffery notes: Radi os, as Blake’s gift to Johnson, is the product of a corrosive poetics, a relief composition transposing Blake’s graphic method into typographic textuality, burning away large areas of the surface text with the aquafortis of Johnson’s imagination.14 With regard to Milton, Blake wants to reveal the infinite qualities— the imaginal and prophetic properties—of the poet and his work. Milton is a particularly good example of Blake’s revisioning of the Puritan poet, which, Stephen C. Behrendt explains, presents “the imaginative resurrection of John Milton as performed and recorded by Blake,” as well as “a discussion of Milton’s failure during his lifetime to cast off entirely the restrictive garments of Puritan orthodoxy.”15 Northrop Frye also notes Blake’s attempt “to do for Milton what the prophets and Jesus did for Moses: isolate what is poetic and imaginative, and annihilate what is legal and historical.”16 Frye may have Blake’s epigraph to Milton in mind—“Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets”—which is itself an allusion to Milton’s political tract the Areopagitica (1644), in which Milton calls for the liberty of unlicensed printing.17 This, Milton argues, has prophetic implications: “For now the time seems come, wherein Moses, the great prophet, may sit in heaven rejoicing to see that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when [. . .] all the Lord’s people are become prophets.”18 Thus, it is Moses as prophet, not lawgiver, who interests Blake, just as it is Milton the poet– prophet rather than the orthodox Puritan that concerns Blake's poetry. For a poem so heavily steeped in theology, scripture, and morality as Milton’s, Johnson’s deracination of Paradise Lost is not a light undertaking.



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As Lawrence notes, Johnson “seeks to withdraw from the determinations of history” in Radi os by “configur[ing] a series of images made of words that stand apart from the teleological narrative driving Milton’s adventurous song” (RJ 286). According to Logan Esdale, “Johnson frequently destabilizes the epic poet’s language” so that words “no longer [. . .] require footnotes” (RJ 271), and “the poem eliminates not only the sense of Milton’s range of sources but [also] the epic’s large cast of speaking characters” (RJ 253). Davenport even suggested that Johnson remain discrete about Radi os’s provenance. THE IMPORTANT THING cher Ronald IS: don’t say anywhere that RADI OS is so many apertures let into Milton. Reason One: your structure will be completely free of its quarry. Reason Two: your critics will be academics, whose brains are of Danish Blue Cheese, pubic hair from the drain, chicken shit, and mayonnaise left in the August sun, and will have a flibbertigibbet fit at the very idea . . . let secrets be secret. (Zuk tells no one when his poems are lifted with platinum tweezers from Mallarmé) What you’re doing is absolutely brilliant. But I feel that the artist ought to keep his mouth shut about his own work (practically every public reading cum jabber “about” the poems is the extraordinary metaphysical feat of a poet preventing himself from being heard). So do it, and Mum.19 Fortunately, Johnson did not keep “Mum” about Milton. For, one of the most pertinent aspects of Radi os is to know that we are reading an appropriation of Paradise Lost. This adds considerably to the implications that the poem holds for Johnson’s ongoing negotiations of Romanticism and Modernism, and also for the way we interpret Johnson’s cosmology. In “Up Till Now,” Johnson suggests that Radi os “is perhaps my most loved work for people open it expecting a deconstruction and find an arching continuity” (U 118). One way this “arching continuity” operates is the



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manner in which the poem taps into a strong Romantic tradition of reading Milton, while also advancing a modernist collage praxis. As McCaffery proposes, Radi os “reconnects with the radical Romanticism of William Blake,” while confirming “the characteristically modern praxis of fragmentary collage techniques evident in Pound’s Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste Land.”20 But Romanticism and modernism (and science) are not exclusive terms in Radi os. Johnson makes very tangible connections between Romanticism and modernist collage, particularly in the Orphic tradition of reinterpreting Paradise Lost. For example, what Thomas A. Volger describes as Blake’s “complex act of un/renaming” Paradise Lost in Milton, which is achieved via “titular onomastics” and “a breaking of the experientially syntagmatic structure of the signifying chain of language,” is repeated in Radi os, but with methods deriving from twentieth-century forms of appropriation and found poetry.21 Indeed, Radi os is a “found poem” in the sense that Johnson uses a pre-existing text. But it is also a found text because Johnson finds his poem—like Blake and Wordsworth—within Milton’s. Found Texts Radi os is a compelling example of how to use a pre-existing text and make it say something new. To take one text and erase the bulk of its words may at first seem a significant departure from the diffuse borrowings of Johnson’s earlier work. Despite the inventive ways Johnson uses quoted material in his earlier poetry, it is never divorced as radically from its original context or effaced so extensively as Milton’s poem is in Radi os. For example, the use of Gilbert White in The Book of the Green Man is readily apparent for the context of a poem that seeks to convey a vision of the British landscape. Clearly, Johnson wants us to make the connections between his selections of texts so that we can form an ideogram of the poem’s main subject. Nevertheless, as Dirk Stratton explains, Johnson’s quoting methods in Radi os are essentially the same as this earlier work: Pulling a quotation from one text and putting it in another requires, in effect, the elimination, the crossing out, of all the words in the first text that surrounded the quotation. (And often, words outside the quotation are crossed out with ellipses.) The difference, then, between this standard, accepted practice of text-carving and Johnson’s, is that Johnson doesn’t move his borrowings from Milton to another text, nor does he fill in the white space with his own words.22



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Rhetorically your Milton is a cento: a poem written with another poet’s phrases. Byzantium did a lot of this: making poems out of whole lines of Homer and Virgil. I prefer to think of it as a sustained quotation from a single source.23 Davenport may be thinking of the Empress Eudoxia who wrote the history of Christ in verses from Homer, or of Proba Falconia who, in her Cento virgilianus, uses Virgil for the same purpose. In his book Literary Frivolities: Fancies, Follies, and Frolics, William T. Dobson refers to Falcona in his chapter, “Centoes or Mosaics.” According to Dobson: “A cento is properly a piece of patchwork and hence the term has been applied to a poem composed of selected verses or passages from an author, or from different authors, strung together in such a way as to present an entirely new reading.”24 Radi os clearly follows in this tradition of “patchwork” composition but, as Esdale stresses, “Radi os is not a collage of quotation that testifies to extensive reading; instead it is the result of intensive reading” (RJ 253). As a “sustained quotation” resulting from “intensive reading,” Radi os contrasts with Pound’s collage model. Not only does the Poundian mode use an extensive range of quoted material, it also emphasizes the material’s provenance and carries considerable pedagogic implications. By contrast, Radi os does not encourage the reader to visit the library or follow a trail of references. We may feel inclined to read Johnson’s poem against Milton’s original, but this does not necessarily enhance our understanding of the poem. As a collage poem that testifies to “sustained” and “intensive reading,” emphasis falls on what Johnson chooses to leave on the page and how we read it. Reading becomes, as Genette proposes, “a choice of attention”: “To read means to choose, for better or for worse, and to choose means to leave out.”25 Both Wordsworth and Blake exercise such choice in their reinterpretations of Paradise Lost, just as Johnson does in Radi os. Johnson’s reinterpretation of Milton draws considerably on twentieth-century forms of collage praxis and intertextuality, which, as we have seen, owe a considerable debt to Pound. However, “on the strength of a common technique” that he identifies as bricolage, Steve McCaffery proposes an “alternative line of descent” for Johnson, linking him with “Tzara, MacLow (Dada and neo-Dada chance compositions in general), Kaprow and Happenings, Found and Bern Porter, Schwitters’ ‘Merz’ etc.”26 “As a progenitor of what would later be known as chance composition, found-poetry & -art (vide his ‘ready-mades,’ etc.), intermedia and conceptual art,” Marcel Duchamp is a



Davenport makes a similar point, calling Radi os “a sustained quotation from a single source”:

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key figure in this tradition.27 As well as his ready-mades such as Fountain (1917), Duchamp (who was associated with Apollinaire’s Orphism) also produced a number of literary ready-mades that pre-figure the principles underscoring Radi os and other examples of twentieth-century found poetry. For example, the poem “Men Before the Mirror,” an “apocryphal [. . .] literary ready-made,” was “Composed by a German girlfriend of Man Ray’s in her native tongue, then translated into English, [and] finally signed by Duchamp qua Rrose Sélavy.”28 And the censorings in Duchamp’s poem “SURcenSURE” bear a certain resemblance to Radi os’s excisions: I wish to state in the first place that ....................................... ....................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . that he is the first in the world, and notably superior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We approve beforehand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . which he commands . . . . . . . . .29 Relinquishing claim to authorship, Duchamp explains that this poem is a “Translation from French in catalogue, Art of the Century (1942), by Peggy Guggenheim.”30 The importance of these literary ready-mades, just like their plastic counterparts such as Fountain, lies in the emphasis they place on context and choice. This is particularly evident in an anonymous article defending Fountain in the 1917 edition of Duchamp’s journal The Blind Man (which features favorite poets of Johnson’s, Mina Loy and Bob Brown): Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.31 As well as recalling Genette’s comments about reading as a process of omission, this defence of Fountain is a reminder that quotation, in its broadest sense, is essentially a matter of selection. Quoting is an active process of choosing one material over another and deciding the new context in which to exhibit or use it, be it gallery, literary text, mosaic, or assemblage. But as much as new points of view create new thoughts for the object, new thoughts also arise when material is used or manipulated in new, unexpected contexts. This is evident in two influences that Johnson claims were



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important for Radi os: the British artist Tom Phillips and the American composer Lukas Foss. Both make innovative use of the found text, making strong links with the “alternative line of descent” proposed by McCaffery. Recollecting the provenance of Radi os, Johnson tells Alpert that he had “been thinking for a time about people like Tom Phillips doing lines through texts as an art object” (RJ 556). The “art object” Johnson refers to is Phillips’s book, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, which, now in its fourth edition, Phillips has yet to conclude. Just as Radi os started out as “something to fiddle with,” A Humument, “started out as idle play at the fringe of [Phillips’s] work and preoccupations” before becoming a major addition to his work.32 Johnson had met Phillips during one of his visits to the United Kingdom with Williams in the mid-1960s, around the same time that Phillips began A Humument.33 Reading about the “cut-up” techniques in William Burroughs’s 1965 Paris Review interview, Phillips decided to do something similar. Initially Phillips made his “own variant (the columnedge poem) from copies of the New Statesman,” before deciding to “push those ideas into a more ambitious service.”34 A chance discovery of W. H. Mallock’s Victorian novel, A Human Document—the first “coherent” book he found for threepence—gave him the necessary text.35 When he began A Humument in late 1966, Phillips “merely scored unwanted words with pen and ink,” but quickly realized other ways “of making a better unity of word and image.”36 This more comprehensive approach called for a widening of the techniques to be used and of the range of visual imagery. Thus painting (in water colour or gouache) became the basic technique, with some pages still executed in pen and ink only, some involving typing and some using collaged fragments from other parts of the book (since a rule had grown up that no extraneous material should be imported into the work.) In some pages I have incorporated elements of their printed predecessors.37 New narratives emerge from Mallock’s text when collaged and painted over. “Its vocabulary is rich and lush,” Phillips writes, “and its range of reference and allusion large. I have so far extracted from it over one thousand texts, and yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover.”38 For example, Phillips manipulates Mallock’s introduction on the first page of A Humument by painting over the majority of the original text, leaving a series of isolated words connected by what Phillips calls “ ‘rivers’ in the type of the original.” Linked together thus, the text reads: “The following / sing / I / a book. a book of / art // of // mind / and art / that / which // he / hid / reveal I.”39



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Johnson’s method in Radi os is similar to Phillips’s. By blotting out the bulk of Milton’s text—by erasure rather than painting over the text or scoring it out with pen and ink—Radi os also becomes a book of art and mind. But it is “By act of grace, // and void” (R 71) that Johnson’s poem is both hidden and revealed by Milton’s. And whereas Johnson is keen to stress that Radi os is not a “deconstruction,” but an “arching continuity”—not only between himself and Milton but a whole array of kindred Orphic minds— Phillips sees his book as exemplifying the “need to ‘do’ structuralism [. . .] to be of it rather than on it.” At its lowest, it is a reasonable form of bricolage, and at its highest it is perhaps a massive déconstruction job taking the form of an unwitting collaboration between two ill-suited people seventy-five years apart. It is the solution for this artist of the problem of wishing to write poetry while not in the real sense of the word being a poet . . . he gets there by standing on someone else’s shoulders.40 There is a major difference in the way Phillips and Johnson esteem bricolage. Whereas for Phillips bricolage represents the “lowest” form of collage, in Radi os bricolage provides Johnson the means for finding his Orphic poem within Milton’s epic. The other influence Johnson claims for Radi os is Lukas Foss’s Baroque Variations, which a friend played for Johnson at a party in Washington. It was the first movement of Foss’s piece that caught Johnson’s attention. Foss’s method in Baroque Variations, Johnson explains, is to “cut holes” in a Handel Larghetto (from Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, No. 12), a Scarlatti sonata, and a Bach prelude: Groups of instruments play the Larghetto but keep submerging into inaudibility (rather than pausing). Handel’s notes are always present but often inaudible. The inaudible moments leave holes in Handel’s music (I composed the holes). (R ix) Foss’s method is, to quote Genette, a matter of “suppression” or “excision,” with his “inaudible” holes improving Handel’s score. John Cage has been an important influence for both Phillips and Foss. Phillips has used chance procedures in A Humument, and Foss, according to Philip Clark, “fell under the spell of John Cage and cultivated an interest in indeterminacy and electronics.”41 The recording of Baroque Variations that Johnson heard in Washington would have probably been the LP released by Nonesuch in 1968, which also includes Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano



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and Orchestra. Although Johnson and Cage share some mutual interests in Thoreau, Satie, and Ives, and have mutual friends in R. Buckminster Fuller and Lou Harrison, as well as that they both utilize collage aesthetics, Cage is not actually a direct influence for Johnson. “Let’s face it,” Johnson writes in a letter to Jonathan Williams, “John Cage is a bore—we need more than our ears. I want to begin at The Sun Treader again.”42 Nevertheless, despite his allegiance with older American mavericks such as Ruggles and Ives, Johnson is aware of the indirect influence of Cage on his work: “I’ve always felt Ives to be a more interesting person to learn from, but Cage had many good ideas so he influenced a lot of people” (RJ 549). Clearly, this includes a number of the people that Johnson, in turn, was influenced by. But rather than this tradition with its links to Duchamp, Johnson’s own affinities lie more immediately with the poetry associated with Jargon in the early 1970s. Although Johnson and Williams parted company in 1968, Williams’s celebration of the vernacular cultures and folk art of Appalachia in Blues & Roots / Rue & Bluets: A Garland for the Appalachians, no doubt gave Johnson suggestions for pursing his own regional Americana in ARK. Williams uses found material for many of his poems in Blues & Roots, and evokes Ives as a model “for Bringing Everything Back Alive” and making something new with the acquisitions.43 Williams also makes use of found texts in an earlier series of poems entitled, “Excavations From the Case-Histories of Havelock Ellis, With a Final Funerary Ode for Charles Olson” included in The Loco Logodaedalist in Situ (1971). Using the 1926 edition of Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Williams places “a rectangular cutout laid over a section of prose text” in order to “focus [his] response”: The cutout used for Excavations was about an inch and a half wide and two inches deep. It was positioned, variously rotated, etc., over various sections until material began to re-shape itself. The margins and the spaces become those left when the dross is thrown out. What I was looking for were the fire-points, the garnet crystals free of their matrix.44 “Focus” and “attention” are key to these excavations: The poet’s Muse, in the present instance, has not been stifled by the drab, matter-of-fact overlay of Ellis’s prose. All that you could want is there—if you dig at it with perfected attention used to make any made poem. The “method” is a tool like any number of others and makes no claim to the Presidency.45



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I remember that erection the first of many accomplished by emission46 However laconic, each poem appears on a single page, reminding the reader of Ellis’s original text. The lines from “History VIII,” for example, occur approximately halfway down the page. The preservation of Ellis’s original spacing and margins after Williams has “mined” the buried “garnet crystals” from its dross is something that Johnson adopts in Radi os.47 Whereas Williams’s poems largely retain the prosaic syntax and grammar of Ellis’s prose, Radi os’s excisions result in a more syntactically and grammatically indeterminate text. In this respect, Radi os more closely resembles Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark’s “excavations,” which Williams acknowledges as influencing his Ellis excavations.48 Clark’s Some Particulars, published by Jargon in 1971, comprises a series of found poems that he calls “excavations.” In a letter to Williams, Clark explains his method: i suppose really it dates back several years right through my involvement with the short poem, the attempt to find those surprises in language. years of working in a short space via haiku wc williams creeley concrete etc. but trouble i always found with such a small tight space was how to distance it from one’s own mind, the language became more and more self referant [sic] and “obscure” in the worst sense. so for a couple of years i’ve been making poems using texts which were outside my head and treating them in different ways, permutational, fragmentary, etc. [. . .] i call these cutouts “excavations” because they are not at all found texts ie i always know pretty well what i’m looking for and more and more i know where to look for it. like excavating too one arrives at something which is real but has been hidden.49 As the title, Some Particulars, indicates—and like Williams’s emphasis on “perfected attention”—Clark’s “excavations” are not chance finds but the result of intensive looking. Clark’s concern with observation is reasserted by his choice of texts, which show evidence of Johnson’s influence: A. H. Palmer’s The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selbourne.50



Being “worked, mined, or excavated,” Ellis’s “drab” prose yields a series of overtly sexual and homoerotic poems rich with suggestive puns and associations. “History VIII,” for example, reads:

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everywhere curious entomology walking in the optic nerve51 A lengthy letter by Palmer addressed to John Linnell provides the material for this poem. Johnson uses the same letter as his epigraph for the Autumn section of The Book of the Green Man (BG 63). Everywhere curious, articulate, perfect and inimitable of structure, like her own entomology, Nature does yet leave a space for the soul to climb above her steepest summits. As in her own dominion, she swells from the herring to leviathan, from the hodmandod to the elephant, so divine Art piles mountain on her hills, and continents upon those mountains. However, creation sometimes pours into the spiritual eye the radiance of Heaven: the green mountains that glimmer in a summer gloaming from the dusky yet bloomy east; the moon opening her golden eye, or walking in brightness among innumerable islands of light, not only thrill the optic nerve but shed a mild, a grateful, an unearthly luster into the inmost spirits . . .52 Clark does not preserve the spacing and margins of Palmer’s original text, but transplants the selected words into a new configuration. In doing so, a range of interpretations emerge from the condensed arrangement. The absence of punctuation (which Clark could have retained) combined with the reader’s instinct to supplement missing punctuation, conjunctions, and subjunctives, opens the poem up to numerous meanings: “Everywhere [and] curious [,] entomology [is] walking in the optic nerve,” is one way of of interpreting these lines. “Everywhere [,] curious entomology [is] walking in the optic nerve,” is another. We could also read “walking in / the optic / nerve” as referring to the insects who are “walking in [to] the optic nerve” (into one’s field of vision). We could also read the line to mean that these insects are seen “walking in / the optic / nerve” (by means of one’s own sight). Depending on how one chooses to supplement the text’s missing punctuation, the interpretation changes. But however one reads the poem, Clark’s editing of Palmer turns the painter’s words into another reflection on intensive looking. Palmer’s letter expresses the opinion that “General nature is wisely and beneficially adapted to refresh the senses and soothe the spirits of general observers” (Palmer’s emphasis).53 Clark turns these speculations on 10.1057/9780230115552 - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, Ross Hair


Clark’s method in Some Particulars can be seen in one of the Palmer excavations:

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nature’s “general” attributes into attentive observations of particulars found “in her own dominion.” Thus, speculative vision becomes careful (from the Latin root of “curious,” curiosus) observation. The ambiguous punctuation and syntax in Clark’s “excavations” recall the syntactic indeterminacy of Stein, Zukofsky, and Oppen. Likewise, Johnson opens his excavations to multiple interpretations, liberating Milton’s language to advance a cosmology exceeding Milton’s theological designs. Johnson takes advantage of such indeterminacy in Radi os and later in ARK’s “Spires” and “Ramparts,” but it is only in Radi os that Johnson retains the original spacing of Milton’s pages. This considerably enhances the visual impact of the poem so that “each page, as in Blake’s concept of a book, is a single picture” (R ix). But whereas Clark’s poems in Some Particulars are concerned primarily with observation—“worthy of observation / I saw it / confute the vulgar opinion,” Clark writes in one of his White excavations—Radi os is very much a poem of speculative vision that finds its “cosmology of mind” reflected in the correspondences that Johnson intuits between humankind and the cosmos it inhabits.54 Similarities between Radi os and the “excavations” of Williams and Clark are readily apparent. There is, however, one major difference between Johnson’s erasures and those of his Jargon peers. Johnson’s excisions do not stop at clauses and words, but are also applied to certain letters within specific words. For example, from Milton’s word “Excelling” (“Excelling human, princely dignities”), Johnson retains the letters that spell “cell” (R 11), which suggests both the microscopic functional units of organisms as well as confinement or containment.55 Forthwith, from every head —godlike Shapes, and Forms cell

the invisible by various name (R 11) This is all that remains after Johnson has mined the twenty lines from Book One of Paradise Lost in which they occur: Forthwith from every squadron and each band The heads and leaders thither haste, where stood



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Their great commander; god-like shapes and forms Excelling princely, human dignities, And powers that erst in heaven sat on thrones, Though of their names in heavenly records now Be no memorial, blotted out and rased By their rebellion from the books of life. Nor had they yet among the sons of Eve Got them new names: till, wandering o’er the earth Through God’s high sufferance, for the trial of man, By falsities and lies the greatest part Of mankind they corrupted to forsake God their Creator, and the invisible Glory of him that made them to transform Oft to the image of a brute adorn’d With gay religions full of pomp and gold, And devils to adore for deities: Then were they known by various names, And various idols though the heathen world.56 Describing how the names of the rebel angels are “blotted out and rased”—or “razed,” which from the Middle English means to “scratch or incise”—from the “heavenly records” and “books of life,” the text that Johnson discards actually reflects the methods in Radi os. Whereas the blottings that Milton refers to are an act of censorship (which he decries in his Areopagitica), Johnson’s lead to disclosure and revelation. This disclosure occurs not through “excelling” Milton’s text, but by confining, restricting, and containing it in the “cell[s]” of conserved syntax. “It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible,” Italo Calvino writes in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, finding in “the uncertainties of spelling” one way that such legibility occurs.57 But in Radi os, it is the indeterminacy of Milton’s syntax, stemming from Johnson’s excisions, that makes “Infinitude confined;” (R 64) and the “invisible” legible. As the poem’s opening page demonstrates, nouns often function as verbs in Radi os. Depending on how much emphasis is placed on the comma in “Shapes, and Forms,” these words can perform as verbs and nouns. One way of reading the passage is to see the “godlike” head as shaping and forming all things. Another reading would be that it is the Shapes (proceeding from the head) that form the cells. Another option is to see “Shapes, and Forms” as nouns and the word “cell” as a verb.58 Thus, the invisible forces in Johnson’s poem become visible and knowable, by being “celled” (contained and confined) in specific Shapes and Forms. The essence



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of each thing is thus “celled” in the nomination—the “various name[s]”—of each shape and form so that Milton’s description of the dissenting angels’ fall from Heaven now evokes Adam in Genesis naming every bird and beast in Eden (Genesis 2: 19–20). These textual lacunae and quarries of blank page created by Johnson’s erasures result in what Craig Dworkin calls “new syntactical relationships” that permit the emergence of new meanings.59 As Lawrence writes, Johnson’s achievement in Radi os is “his mosaic-like reinvention of syntax, whereby juxtaposition and discontinuity, all the features of modernist praxis, serve not simply to disrupt the linear progression of reading or thought but to suggest a simultaneity of diverse vectors of signification” (RJ 286). These collage processes contract and confine Milton’s syntax in order to expand and amplify it, enabling Johnson to write his own poem made from Milton’s words but telling its own story. Via these methods, Milton’s text is “Sublimed” (R 8), allowing Johnson to “find // the more / Clear // song” (R 50) of his own poem. Thus, in “bright confines” (R 31) and “in loss itself;” Radi os discloses the “high words” of Johnson’s apocryphal poem (R 14). Radi os: Orphic apocrypha Indeed, “apocryphal” is a significant word for Radi os. As Hans-Josef Klauck explains, “The word ‘apocryphal’ comes from the Greek (apokruphos) and means literally ‘hidden, concealed, secret.’ ”60 The word is appropriate for expressing the way Radi os is a poem concealed within Milton’s. Johnson has claimed how in rewriting Paradise Lost, he realized that there was “a text emerging that was completely other than Milton telling the old, old story” of Genesis, which “finds the story of Orpheus and Euridice unexpected in the Biblical story” (U 118). This latent story of Orpheus and Eurydice, emerging from Milton’s “theological backstory,” becomes, as Peter O’Leary suggests, the backbone of Johnson’s “own decidedly Orphic tale of the cosmos awakening to its powers.”61 But what Johnson reveals is also apocryphal in the sense of secret and unorthodox revelations. In the Christian church, Klauck explains, The term “apocryphal” is applied to secret revelations not included in the generally acknowledged corpus of revelatory documents but are much more relevant—in the eyes of particular groups—than those professed and accepted in the public life of the church.62 This has lead to the word, especially when used to refer to early Gnostic texts, assuming negative associations. For orthodox adherents of scriptural canon,



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apocrypha has become synonymous with heresy. Klauck offers the example of “the Gelasian Decree, a sixth-century list of the scriptural canon,” in which the term “ ‘apocryphal’ appears in stereotypical manner alongside a large number of writings and means ‘heretical.’ ”63 “The intention,” Klauck stresses, “is to make it clear that such writings possess no kind of authority whatsoever.”64 Like the names of Satan’s band, “blotted out and rased” from the heavenly records in Paradise Lost, many apocryphal texts have been censored and banished from the “heavenly records” of official, orthodox scripture. However, Elaine Pagels notes, “nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them.”65 The fragmentation and cosmology of Radi os recall many of the tractates (such as the Zoroastrian “heavenly journey apocalypse,” Zostrinanos) that comprise The Nag Hammadi Library, the collection of early Christian Gnostic and Hermetic texts found in Upper Egypt in 1945.66 This is not that surprising if we recall that Blake—as the work of Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper has shown—was appropriating aspects of this apocryphal Gnostic tradition, “making it new” to meet the demands of his own mythic concepts. Following Blake, Johnson taps into a tradition that occurred in what G. R. S. Mead calls “the brilliant period of Hellenistic syncretism which succeeded the founding of Alexandria.”67 Like the syncreticism of the Hellenistic theology that draws on “Chaldean, Babylonian, Magian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Egyptian, Phrygian, Thracian, and Greek mystery-traditions,” Johnson’s apocryphon (“secret book”) entertains a complex of traditions as suggestions of Orphism, Jewish Kabbalah, and Gnosticism announce themselves in Radi os’s Orphic cosmology.68 For example, in the passage from Radi os previously cited, there is the suggestion of the Divine Anthropos, “the Spiritual Prototype of humanity and of every man,” a figure who occurs in various apocryphal traditions including Hermetism, Christian Gnosticism, and Jewish Kabbalah under a variety of names.69 The Christian Gnostic Zosimus of Panopolis (c. 3rd–4th CE), for example, calls him “Thoth the First Man, the Interpreter of all things which exist, and the Name-maker for all embodied things,” and also “Light-Man (Phos).”70 And Jewish Kabbalists, as Norman Finkelstein notes, call this figure “Adam Kadmon,” who is “cosmic man [and] the primordial emanation of God out of Nothingness.” 71 Blake makes implicit allusion to this figure in Jerusalem’s address “To the Jews”: “You have a tradition, that Man anciently containd in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth.”72 Jung, likewise, recognizes the same figure as “the Anthropos idea that stands for man’s wholeness, that is the conception of a unitary being who existed before man and at the same time represents man’s goal.”73 In Kabbalah, Adam Kadmon is a mythic figure and part of a complex theosophy explicating the emanation of the Ein Sof—“the endless and 10.1057/9780230115552 - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, Ross Hair


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undefinable reservoir of divinity, the ultimate source out of which everything flows”—into our physical world via the ten sefirot of the Ein Sof.74 Due to their interrelated symbolic structure, these sefirot are also known as the Tree of Life, which has bearing on Johnson’s interpretation of the Adam figure in Radi os as a tree.75 According to Howard Schwartz: Adam Kadmon preceded all other creations, and from Adam Kadmon all other worlds spread forth. He was the first creation to fill the void created by God’s contraction, consisting of ten emanations in the form of circular wheels, one inside the other, which came forth, followed by the form of a single human being. And it was Adam Kadmon, the primordial man, a completely spiritual being. When it is said [in Genesis 1:27] that man was created in the image of God, this refers to the form of Adam Kadmon. For God Himself has no form or image.76 Throughout Johnson’s poetry, Peter O’Leary suggests, “Adam serves as the figure of Primordial Man.”77 Indeed, Adam Kadmon is implicit in Johnson’s description of “godlike Shapes, and Forms,” coming forth “from every / head” in Radi os. In that passage, we find echoes of the Adam Kadmon who “contains thousands of myriads of worlds,” including “the Four Worlds of Emanation (Atzilut), Creation (Beriah), Formation (Yetzirah), and Action (Asyah).”78 There are further suggestions of the Primordial Man on the concluding page of “radi os / o III,” where Johnson presents a striking image that recalls both Jung’s “Anthropos idea” and Adam Kadmon: Man; that light which else, Still ending, still renewing, is Paradise, Adam’s

ecliptic, in many an aery wheel (R 65) This Adam marks a fundamental stage in the creation of the universe. Although Adam Kadmon’s circular wheels of light are substituted in



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All the lights that shine forth from Adam Kadmon eventually come together into a single circle. This light is so great that it can only be received if transmitted through the filter of his being. Still, the light that remains inside Adam Kadmon is far greater than the light that emerges from it.80 This great light, Schwartz explains, is transmitted through the forehead of Adam Kadmon: “From the forehead [. . .] tremendous lights shine forth in rich and complex patterns, some taking the form of letters and words of the Torah.”81 Again, this is echoed in Radi os where we are told that “from every / head,” the “godlike Shapes, and Forms / cell // the invisible // by various name.” In this respect, the Adamic figure implicit throughout Radi os, like Adam Kadmon and the Divine Anthropos, functions as “a cosmic metaphor, representing a stage in the creation of the world as well as the universe itself,” forming a bridge between the unknowable divine transcendence (the universe’s invisible powers) and the “fallen” material universe.82 The light associated with this primordial Adam figure is also a crucial component in Johnson’s wider cosmological concerns. “When you take a poem from a text it should announce itself in your title. Right up front,” Johnson tells O’Leary: “So Radi os was from Paradise Lost, and it also then gave me my text, indicating radiant things of light all the way through” (RJ 575). Thus, the importance of light is immediately apparent from the word “radi os,” which suggests a number of scintillating words. Most immediately, there is the suggestion of “radius” whose Latin roots mean “staff,” “spoke,” or “ray” and by association, “radiate.” The theme of light that these radial words connote announces itself throughout Radi os with the sun occurring invariably throughout the poem as the source of life and song: Hail Bright effluence of bright essence Whose fountain at the voice The rising World (R 49) Throughout Radi os, the sun is “the O // Of // wonder,” (R 9) whose circumference rays provide light and heat in the genesis of the universe. Indeed, the collection of solar and fiery words that Johnson retains in his excavation



Johnson’s poem for “many an aery wheel,” the principle is essentially the same: the universe is contained and perennially manifested—“Still ending, still renewing”—in, and by, the supernal light of this anthropic form.79

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of Paradise Lost comprise a compendium that would make “sun-lover, sunworshipper, sun-seeker” Harry Crosby proud.83 An initial but not exhaustive survey yields the following words that, in one way or another, refer to sun, light, and/or heat: “Illumine,” “fire” (R 4); “lustre” (R 5); “lightning” (R 7); “burning” (R 8); “light” (R 11); “star” (R 12); “heat” (R 13); “sun,” “heaven’s fire” (R 16); “sudden blaze” (R 17); “ribs of gold,” “cells / of liquid fire” (R 18); “strange fire” (R 24); “blackest light” (R 26); “flames” (R 27); “round / lustre” (R 29); “bright confines” (R 31); “convex of fire” (R 32); “the radiant sun” (R 33); “circling fire” (R 37); “bright arms” (R 40); “pyramid of fire” (R 44); “moon” (R 45); “excessive bright” (R 57); “flaming wheels,” “the Starry Sphere” (R 60); “golden Sun” (R 61); “radiant visage” (R 63); “the full-blazing / meridian” (R 70); “vegetable gold,” “golden rind” (R 74); “shining rock,” (R 75); “diamond flaming” (R 81); “the Sun’s bright circle” (R 81); “bright beam,” “Diurnal” (R 82); “orient,” “stellar” (R 83); “authentic fire” (R 84); “starry pole” (R 85); “spark” (R 86); “blaze” (R 87); and “fiery” (R 90). Out of such a concordance one can expect to find the Orphic genesis god, “called Phanes because he first shone forth— appeared in a blaze of light—or alternatively because he makes visible, gives light to, the rest of creation. He is sometimes called light itself, or by a slight and very natural transference is identified with the sun.”84 This lexis also suggests Pound’s Neoplatonic conception of light in The Cantos: “the light of light” that Pound calls “the virtù” in “Canto LXXIV” (C 443), and in “Canto CXVI,” “the great ball of crystal,” and “great acorn of light” (C 809). Thus, Johnson uncovers a bevy of words from Milton’s text, suggesting Pound’s “radiant world where one thought cuts another with clean edge” (LE 154): “bright image” (R 13); “dazzling” (R 15); “The radiant image” (R 46); “Light after light” (R 53); “glimmering air” (R 58); “crystalline” (R 59); “dawning light turned // thick with sparkling // stairs” (R 60); “glistering,” (R 61); “sheer / Light” (R 73); and, “crystal mirror” (R 75). As it does for Pound in The Cantos, however, such light and clarity refers as much to “radial inwardness”—as Johnson writes in “BEAM 4” of ARK: The Foundations—as it does to solar radii. For, it is with the enlightened (luminous, shining) eyes of such “sheer / Light” that one looks into the depths of the mind to speculate on the invisible. Shine inward, and there plant eyes that I may see and tell Of things invisible once thick as stars, (R 50)



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Here Johnson reiterates his claim in “BEAM 4” that, “After a long time of light, there began to be eyes, and light began looking with itself.” Such a notion has significant bearing on Johnson’s concept of cosmology—not only in ARK but throughout his work—and his belief that, as part of that cosmology, “brains were made to communicate with the universe”: “Life was always tending towards the human brain so that the universe could start talking to itself.”85 Johnson recalls similar ideas found in Gnosticism and developed subsequently by the likes of Jacob Boehme who, in the Signature of All Things, explains God in similar terms. According to Boehme, God is first a “CHAOS, or wonder-eye [. . .] who thus manifests himself in particular beings with the eyes of eternity.”86 We give you to understand this of the divine essence; without nature God is a mystery, understand in the nothing, for without nature is the nothing which is an eye of eternity, an abyssal eye, that stands or sees in the nothing, for it is the abyss; and this same eye is a will, understand a longing after manifestation, to find the nothing; but now there is nothing before the will, where it might find something, where it might have a place to rest, therefore it enters into itself, and finds itself through nature.87 In Radi os we find a similar abyssal eye looking “astonished on the oblivious pool,” that dilates into “the O // Of // wonder,” the manifold material world (R 9). For, “O is The Mirror, or a cosmos made reflective by the hindside of chaos,” Johnson proposes in “BEAM 28, The Book of Orpheus.” Lest we forget that Johnson wants to be a Blake who can look at Newton and modern science, it is worth stressing that similar ideas about a selfreflexive cosmos occur in contemporary science. Indeed, Sewell claims that “mind and body are not a camera and tape-recorder, but makers and organizers from the start” (OV 346). One is not simply the passive receptor of the world but involved in making it, as Johnson intimates in Radi os: “sit we then projecting //—another World, / called Man” (R 30) and “ ‘What thou seest / is thyself;’ ” (R 79). This idea also occurs in the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, introduced by Brandon Carter in 1973, which advances the hypothesis that observers are necessary agents in bringing the Universe into being. “[T]he observed structure of the Universe is restricted by the fact that we are this observing structure,” John Barrow and Frank Tipler explain; “by the fact that, so to speak, the Universe is observing itself.”88 Thus, “any observed properties of the Universe that may initially appear astonishingly improbable, can only be seen in their true perspective after we have accounted for the fact that certain properties of the Universe are necessary prerequisites for the evolution and existence of any observers at



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Eurydice: The Descending Axis The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, according to Barrow and Tipler, “deepens our scientific understanding of the link between the inorganic and organic worlds and reveals an intimate connection between the large and small-scale structure of the Universe.”90 As well as furthering the principles of Orphic postlogic, these connections between “the large and small-scale structure of the Universe” are also evident in the way Johnson presents Radi os’s Anthropos figure as a tree who, in the poem’s first page, rises from chaos into the world of light. It is a movement that parallels a similar process in the mind’s awakening to consciousness and the Universe’s own self-reflexivity. Johnson tells O’Leary that he “had a conversation with Guy Davenport about” this idea of the human body as tree: I said, you know, Blake says it’s all one big body. And I said, No, I think it’s a tree. And Guy Davenport said, “I think you’re right.” I felt it as being this, as a being a tree. It’s got one of the great structures, it’s got depths and heights, it’s got circulation, it goes into streams. It goes into stream patterns, which is what branches do. I think time makes things a tree. (RJ 572) As Selinger suggests, this analogy “recalls the Renaissance conceit of man as arbor inversus,” and reiterates Johnson’s belief that “tree, world, poem, and man fit together in a greater whole.”91 The tree is a significant image for Radi os, especially in terms of its references to light. The suggestion of “radiate” in Radi os’s title now includes the biological sense of the word, referring to the way an animal or plant group evolves into a variety of forms. Light becomes the stimulant for humankind’s own chlorophyllous radiation into the world, absorbing radiant energy (sunlight) and converting it into the chemical energy of the imagination. This sentiment is reiterated in one of Johnson’s jottings in a notebook he was keeping in 1994: “all life aspires to light / mankind, to the stars.”92 Such an idea touches on Northrop Frye’s reading of Blake: The natural man is, speaking in terms of conscious vision, an imaginative seed. Just as the seed is a dry sealed packet of solid “matter,” so the



all.”89 In this respect, the Anthropic Principle adumbrates the imaginative, mythopoeic intimations of cosmos, dovetailing pertinently with Gnostic ideas of the divine Anthropos and Boehme’s notion of nature as the eye or speculum of Eternity.

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natural mind is a tight skull-bound shell of abstract ideas. And just as the seed is surrounded by a dark world which we see as an underworld, so the physical universe, which surrounds the natural man on all sides, and is dark in the sense that he cannot see its extent, is the underworld of the mind, the den of Urthona, the cave of Plato’s Republic.93 Light is part of the process, nurturing these embryonic forms of life and consciousness. “Here and there a seed puts out a tentative shoot into the real world, and when it does so it escapes from the darkness of burial into the light of immortality.”94 But, ultimately, the Man who “Rose from Chaos” in Radi os disagrees with Frye’s assertion that “the vegetable life is not the most highly organized form of life, because it is still bound to nature.” According to Frye, “The animal symbolizes a higher stage of development by breaking its navelstring, and this earth-bound freedom of movement is represented in our present physical-level.”95 Such dualism contradicts Blake who refutes “the notion that man has a body distinct from soul.”96 And as a tree (or “Rose”), the depiction of humankind in Radi os reminds us that despite the heights to which we as a species can ascend, humankind is necessarily rooted in a chthonic substratum, a chaos; something that Milton’s Satan, in his ascending and aspiring hubris, forgot. Thoreau says as much in his 1851 journal entry for May 20th. Reflecting on a passage from Asa Gray’s book, A Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States (1848), Thoreau speculates about the radical nature of the mind. Quoting Gray in a rather truncated manner, Thoreau writes: “The plant—develops from the first in two opposite directions, viz. upwards [to expand in the light & air] to produce & continue the stem (or ascending axis), and downwards [avoiding the light] to form the root, (or descending axis. The former is ordinarily or in great part aerial, the latter subterranean.”97 Gray’s botanical observations inform Thoreau’s analogy for the mind which, like the plant, is part aerial and part subterranean: So the mind develops from the first in two opposite directions—upwards to expand in the light & air; & downwards avoiding the light to form the root. One half is aerial the other subterranean. The mind is not well balanced & firmly planted like the oak which has not as much root as branch—whose roots like those of the white pine are slight and near the



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surface. One half of the minds [sic] development must still be root—in the embryonic state—in the womb of nature—more unborn than at first. For each successive new idea or bud—a new rootlet in the earth. The growing man penetrates yet deeper by his roots into the womb of things.98 Thoreau provides valuable insight into the nature of Radi os’s Orphic story. For as much as Radi os is a poem that celebrates the life-manifesting virtues of supernal light and solar energy, it is also a chthonic poem concerned about descent, katabasis, and “The / black / realm, beyond / The flower” (R 12). It was Eurydice who reminded Orpheus of this fact that we are part aerial, part subterranean. Likewise, the poet in Radi os must go Through the Orphean descent, and up To find the more Clear song; (R 50) Eurydice is this “more / Clear / song” and the one who implicitly directs this trajectory in Radi os: Direct my course: (Which is my present journey) Yours be the speech I saw and heard

far and wide (R 44)



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The final line in this passage—“far and wide”—recalls the etymology of Eurydice’s name, Eury-Dike, which, Christine Downing points out, “means broad ruling” and suggests that Eurydice “was originally an underworld goddess associated with the maintenance of a mode of natural order, of cosmic justice.”99 As underworld goddess, Eurydice is at the very heart of Radi os, forming the “root” of Johnson’s poem.100 Applying Thoreau’s ideas, Eurydice assumes a “subterranean” role in Radi os, becoming the natural corollary of the “Man” that “tree[s] / into the world” (R3). Where Gray’s descending/ ascending axes of plant forms give Thoreau valuable tropes for conceiving the intrinsic nature of the mind, Eurydice and Orpheus provide a similar function for Johnson as the illuminating figures of the psyche. In Johnson’s “central myth,” Orpheus and Eurydice represent “the blessed argument between poet and muse, man and his anima” (“A Note”). “Orpheus went into the underworld,” Johnson tells O’Leary, “which I take to be the unconscious, and there he finds Eurydice and tries to lead her out. But he looks back and can’t get her out” (RJ 583). This seems to me the Jungian idea that the male has within him the unconscious, which is the female. And that is the muse, actually. What I got from The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell was the idea that Orpheus was a poet of nature who strummed his lyre. He caused the animals and plants, the atoms, to move in rhythm. She said that this is the poet. The poet is somebody who strums that lyre and he’s connected to the natural world and makes things happen and then of course the second thing about him is Eurydice, which took me a long time to figure out, was the anima within, the muse, and Orpheus achieved his ability to make music from that. (RJ 583): Johnson never elaborates this Jungian interpretation of the myth. Thus, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes, “Eurydice remains an unspoken problem” in Johnson’s myth, by “too early assimilating her into himself and losing the conflict and contradictions of what female dangerous agency and stunned passivity mean to the myth of the male singer” (RJ 314). Had he developed the implications of his “myth” more thoroughly, Johnson may have formulated a more profound understanding similar to Downing who reflects on Eurydice’s significance as “anima”: Orpheus’ discovery that (to use Jungian terms) Eurydice was really an anima figure and that it was now time to turn from her to a direct engagement with the anima itself, with his own soul. So he went to the



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underworld, the world where the soul lives. But he went there to rescue the anima, to bring her back to the upperworld—so he still hadn’t really yet understood that the anima wasn’t his; that the ego doesn’t have an anima, that (as Hillman puts it) the point is not to develop my anima but to realize that anima-consciousness represents a way of being in the world. It is only afterward, when he returns to the underworld to stay, that Orpheus comes to understand that he and Eurydice have to relate IN the underworld—that he has to look from the anima perspective not at it.101 To see from the perspective of the anima is to see from the perspective of Eurydice: from the perspective of the radicle and the underworld (Hades) in which it roots itself. In Radi os there are a number of instances where the poem achieves this perspective, meditating on death and darkness in ways that recall the Eurydice-inspired meditations of Rilke or Blanchot. “We can create, / out of pain / Of darkness” (R 29), Johnson writes in one instance. In another: “life dies, death lives” (R 36). Death is also equated with holism—“mute // Death / In whom // Atonement” (R 54) and becomes the possibility of all subsequent life: “So near grows Death to Life, // Among so many signs // Unlimited of manifold” (R 78). At other times, the darkness of Eurydice’s abode assumes a mystical poignancy, as the poet treads “The luminous / inroad of Darkness” (R 58), and in a dark night of the soul witnesses “total Dark // In nature and all things” (R 83). Thus, as much as it is a poem that photosynthesizes radiant energy, turning light into the leaves of its own book, Radi os also recognizes the inextricable root of its existence in the chthonic loam of the unconscious. Radi os and ARK Despite starting out as “something to fiddle with,” Radi os, as we have seen, is a “very serious” poem for Johnson (RJ 556). Johnson even envisioned Radi os as the final section of his long poem: “I suspect [Radi os] will become Book IV—or “Wor(l)ds 100—and I will have found I’ve written the end of the book before the book is finished, again,” Johnson tells Alpert (RJ 555). When Wor(l)ds was shelved in favour of ARK, Johnson still anticipated Radi os as the concluding section of his epic. In 1985, writing in “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” Johnson outlines the now familiar plan for ARK ’s ninety-nine poems. However, in addition to “The Foundations,” “The Spires,” and “The Ramparts,” Johnson foresees Radi os, as “ARK 100,” concluding ARK as “a kind of Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion dome over the whole structure.”102 Johnson tells Alpert in 1974 that he is “up to Book VIII” of



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Radi os, which would suggest that Johnson’s intention was to attempt all twelve books of Paradise Lost (RJ 556). This project, however, was subsequently abandoned. Referring to his plan for Radi os, Johnson tells O’Leary: “I looked at it and I thought it doesn’t have the impetus. Radi os kind of wrote itself. I think it ended when it needed to end and I didn’t need to add the rest” (RJ 575). As well as having “pencilled in up to eight” (RJ 575) of Milton’s books, Johnson had drafted a more-or-less complete version of a fifth book, recently published as “The Book of Adam (Book V of Radi os)” in the Chicago Review.103 However, as O’Leary is keen to stress, “Johnson didn’t leave any instructions to publish a complete Radi os.”104 Ever the bricoleur, however, Johnson makes use of this material in ARK, recycling the final lines “thunder // amidst the / Long way // back” in “ARK 35, Spire Called the Arm of the Moon.”105 Likewise, the opening page of Radi os provides the epigraph to “BEAMS 21, 22, 23, The Song of Orpheus,” in which, using methods of excision similar to Radi os, Johnson rewrites the Psalms (many of which are attributed to David who, as an exalted harpist, is something of an Orpheus figure) as an Orpheus narrative. Reviewing the Sand Dollar edition of Radi os in 1978, Ron Silliman notes that the book is the first third of Johnson’s “new long American poem, Wor(l)ds,” but finds it “impossible to know how it will fit in with the project as a totality: imagine trying to conceive of The Cantos having heard only a portion of LXXV.”106 Of course, the 1977 Sand Dollar Press edition of Radi os (reprinted by Flood Editions in 2005) now stands as a poem in itself and, despite its autonomy, represents a major achievement in Johnson’s work. Indeed, it is now possible to see how Radi os fits into Johnson’s wider project. To reiterate, Johnson had started writing Wor(l)ds when he began Radi os in 1973. It is not surprising therefore that a number of themes pertinent to Radi os also occur in ARK. For example, there are implicit allusions to the Adamic-Orphic descent of Radi os in “BEAM 2” and its description of lightning: in balanced dissent: enlightenment—on abysm bent Eurydice is closely associated with thunder and lightning throughout “The Foundations,” perhaps in recollection of the thunder that peals three times “over the pools of Avernus” in Book IV of Virgil’s Georgics as Orpheus fatefully looks back at Eurydice.107 Thus, she is implicit in “BEAM 2” in the form of the lightning cloud’s “ice electrons,” which find a counterpart in the figure of Eurydice “whose face is ice” in “BEAM 16, The Voices.” Similarly,



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in “BEAM 5” Johnson presents an “an atomed Euridice” in the context of “thunder, cymbal mazed in timpani of smattering, / arm’s electron’s long way / back” which echoes the lines from Book V of Radi os and “ARK 35”: “thunder // amidst the / Long way // back.” Indeed, “BEAM 5” ends with “Euridice” amid the asphodel of Hades “dancing like [Anna] Pavlova,” the Russian ballerina (U 119). There are further suggestions of Eurydice in “BEAMS 21–23, The Song of Orpheus” in the image of “Thunder amid held daffodil” and again in “BEAM 14” in the phrase “underneathunder.” The latter originally appeared in Songs of the Earth, but, in the context of ARK, recalls the cloud-to-ground lightning strike of “BEAM 2” and Eurydice’s chthonic fate, “underneathunder,” in Hades. “BEAM 2” proposes additional instances of descent, as the homophonic pun of “dissent”/“descent” indicates. Implicit in this is Milton’s impious rebel-hero, Satan (and the light-bearing Lucifer) who, in Paradise Lost, falls into “bottomless perdition.”108 “BEAM 2” reminds us that Adam and Eve, as well as Satan, suffered their respective falls because of their dissent. Recalling the “bottomless perdition” in Paradise Lost, Johnson’s choice of “abysm” from the Latin abyssus, meaning “bottomless pit,” reasserts these associations and reminds us that “words // hazard all // Abyss, and / World” (RJ 89). In this enlightening descent it is also possible to see an allusion to the breaking or shattering of the sefirotic vessels (Shevirath Ha-kelim) in Issac Luria’s Kabbalistic theosophy, which, Norman Finkelstein notes, “constitutes a cosmic catastrophe, a Fall preceding Adam’s fall in the Garden.”109 Unable to contain the emanation of divine light, the lower six sefiroth on the supernal Tree of Life shatter and are scattered in the material world. As a consequence of this, sparks of divine light are exiled and imprisoned in the material world and can only be reunited with the divine first light via tikkun, the work of restoration and redemption. A positive implication of this is that all of creation is imbued with divine light and spirit.110 Indeed, the lightning of “BEAM 2” provides an analogy for depicting how such supernal or sidereal energy is “earthed” in the world of matter and generation. But it is ARK ’s shortest poem, “BEAM 10,” with its explicit reference to Adam Kadmon, that most explicitly re-invokes the Anthropos of Radi os daimon diamond Monad I Adam Kadmon in the sky The poem displays Johnson’s deft prosody and playful permutation of words. Thus, as a variant of “daemon,” “daimon,” by adding an additional ‘D,’ permutes into “diamond.” And by omitting the superfluous “I,”



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“daimon” permutes as “monad.” (And, isn’t the shattered Adam Kadmon, exiled from his heavenly home, also something of a “nomad ”?) Johnson also puns on the etymology of “diamond,” which, deriving from the Latin adamans, evokes both Adam and man (“I”). Johnson may also be punning on the similar sounding words, “Adam” and “atom.” Deriving from the Greek atomos, meaning “indivisible,” the atom proposes another monadic form, as does the adamant diamond.111 Furthermore, “I” is the letter whose inclusion, when permuted, spells “daimon,” and whose omission spells “monad,” emphasizes the importance the individual holds in relation to these two terms. One meaning of “daimon,” for example, is an inner attendant or inspiring force denoting, Selinger suggests, “one’s genius or inspiring inner self” (RJ 333), which links it with the first-person pronoun in “BEAM 10.” Denoting a single unit, the number one, and an indivisible entity “Monad,” finds an equivalent of sorts in the autonomous and individual “I,” whose letter also resembles the Roman numeral for “one.” Finkelstein refers to Leibniz’s Monadologie when he considers the significance of the monad in “BEAM 10,” noting that Liebniz considers it “the most basic substantial unit of the cosmos, [which] reflects the divine order from one or another point of view, ascending in an infinite scale of increasing self-consciousness.”112 But Johnson may very well have read of the “Monad” in Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (prompted, perhaps, by Olson’s references to “the Monogene” in Maximus).113 Jung cites from a treatise from the Gnostic Codex Brucianus: The same is he [Monogenes] who dwelleth in the Monad, which is the Setheus and which came from the place of which none can say where it is. . . . From him it is the Monad came, in the manner of a ship, laden with all good things, and in the manner of a field, filled or planted with every kind of tree, and in the manner of a city, filled with all races of mankind. . . . This is the fashion of the Monad.114 Although O’Leary claims that, “Jung can alert us emphatically to the alchemical nature of ARK,” he in fact offers a more syncretic interpretation of Western esotericism that, in addition to alchemy, draws on Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Neopythagoreanism.115 Explicating the above passage, Jung introduces a series of Gnostic ideas concerning the Anthropos, the Monad, and the Spinther (spark of light) that relate to “BEAM 10.” According to Jung, “The Monogene is the Son of God,” and therefore another incarnation of the divine Anthropos.116 He also claims that, “The Monad is a spark of light (Spinther) and an image of the Father identical with the Monogene.”117 Similarly, the monad in “BEAM 10”—which, as a “diamond,” recalls the



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Gnostic Spinther—is synonymous with Adam Kadmon. And with “the insistent trochaic tetrameter,” as Finkelstein notes, recalling the nursery rhyme, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” one instinctively sees the diamond in Johnson’s poem as the star, “Up above the world so high / Like a diamond in the sky.”118 Therefore, up above so high “in the sky,” as a constellation of diamondlike stars, the Adam Kadmon of “BEAM 10” recalls how the Kabbalists conceived him “as the first configuration of divine light.”119 For the ancient Greeks, the daimon was a semidivine being acting as an intermediary between gods and humans. As an angelic agent, it is “ ‘midway between the absolute / and man,’ ” as Johnson writes, quoting Robert Fludd, in “BEAM 11, Finial ” and informs a number of spiritual traditions. The daimon features in Plotinus’s Neoplatonic Tractates, for example, as well as Yeats’s “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” which Finkelstein refers to, quoting Yeats: “the Daimon comes not as like to like but [seeks] its own opposite.”120 Jung, on the other hand, elucidates the daimon in a Neopythagorean context. According to Jung, the Neopythagoreans believed “the soul was swallowed by matter and only mind—nous—was left: But the nous is outside man: it is his daemon.”121 Jung’s ideas reiterate the basic dualism of many Gnostic schools of thought that posit earthly matter (hyle) as corrupt, but containing within it the fallen divine spark (the daemonic soul) that seeks to transcend its corporeal prison and reunite with the nous or Intellect.122 In claiming that nous (and, therefore, the daemon) is “identical with the god Anthropos,” Jung rehearses the dualistic concept of spirit and matter (both in nature and the human individual).123 He [Anthropos] rends the circle of the spheres and leans down to earth and water (i.e., he is about to project himself into the elements.) His shadow falls upon the earth, but his image is reflected in the water. This kindles the love of the elements, and he himself is so charmed with the reflected image of divine beauty that he would fain take up his abode within it.124 Similar “primary narcissism” occurs in Radi os when Johnson, recalling Yeats’s daimon, writes of looking “into the clear / opposite”:125 . I started back, It started back;

‘What thou seest, is thyself;



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And I will bring thee

Under watery image. (R 79) According to Selinger this passage expresses an Emersonian tenet that “the universe as a whole is a bride of the soul.”126 But it also rehearses a central tenet of esoteric thought; namely, that the human, “composed of spirit (or intellect) soul, and body [. . .] is both part of the cosmos which is the object of his knowledge,” but also “a small cosmos within the larger one, of which he is the counterpart, like a reflected image.”127 But who or what is subject and object remains unclear in this passage. Is it the perceiving subject (“I”) who announces that, “ ‘What thy seest is thyself”? Or is it the object (“It”), reflecting back and responding to the inquiring gaze? The quote marks, remaining ambiguously open, only compound this. But however we read it, subject and object blur in a moment of mutual identification, reiterating the fact that by falling or looking into its opposite, the individual (the “I”) recognizes itself as the reflection of, and participant in, the wider world. In esoteric theosophies this would constitute the first stage of a gnosis that awakens and returns the fallen soul to its Divine origins. Understood in this context, the daimon functions as an intermediary spirit that provides the exiled soul a ladder of descent and reascent, connecting the lower earthly world (hyle) with the higher spiritual world of Divine Intellect. As “the core” of ARK, the playful engagement of “BEAM 10” with cosmological speculation articulates a vision that is pervasive throughout ARK and inextricably part of Johnson’s bricolage praxis (U 119). This is especially evident if the cosmology of “The Foundations” is compared with that of its sister poem, Radi os. Both poems pursue Adamic themes that dovetail with questions of cosmos and vision. However, as Finkelstein indicates with his allusion to Gershom Scholem’s discussion of Adam Ha-Rishon (the Adam of the Bible) and the supernal and primordial Adam Kadmon (RJ 51), the two poems can be read in the context of two different Adam figures.128 “Man, as he was before his fall,” Scholem writes, “is concerned as a cosmic being which contains the whole world in itself [like the Monad of “BEAM 10”] and whose station is superior to even that of Metratron, the first of the angels. Adam Ha-Rishon, the Adam of the Bible, corresponds on the anthropological plane to Adam Kadmon, the ontological primary man.”129 This,



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Scholem notes, indicates “the connection between man’s fall and the cosmic process,” with Adam Rishon reflecting on the “anthropological plane” Adam Kadmon’s cosmic fate.130 This dual figuration of Adam on the lower and upper planes of existence offers a way of distinguishing Radi os from “The Foundations,” as well as recognizing their Adamic affinities as part of one overall vision. Radi os presents an image of cosmos that, like the figure of Adam Kadmon, is articulated on an abstract theosophical plane, recalling similar mythic paradigms in Hermetic, Gnostic, and Orphic apocrypha. By comparison, “The Foundations” is more akin to the situation of Adam Rishon, engaging what is ostensibly the same cosmology as Radi os but from a postlapsarian perspective. (It is worth recalling that “The Foundations” concludes in “BEAM 33” at “High Noon [which] stands still as a just picked apple.”) In “The Foundations,” the verities of cosmic integrity and proportion are intimated in the shards and fragments of the material collaged into its BEAMS. Poundian “luminous detail” is, in the Jungian context of “The Foundations,” imbued with cosmological significance, becoming Spintherlike vitalities in ARK ’s cosmology. Like Isis re-membering Osiris–Kadmon, “the scatterd first light,” in Duncan’s poem “Osiris and Set,” ARK re-members and gathers its own cosmology.131 ARK ’s re-membering takes place via a bricolage praxis that uses found texts, quotation, allusion, and wordplay in the spirit of the bricoleurs Johnson admires, who would use “anything they could get their hands on from detritus of a world which had not eyes to see” in order to manifest their dreams and visions.132 Thus, from Adam’s cosmic catastrophe comes multiplicity, heterogeneity, eclecticism, and plenitude; the very things that Johnson embraces in ARK to construct his renewing “mosaic of Cosmos” (“ARK 99, Arches XXXIII”).



Orphic Apocrypha




A “mosaic of Cosmos”: ARK’s Bricolage Poetics

. . . a word is a word most when it is separated out by science, treated with acid to remove the smudges, washed, dried, and placed right side up on a clean surface. Now one may say that this is a word. Now it may be used, and how? —William Carlos Williams1 To shape, to shear, to compress, and delineate; to “add a hue to the spectrum of another’s mind . . .” —Marianne Moore2

T

he eschewal of history and overt referencing in Radi os continues in ARK, which, more than any of Johnson’s poetry, most clearly demonstrates his move away from the Poundian collage mode of his earlier work in favor of a poetics informed by bricolage.3 Furthermore, it is in the last two books of ARK—“The Spires” and “The Ramparts”—that Johnson’s bricolage poetics are most fully realized, consolidating the innovations and advancements of his earlier work. “The Spires” were published in a small volume entitled ARK 50: Spires 34–50 with Gordon Baldwin’s architectural drawings by E. P. Dutton in 1984. Charles Simic selected ARK 50 as the winner of the 1984 National Poetry Series competition and, with Creeley, provides an endorsement of ARK on the book’s dust jacket. Conflating Mallarmé (who, via Zukofsky, informs “The Spires” and “The Ramparts”) with Pound, Simic suggests that in ARK 50 Johnson “purifies the language of the tribe.”4 Unlike “The Foundations” and “The Spires,” “The Ramparts” were never printed as



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a single volume, an indication, perhaps, that Johnson’s poetry by the early 1990s had been largely neglected in favor of either the more politically charged and theoretically reflexive writing of the Language poets or the conservative poetry championed by Helen Vendler. “Let’s face it,” Johnson writes in a letter accompanying one of his own Xero Ox Edition booklets, “if you take Zuk and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers as models you can’t expect Helen Vendler to beat a path to the door . . . .”5 The photocopied booklets distributed by Johnson under the imprint Xero Ox Editions are accompanied by found images of umbrellas, hour glasses, magnifying glasses, and other curios that Johnson describes as “graphics [. . .] literally pulled out of the air for each booklet more as ornament than image integral to the text.”6 A number of “The Ramparts” were printed in various journals in the early 1990s. Conjunctions printed “ARK 67–84, Arches I-XVIII” in 1990 (including many of the images that appear in Johnson’s Xero Ox Editions), and Parnassus, in 1994, printed the final poems, “ARK 97,” “ARK 98,” and “ARK 99.” 7 In 1996 all three volumes were finally collected together and published as ARK by Gus Blaisdell’s Living Batch Press, which was founded for this sole purpose. However, this edition is far from definitive due to a number of omissions and inconsistencies occurring between the earlier volumes and the Living Batch edition. Bricolage: “The Foundations” Before looking at these last two books of ARK more closely, it is worth considering their relation to “The Foundations.” The rudiments of the bricolage that Johnson practices in “The Spires” and “The Ramparts” is evident in ARK ’s initial book. Indeed, a striking example of this earlier phase of Johnson’s bricolage poetics occurs in “BEAM 5, The Voices,” an earlier version of which appears in Wor(l)ds as “Wor(l)ds 5” and which recycles phrases from “Wor(l)ds 45.” It is a particularly good example of Johnson’s bricolage because it draws on imagery from Book X of the Odyssey, offering a useful contrast with Pound’s use of the same text in Canto XXXIX. In hill path: “thkk, thgk” of the loom “Thgk thkk” and the sharp sound of a song under olives When I lay in the ingle of Circe I heard a song of that kind. (C 193)



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[H]er spell binding voice as she glided back and forth at her great immortal loom, her enchanting web a shimmering glory only goddesses can weave.8 The Rapallo looms prompt reflections on Circe’s enchanting craft, as Pound speculates on a number of implicit themes in Book X of the Odyssey concerning metamorphosis, renewal fertility, and sex. These all revolve around Circe’s magic and the “fucking” it elicits (C 193). In order to engage these themes, Pound constructs an ideogram from numerous references and texts. As well as Homer, quoted by Pound in Greek and English, these include Dante, Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, and an anonymous fourteenth-century English lyric, which are cited in their original languages. Via the ideogrammic method, Canto XXXIX makes a series of claims that articulates Pound’s belief that throughout history, there existed a Neoplatonic cult of love in which culture heroes such as Sigismundo Malatesta and Dante participated. Indeed, the lines from the Paradiso included in Canto XXXIX (C 194) reiterate Pound’s theory that love and sexuality constitute a form of gnosis that originated in the Hellenic mysteries and continues in the trobar clus of the troubadours and the Fedeli d’Amore associated with Dante’s circle of poets. Like Canto XXXIX, “BEAM 5” begins with a loom: the l∞m, the x of the instant looped to time: windmill-ply of the plenum, laced ion Johnson’s “loom” weaves together a number of themes. On the one hand, “loom” suggests the apparatus for making fabric, with “the x of the instant” visually recalling the warp and woof of woven fabric. On the other hand, “loom” also functions as a verb, with the suggestion that time looms in the poem, just as “Clouds loom below” in “BEAM 1.” Clearly discernible in North Point Press’s ARK: The Foundations is the infinity symbol “∞” in “loom.”9 This mathematical term introduces the idea of limitless, unbounded time. Indeed, temporality is implicit in the words “instant” and “time,” and in the word “eon” beginning the following stanza. Notably, this “time” is set against space, which, as “plenum” suggests, is filled by matter. Thus, time



Canto XXXIX begins with the sound of looms in Rapallo that invoke the moment in Book X of the Odyssey when Odysseus and his crew discover Circe’s palace. Bewitched wolves and lions surround the goddess’s palace, while from within her abode “plying a great loom” Circe is heard:

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X is the double pivot into an instant we see through Likewise, “BEAM 5” reads as a comment on how time is woven into and bound with matter. Recalling Blake’s lines in “Auguries of Innocence,” where infinity is held in the palm of the hand and a world is seen in a grain of sand, “BEAM 5” conflates time and space in its own visionary moment. This conflation is reified by the close proximity and rhyme of “ion” (which, as atoms, comprise the plenum of space) and “eon” (an indefinite or infinite period of time, and in Gnosticism, a power existing completely outside time). But what is really noticeable in “BEAM 5,” compared to Canto XXXIX, is Johnson’s minimal use of reference. Only Hieronymous Bosch, Bach, and Eurydice are invoked directly by name, and the few lines of text that Johnson quotes, from The Tempest and “The Star Spangled Banner,” are minimal. Johnson does not emphasize discursive narrative detail as Pound does but, nevertheless, still evokes the Odyssey in his poem. He does so by focusing on specific words in “BEAM 5,” just as he does in “BEAM 10,” making these words do all the work. A word such as “loom,” for example, operates autonomously of any overt references, but because of its inescapable literary associations still manages to suggest the looms of Penelope, Calypso, and Circe. There are also suggestions of Blake, who uses the loom as a potent symbol in his poetry and painting. For example, The Sea of Time and Space (1821) uses imagery from the Odyssey, including the loom, to illustrate the way in which the soul—bound and fatefully woven into the finite world—descends into generation (time and space).10 Additionally, Johnson’s loom also reminds us of Canto XXXIX and Pound more generally, with Johnson’s “windmill-ply” evoking the “ply upon ply” of Canto XVII (C 78). Yet another Poundian ply in “BEAM 5” is Robert Duncan’s poem “At the Loom, Passages 2,” which also evokes Canto XXXIX. However, all of these are associations that the reader could bring to “BEAM 5.” For, unlike Pound, Johnson does not put any emphasis on seeking out references. Indeed, following the directive of the “Voices” in “BEAM 28, The Book of Orpheus,” Johnson will “GO INTO THE WORDS AND EXPAND THEM” rather than develop details of the Homeric story in the way that Pound does. This is evident in the word “looped” which conveys multiple associations. On the one hand, “looped” repeats the infinity symbol in



intersects space. “Y is space. X, time,” Johnson proposes in “BEAM 28, The Book of Orpheus,” and in “BEAM 29” claims that:

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“l∞m,” compounding the theme of infinite or uroboric time. On the other hand, because it also denotes a fastening device used in textiles, “looped” additionally connotes the loom, a connotation that is further reiterated by “laced” and its suggestion of looping fabric and twisted or threaded patterning. Furthermore, “laced” suggests Circe’s intoxicating “tisane.” And, together, the two meanings of “looped”—laced fabric and spiked drink— evoke the spellbinding magic of Circe’s “craft” (C 3). Innovative wordplay yields other references to Circe in “BEAM 5.” For example, the vowels in the miniconcrete “w a v e” poem also spell the name of Circe’s island abode, Aeae: a e a e a e a e a e w v w v w v w v w v Johnson conveys the isle of Aeae looming from the waves of the Aegean Sea while Circe’s craft is spelled out by the “weave” of the waves. A more complex series of associations occur in the justified block of text that forms part of the poem. form from form from form from form ‘play’d by the picture of No–body’ whose bright stripes & broad stars pinpointeddyshuttlecrossroadssword (a-hinged-magnetic-up-and-down-on) all a bowed honeycomb space become With a cadence suggestive of the repetitive motion of the loom or sewing, the first line (that originally appeared in Songs of the Earth) rehearses the idea of “looped” time with form emerging from, or begetting, form indefinitely.11 And, in keeping with the “loom” of the opening line and theme of weaving, one way of making sense of this collage “form” is to see it as a blanket or piece of stitched, woven fabric. Indeed, the italicized paraphrase of lyrics from “The Stars and Stripes” suggests that this is a flag. The words “pin,” and “pinpoint” (recalling the sole period or interpunct that precedes the blanket of collaged text in “BEAM 5”) relate to sewing and weaving, as does “eddy,” which suggests the forward–backward motion of the “shuttle,” as well as the tidal flux of the Aegean Sea. Additionally, there is “cross,” which represents the threaded trajectories of the warp and the woof—“the x of the instant”—as well as the trajectory of both shuttle and ship. Duncan, notably, conflates the shuttle and ship in “At the Loom.”12 But “BEAM 5” suggests other kinds of crossings with “crossroads,” evoking Hermes, god




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of the herm and crossroads. Indeed, in Book X of the Odyssey, Odysseus recounts how “Hermes god of the golden wand / crossed [his] path,” giving him the moly herb as an antidote to Circe’s “subtle craft.”13 The theme of magic is also reiterated by the quote from The Tempest (“ ‘play’d by the picture of No–body’ ”), which proposes another instance of island enchantment and exile. The fundamental difference in reading Canto XXXIX and “BEAM 5” is that Johnson does not presume that his reader knows their Homer; neither does he make it a prerequisite for understanding his poem. Although familiarity with the Odyssey does illuminate some of the text’s nuances, as we have seen, the poem largely operates via a more straightforward set of associations. Simply by recognizing the significance of the loom in “BEAM 5” enables a satisfying, if not exhaustive, reading of the poem. Thus, when (in the North Point edition) Johnson pastes snippets of sheet music denoting a flat key signature toward the end of his poem, there is no urgency to identify the piece of music. Despite the implication being that it is Bach (an implication reinforced by the arrangement of flats, each of which resembles a lowercase “b”), in the wider context of the poem’s theme of weaving we simply need to note how the treble clef approximates a shuttle and the interlacing flats in the staves suggest the loom’s warp and woof. Clearly, “BEAM 5” is not making claims about Odysseus being a man of unusual genius or the Odyssey being a foundational text of Western culture. Indeed, where gnosis is the privilege of a select and exceptional few in The Cantos, in “BEAM 5” gnosis takes on more humble proportions. This is particulalry apparent in the poem’s concluding lines: Ear (solar) in Bosch of metanoias—nose to nose Is, Is, Is. (noise) Polyphony of epiphanies Punning on knows (“nose”) and gnosis (“nose Is”), with “Bosch” (which recalls the colloquial “bosh,” meaning “nonsense”) Johnson implies that it is via the discerning ear that gnosis and metanoia—the changing of one’s mind—occurs. From Eye to Ear Although “BEAM 5” demonstrates the general bricolage poetics Johnson practices throughout the three books of ARK, a metanoia of sorts occurs in “The Spires” and “The Ramparts” as the visual emphasis of “The Foundations” gives way for a regard for the creative possibilities—the



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noise and non-sense—of wordplay. The pronounced visual qualities of “The Foundations” diminish in ARK ’s last two books as Johnson becomes increasingly interested in the aural capacity of language. Thus, emphasis shifts in “The Spires” and “The Ramparts” from sight and what Pound calls “Phanopoeia” to sound and intellect (“Melopoeia” and “Logopoeia”).14 “To begin writing ARK,” Johnson explains in “Up Till Now,” “I started with Pound’s gleaning from the Greeks that poetry was composed of Logopoeia, Phanopoeia, and Melopoeia, which gave me a trinity of The Eye, The Ear, and The Mind” (U 119). Indeed, Johnson’s schema approximates those of Pound and Zukofsky:

Pound

Zukofsky

Johnson

Phanopoeia

Sight

The Eye (The Foundations)

Melopoeia

Sound

The Ear (The Spires)

Logopoeia

Intellection

The Mind (The Ramparts)

“The Foundations” ’ concern with “The Eye” and sight—what Pound calls “the casting of images upon the visual imagination”—gives way to sound and “The Ear” in “The Spires,” “wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property,” and finally, in “The Ramparts,” to intellection, “The Mind”: “the dance of the intellect among words.”15 From this schema, it is evident how the early imagistic properties of Johnson’s work are, to a degree, in “The Spires” and “The Ramparts” “left behind for a less material lyricism,” as Jena Osman proposes: “The lyre—with its utopian drive to express beyond material circumstance—begins to absorb the letter” (RJ 230). It is at this point in Johnson’s poetics that Zukofsky assumes a more central role in ARK, helping Johnson achieve his own “upper limit music.” Johnson’s shifting attention from The Eye to The Ear and The Mind reflects a wider shift in late twentieth-century American poetics. According to Marjorie Perloff, a great deal of the poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, particularly that associated with the Language Poets, moves away from the Poundian emphasis on the visual, in which “the role of the syntax is [. . .] subordinated to that of the Image,” to engage the specifics of language itself.16 “Image as the dominant gives way to syntax,” Perloff proposes: “[I]n Poundian terms, the turn is from phanopoeia to logopoiea. ‘Making strange’




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now occurs at the level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the image cluster.”17 Johnson’s “many-focused poetry” makes a similar move. In “The Spires” and “The Ramparts” the emphasis, as Johnson indicates in a covering letter for one of his Xero Ox booklets, is “language itself.” The theme of ARK is that of the language itself, as a thing which could be examined as galaxies, through a telescope, or matter through electron microscope. Though the text necessarily spirals and impacts, it is always informed by music, and nowhere does it require arcane learning like The Cantos, Maximus, “A”, etc.18 Still seeing it as “a thing which could be examined as galaxies, through a telescope, or matter through electron,” Johnson never completely abandons his longstanding interest in the visual properties of language. More than ever, however, Johnson is interested in language at the level of syntax. The visual epistemology of Pound’s ideogrammic method underscoring The Book of the Green Man, for example, is superseded by a concern for the aural qualities of language. We can see this is in the way that textual qualities of ARK are increasingly refined across the last two books. The visual effects of “The Foundations”—its images, concrete poems, italics, and capitals—are not so prominent in “The Spires” (which, notably, includes “ARK 38”: “the invisible Spire”) and, by “The Ramparts,” have vanished almost entirely. A “mosaic of Cosmos” Both Louis Zukofsky and Marianne Moore provide Johnson valuable collage models that encourage further reassessment of the referential purpose of quotation as perpetuating an exclusively “high” cultural canon. Zukofsky’s reconception of history as a perpetually open contingent in “A”-22 and “A”-23 offers Johnson strategies for fulfilling his own aspirations in ARK to write a poem “without history” (RJ 563), whereas Moore’s use of noncanonical material in her quoting poems becomes an important precursor for the egalitarian and democratically eclectic bricolage of “The Spires” and “The Ramparts.” Moore and Zukofsky have both described their poetry in terms of mosaic. Moore, in her essay “Idiosyncrasy and Technique,” describes her poetry as “a mosaic of quotations.”19 And Zukofsky, in “A”-12, proposes sound as being akin to mosaic.20 The implications of this mosaic of sound, however, are heard most clearly in “A” ’s later movements: “A”-22 and “A”-23. As well as anticipating Julia Kristeva’s assertion in “Word, Dialogue, Novel” that “any



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text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations,” both Moore and Zukofsky’s sense of mosaic dovetail with Johnson’s description of ARK as a “mosaic of Cosmos” (“ARK 99”).21 In his interview with Peter O’Leary, Johnson uses the analogy of mosaic again, this time emphasizing the close associations it holds with vernacular art and bricolage. I wanted [“The Ramparts”] to be constructed in a way so that I could get a source anywhere, from any source whatsoever, a word spoken, a word read, a sight, whatever, so that I could make a mosaic out of it. (RJ 564) But why the word “mosaic” rather than “collage”? Partly because all three poets position themselves on the periphery of Pound’s and Eliot’s high modernism. If The Cantos and The Waste Land are understood as pedagogic exercises whereby the reader is “educated” by researching the poems’ references, then mosaic suggests an intertextuality concerned with surface, texture, and encrustation rather than contextual or hermeneutical depth. With mosaic what you see is what you get: a collection of raw materials forming new aesthetic configurations. Mosaic implies ornamentation, adornment, and aesthetics: color, texture, design, and pattern. As the etymology suggests, the idea of mosaic as a cosmetic principle adumbrates Johnson’s cosmographies in ARK, encouraging us to read Johnson’s “mosaic of Cosmos” with the faux-naïf eyes of Transcendentalism. Those same eyes that, in The Book of the Green Man, are not only “cleansed of stupidity and indifference” (V 11), as Guy Davenport writes, in ARK are also cleansed of the overbearing ideological agendas implicated in Pound’s poem “containing history.”22 With eyes cleansed one can, to quote James Hillman, “enter the world without preconceptions, startled by the phenomena where everything is given and nothing taken for granted.”23 This is a crucial factor in ARK ’s Adamic aspirations as the shards and fragments cemented into ARK ’s mosaic become “cosmetically adorned, an aesthetic event for the senses” and “instruments of imagining.”24 Cosmetic adornment and an emphasis on surface rather than depth, suggested by Johnson’s description of ARK as “mosaic of Cosmos,” might imply that ARK attempts to transcend or escape history. Johnson’s claim that ARK is a poem “without history” certainly encourages such a presumption. But can a poem constructed largely out of things in Johnson’s time be as innocent of history as he supposes? Of course, the answer is “no.” If Johnson really wanted ARK to be “without history,” he would not have constructed it out of found material. Therefore, R. Bruce Elder’s belief that Johnson’s attitude toward history is a way of getting back to an “authentic individual self”




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is problematic. In ARK, Elder writes, Johnson “wanted to separate himself from [the] ambition” of writing an epic containing history, and instead “get behind the distortions of history and back to the authentic individual self.”25 The problem with this idea, however, is that it does not take into account the extent to which ARK ’s material contributes to shaping the “self” the poem constructs. ARK is without his story because Johnson does not adopt an epic persona in the manner that Pound adopts Odysseus or Olson adopts Maximus to articulate an overarching mythic narrative structure. Although there are, as Mark Scroggins points out, “a cluster of themes and stories [that] Johnson alludes to and retreats from” in ARK, none of them actually dominate the poem as an arch narrative (RJ 11). ARK ’s allusions to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the Odyssey, Old Testament Books and Baum’s series of Oz stories become, like everything else, glittering tesserae in the poem’s mosaic. For ARK, as Johnson tells O’Leary, “doesn’t have a story”: “It doesn’t have a history. It just lists a few things” (RJ 577). Johnson’s use of the word “history” is further complicated by the preposition, “without,” which suggests ARK is somehow ignorant of history, lacks it, or is oblivious to it. But “without” also suggests that ARK is situated beyond or outside history. Both meanings are relevant for the position Johnson assumes in relation to history. What is especially apparent is that Johnson wants to situate ARK in the present moment, as “ARK 34, Spire on the Death of L.Z.” makes clear: this is paradise this is happening on the surface of a bubble time and again The repetition of “this” emphasizes the present moment, which, while ephemeral and transitory, “happening / on the surface of a bubble,” is also continually occurring “time and again” in the plenum of phenomena. Emphasis on the present moment—on “this”—reasserts the Adamic stance that Johnson advances throughout his work. Indeed, this innocent, faux-naïf emphasis on the present is reaffirmed in Johnson’s interview with O’Leary, when he misattributes to Olson Pound’s remark that an epic is “a poem containing history”: Olson said that an epic is a poem with history. Zukofsky put a lot of contemporary history and Marxist politics into his poem. William Carlos



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Williams had a topography, a history of all of the people around him, you know, kind of a Whitman, he was a new Whitman. But I thought that ARK would be like the Watts Towers, like the Ideal Palace of the Facteur Cheval. I wanted it to be without history, that it was constructed of things in my time. It’s just filled with snippets: things from books, things on television. When there was a good nature program on, sometimes I got a Rampart or two [laughs]. I keep my ears open and my eyes open and when I see or hear something I write it down in my notebook. (RJ 563) Johnson echoes Emerson’s belief that the near, the common, and the low can provide insight into the present moment. “Give me insight into to-day,” Emerson proposes, “and you may have the antique and future worlds” (N 102). This concern for the present, quotidian moment assumes considerable importance in Emerson’s theory that there is no history, only biography. The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history to which there is not somewhat a corresponding in his life. Everything tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. (N 152) Emerson places great emphasis on the present—on “this thought, this hour, this connection of events”—rather than on past historic ideals. 26 If history is to hold any significance or meaning for the individual, it must relate to, and communicate, the present moment. When constructed out “of things in my time,” and assembled out of such eclectic material phenomena—things from books, things on television, things overheard, things observed—history becomes a discourse founded on the contingencies of the present. Contemporary phenomena, imbued with universal resonance, are conditioned by the present moment. The emphasis placed on such phenomena by Emerson anticipates Zukofsky’s similar regard for the particulars of history, which, Bruce Comens notes, posits history “not as an object of discourse but as a construction of discourses.” 27 Emerson implies a similar notion, arguing that “history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming” (N 189). History is therefore defined by the present moment, not “without” it. It answers to, and is found within, as Emerson intimates, “this thought, this hour, this connection of events.”




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It is striking that Emerson’s idea of history’s “impertinence” should be paraphrased by Zukofsky in “A”-22 as part of his response to the problems he recognizes in high modernism.28 Like Johnson, Zukofsky questions the validity of Pound and his model of history as a measure for his own poetry. Prompted by “the aesthetic and political failures of modernism,” Edward Schelb believes that Zukofsky, from “A”-12 onward, establishes “a language resistant to the limits of history.”29 Burton Hatlen makes a similar point, claiming that where “the first ten sections of “A”, all written before World War II, are still essentially Poundian,” in his “postwar writings Zukofsky moves decisively beyond the modernist mode into a poetics of indeterminacy, interruption, and incompletion,” which is “signalled most clearly in “A”-12.”30 In relation to Johnson’s bricolage, however, it is the emptying of history’s names that marks another notable departure from Pound. By emptying history of names in “A”-22 and “A”-23, Zukofsky revises and reassesses Poundian ideas regarding the role of quotation, reference, and the cultural hegemonies they vivify. In this later work, emphasis is placed on the aural capacity of language with a scrupulous regard for the literal, nonreferential, quality of words as paramount. The literal regard for language in “A”-22 and “A”-23 adumbrates the faux-naïf, Adamic aspirations governing “The Spires” and “The Ramparts,” which is not surprising because Johnson draws considerably on Zukofsky’s later work to develop his own bricolage poetics, positing music, contingency, and nonreferential quotation as part of his own response to history. As early as 1974, Johnson was reading “A”-22 and “A”-23 with his ear: “I don’t understand any of Louis’ “A” 22–23,” he tells Alpert, “although I read it over and over for the sound” (RJ 557). Johnson never did make entire sense of Zukofsky’s work but continued to value its musical and prosodic achievements. “Louis became my last mentor, and the best for my purposes all in all,” Johnson writes in “Up Till Now”: Except for the late Bunting, I have learned most from Louis with Pound always in their background. His close boxing with the language, its giveand-take, is what I modelled my poetry in ARK to emulate (but always to make sense, which late Zuk often doesn’t). (U 113) By Zukofsky’s “close boxing with language,” Johnson refers to the truncated syntax, compression, and ellipses characteristic of Zukofsky’s poetry. It is also worth noting Johnson’s remark about Pound. That he never completely leaves Pound behind perhaps explains why his poetry still makes sense in a way that Zukofsky’s later poetry often does not. Despite the importance



Zukofsky, Music, History

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of Zukofsky—“I learned most, when all is said and done, from Louis Zukofsky,” Johnson writes in a letter to O’Leary, “He is the purest of the pure, and has an ear for music better perhaps than anyone of the century” (RJ 590)—Johnson never completely abandons the Poundian image and its ideogrammic epistemologies for Zukofsky’s pure word play. Nevertheless, from “Louis Zukofsky’s poetry (via Mallarmé)” Johnson “learned music and concision” (“A Note”). The influence of Zukofsky on ARK ’s music is clearly evident in the way Johnson’s own “magpie gleanings of song” are condensed and truncated in “The Ramparts.”31 More generally, the ellipses, compression, transliteration, and ambiguous syntax, particularly in “The Ramparts,” recall Zukofsky’s similar procedures in the later movements of “A”. “The Ramparts” are full of indelible lines such as “riddle iota sublime” (“ARK 76, Arches X ”) that recall the upper limits of Zukofsky’s music in “A”-22 and “A”-23. As does “ARK 95, Arches XXIX ”: arcade cadence arcade fabric, one fluted blaze nested set of cycles respond Recalling Zukofsky’s similar references to “A” in “A”-1 and “A”-23, Johnson inscribes compacted, self-reflexive puns (arcade: ark) into his poem.32 Johnson’s clipped syntax and extended use of alliteration, consonance, and assonance also bear comparison with similar lines from “A”-22 and “A”-23. As with the most musical moments in Johnson’s work, sound predominates sense. And the linguistic and syntactic instability that such attention on sound engenders in both poets’ work can lead to witty wordplay. Johnson punning on the names of Linnaeus and Webster, for example, in “BEAM 8”: “Line eye us. / Web stir us.” Or, Mercurius (the Latin name for Hermes) in “BEAM 16, The Voices”: “Mr. Curious Hermes,” which recalls Zukofsky’s pun on Hermes Trismegistus in “A”-13 and Pythagoras in “A”-22.33 How this influence of Zukofsky on Johnson’s poetry involves Stéphane Mallarmé is not immediately apparent. One possibility is the way the laconic aesthetics of “A”-22 and “A”-23 rehearse and extend Mallarmé’s theories about language. Although Zukofsky initially rejected Mallarmé’s symbolism, he eventually found the French poet’s literal approach to language instructive for his own poetry.34 Zukofsky’s reassessment of Mallarmé’s work is most apparent in “A”-19, which discretely quotes snippets of the Symbolist’s poetry and prose. But Mallarmé’s influence is evident in other ways. One idea expressed by Mallarmé that Zukofsky




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If the poem is to be pure, the poet’s voice must be stilled and the initiative taken by the words themselves which will be set in motion as they meet unequally in collision. And in one exchange of the gleam they will flame out like some glittering swath of fire sweeping over precious stones, and thus replace the audible breathing I in lyric poetry of old—replace the poet’s own personal and passionate control of verse.35 Mallarmé theorizes a poetry that purifies language of its everyday contexts and usages. Purified and set in motion, words exceed the “poet’s own personal and passionate control of verse” communicating meaning via juxtaposition, “collision,” and configuration. This is evident in the sonnet “Ses purs ongles,” which in a letter to the poet Henri Cazalis, Mallarmé describes as “inverted”: [B]y which I mean that its meaning, if there is one (but I’d draw consolation for its lack of meaning from the dose of poetry it contains, at least in my view) is evoked by an internal mirage created by the words themselves.36 A pure language such as this, Roger Pearson proposes, requires that the everyday meanings of language become increasingly obscure as “Syllables break loose from their verbal context and, like the sibyls of old, call up the shades from an other, spirit world.”37 The diminishment of representational language does not mean the poem ceases to convey any meaning whatsoever. Rather, as Matthew Potolsky stresses, attention is directed “to the ‘surface’ of the text, to the play of words and syntactical ambiguities” of Mallarmé’s poetry.38 This emphasis on the surface of the text is also evident in the mosaiclike poetics Zukofsky fashions in “A”-22 and “A”-23. Indeed, it is possible to see Zukofsky in “A”-22 and “A”-23 close to realizing Mallarmé’s ideal poet who cedes initiative to words. For Zukofsky advances a poetics that, Kent Johnson suggests, dramatizes “language’s autonomous nature and its potential for reproducing beyond the conscious intentions of author and reader.”39 Zukofsky not only yields initiative to single words but also to phonemes, so that “the signified fully cohabits the sign of music.”40 As Tim Woods notes, this creates “a writing that is at once plastic art and language, spatialized and nonlinear, functioning by agglutinations, cementing



appears to expand upon in his own poetry is that the poet should yield initiative to words. Mallarmé famously proposes this in his 1896 essay, “Crise de Vers”:

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in one graphic code elements that are figurative, abstract, symbolic, and phonetic.”41 Mallarmé is undoubtedly implicated in the “Upper limit music” of “A” ’s later movements, which move far beyond the imagistic principles of Pound’s modernism. Zukofsky realizes a poetics that “insist[s] on the ‘surface’ of writing rather than the ‘depth’ of interpretation, and an ethical resistance to conceptual imposition” adumbrating the purifying “symbolisme” of Mallarmé.42 The “symbolist approach to language,” that Edward Schelb identifies in “A”-9, “generating patterns of sounds and a system of relations outside of logical conventions,” is developed extensively in “A”-22 and “A”-23.43 This is particularly so in “A”-22, when Zukofsky advocates simply reading the surface of a text—reading the words—rather than reading meanings into those words.44 Johnson reiterates such literal reading in The Round Earth on Flat Paper, claiming: Till recently, poetry, like prose, has been invisible. We can now make a line of poetry as visible as a row of trees. We may see, not through, but with the letters.45 The emphasis Zukofsky puts on the surface of writing is one way of resisting and inverting the hegemonic narratives and totalizing structures of high modernism and the discourses of history, more generally. Zukofsky hinted at this as early as 1946 when in his essay “Poetry / For My Son When He Can Read,” he questions high-modernist mythos by turning attention to the small, humble words: “the” and “a.”46 For Zukofsky these little words carry as much significance and weight as the bigger words synonymous with modernism’s grand narratives and hegemonic visions. Zukofsky, however, is not proposing a simple reduction of language but a reassessment of its smallest components. In their capacity as grammatical determiners, the and a carry immense weight when it comes to establishing (and disestablishing) the meaning and sense of the bigger words underpinning grand narratives. Zukofsky reminds us that all narrative, big or small, rests on the ordering and arrangement of words, something all too easily forgotten when, for example, Pound is rallying against usury in The Cantos. A literal response to language, as Zukofsky proposes, draws attention to the multiplicity, ambiguity, and polyvalence of letters and words set in contiguous relation to one another. If words are responsible for constructing totalizing structures, then they are also responsible for undoing them. Language, as Zukofsky sees it, remains indefinite and irresolute. A literal response to language highlights this indeterminacy, encouraging a reconsideration of the ideological and teleological roles of language and representation.




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The questioning resistance to modernism’s “coercive relations toward nature, language, and history” is realized most fully in “A”-22 and “A”-23, which Schelb calls Zukofsky’s “glorious songs of forgetting.”47 What Zukofsky “forgets” in these poems is history. This is particularly evident in “A”-22 when Zukofsky paraphrases Emerson’s claim in “Self-Reliance” that “history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming” (N 189).48 Deriving from the Latin, impertinent (“not having reference to”), the word “impertinence” resonates considerably in “A”-22 and “A”-23, which endeavor to abandon reference and the hegemony of literary history and tradition. Stripped of history’s names, Zukofsky’s transplanted material is relieved of the pedagogical and ideological burdens that Pound’s citations bear in The Cantos. This does not mean that history is entirely absent from “A”-22 and “A”-23. “A”-22 obliquely relates a natural history of the earth, and “A”-23 takes the history of language as it subject. Zukofsky’s is not a Poundian history of ideas but a natural history of the interactions and correspondences that occur in the histories of earth and language. History is inscribed in “A”-22 and “A”-23, but it inhabits Zukofsky’s poems as the sediments of sound and sense that have been compacted over thousands of years, just like the ossified strata and linguistic marl disclosed in “A”-22. Zukofsky’s emptying of names in “A”-22 and “A”-23 also operates at a semantic level with the impertinence of history’s names occurring in all of the poems’ signs and signifiers, not just the quoted material. When reading these poems, all that is left (as in a Mallarmé poem) are words. No ideas in things, as Williams would have, but simply words. Words creating, what Comens calls, a “weave between referent and product, between text and world.”49 Indeed, the semantic scope of “A”-22 and “A”-23 is opened up by the texts’ refusal to refer to any single external idea of order. As Scroggins notes, in “A”-22 and “A”-23 we have to construct meaning by a focused, wordby-word, phrase-by-phrase reading of poems where syntax “has been largely disrupted, rendered tenuous, ambiguous, and continuously provisional.”50 Again, the emphasis here is on a literal reading of the two texts; reading of, not into, the words as they present themselves and correspond on the page. With little else to go on, we cede the initiative to the words. This literal process of reading is evident in the prologue to “A”-22, originally published as Initial by the Phoenix Book Shop in 1970. In the same year, the Unicorn Press in Santa Barbara published the first three lines of Initial as a postcard in blue upper case type on a yellow background. Notable in this section of “A”-22 is the reference to old fields.51 Zukofsky first used the phrase, “out of olde feldes,” forty years earlier as the epigraph to the First



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For out of olde feldes, as men saith, Cometh al this newe corn fro year to year; And out of old bokes, in good feith, Cometh al this new science that men lere.52 Chaucer articulates a favorite idea of the Transcendentalists; namely, that the new emerges from the recycling of the old, whether the remains of a corn harvest dying back into the field’s soil to provide rich nutriment for the successive harvest, or the content of old books providing an equally nourishing loam for the writer to draw from. In both cases, the past feeds and nourishes the present. It is an idea previously seen in Thoreau’s “Decayed literature” (BG 83) and intimated in the line, “form from form from form from form” in “BEAM 5.” But Zukofsky’s use of old books and decayed literature is far more covert and discrete in “A”-22. Books are permuted and transmuted in “A”-22 to such a degree they are barely recognizable. There are no quotation marks, italics, or other indications that any of the material in these lines from “A”-22 are quoted material. And when we do start to recognize certain phrases— Chaucer’s “old fields,” for example, or phrases from The Tempest: “let me live here ever, / sweet now, silence foison”—we are not given a wider context in which to understand them.53 In The Book of the Green Man, Johnson applies quotation to amplify a specific context, using, for example, a line from Herrick in the context of the Green Man and spring rites. The quotations refer back to a thematic context and explains their occurrence in the text. Zukofsky, however, does not provide a contextual backdrop within which to interpret either his or other people’s words. Instead, the text generates its own contexts through the contiguous relation of words. Chaucer’s “out of old fields” only begins to achieve meaning when read in relation to proximate words. Words begin forming their own constellations of significance without resorting to conventional discursive notions of reference and signification. Turning attention back to Zukofsky’s use of Chaucer, it is evident the extent to which the interactions of sight and sound operate in “A”-22. Chaucer’s “out of old fields” elucidates Zukofsky’s curious line about “scapes” welcoming young birds. An initial impulse is to read the word “scapes” as an abbreviation of landscapes. Thus, landscapes are seen as welcoming young birds flocking to feed in freshly harvested fields. If we look to Chaucer’s own text for a clue about Zukofsky’s poem, then we might find some affirmation



Movement of Poem beginning “The”. The line is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules:

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in his description of “Foul that lyvth by seed sat on the grene / And that so fele, that wondyr was to sene.”54 But this reference is not necessary because “scape” also denotes the stalk of a plant as well as the hollow stem of a bird’s feather. The word therefore, explicates itself, its definition amplifying the previous lines in Zukofsky’s text. Thus, Zukofsky’s line suggests birds feeding among the stubble—the cut stalks of cereal plants—remaining in fields after harvest. The sense of “scapes” as plant stems is further amplified by the suggestion of a yellow (harvested) field set against a blue sky—implicit in Zukofsky’s references to blue and yellow—and subsequent allusions to grain and weed in Initial. “Scapes” also encourages us to read the word “read” homophonically as “reed,” which is another hollow plant stalk found growing in marshy ground or water. Thus, the poem moves from air to water in the obscure line proposing swimming near to and reading weeds. Reeds also have strong associations with music, denoting rustic musical pipes made from reeds or straw, as well as contemporary wind instruments, such as clarinets and saxophones, played with vibrating mouthpieces called “reeds.” Therefore, the blue that is blown up in a yellow backdrop, as well as suggesting a field and Zukofsky’s “chromographic specifications” for the Unicorn Press postcard “An,” also carries musical implications.55 At the very least, it amplifies the aerial motif playing throughout “A”-22’s Initial. This is evident in the word “era” initiating “A”-22 that connects, etymologically via the Latin aer, with air. This aerial element is conspicuous throughout the poem; it is in the references to birds (which in their flight patterns augur the good omens to which Zukofsky’s text alludes); in the verb “blow”; in the suggestion of wind/reed instruments; and, by extension, the ear (permuted in the words “era” and “years”) that hears such music. Michele Leggott notes that “tangled up in aera” (the Latin root of “era”) is the Greek aira, meaning “a weed among grain.”56 Therefore, Comens proposes, Zukofsky’s allusion to blue in “A”-22’s Initial also “refer[s] to a weed growing in the [yellow] field.”57 Thus, a network of correspondence gradually reveals itself through the words themselves: through their etymology, phonemes, homophones, and the syntactical ambiguities they create in proximity with one another. In this manner Johnson learns music and concision from Zukofsky via Mallarmé. But as well as helping Johnson achieve a Pateresque condition of music in “The Spires” and “The Ramparts” that abolishes distinctions between form and content, Zukofsky’s example also furthers Johnson’s Adamic aspirations in ARK. Johnson resists the pure sonic complexities of “A”-22 and “A”-23 because he still wants to “make sense.” Nevertheless, Zukofsky’s music offers a way of emphasizing the literal qualities of things and thinking with them in the exigencies of the given moment.



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Zukofsky is also important for Johnson in the way that his emphasis on contingency and process offers a useful alternative to Pound’s static, totalizing poetic model. Just how Johnson favors the Zukofskian model is evident in “A Note,” which is perhaps Johnson’s most focused assessment of the Poundian tradition. Achieving poetic maturity in the wake of what Robert Creeley calls the “great works of the century”—Pound’s Cantos, Zukofsky’s “A”, Olson’s Maximus and Duncan’s Passages—ARK ’s bricolage poetics not only offers Johnson a way of asserting his poem’s unique position within that “great” tradition, but also a way of avoiding the overbearing influence of those other poems.58 Johnson’s ambivalent regard for these great works of the century is conspicuous in “A Note” when he situates ARK within a Poundian tradition. To spend twenty odd years writing a poem, undeterred by risks and shipwrecks of those before, would seem sheer folly. They stand before me, great obstacles. Pound, only a long afternoon in Venice, waving his cane farewell in sparkling background the canal he associated with the writing of A Lume Spento . . . W.C.W. maybe a half-dozen visits to Rutherford, when a student at Columbia, rife with sparky theories for the American vernacular . . . More closely, Zukofsky and Olson, braving new schemes for language—the Minimalist and the Maximus—such opposing poles of influence: parities. The lineage Johnson reverently sketches out comes as no great surprise. What is surprising, however, is his critical assessment of that tradition. Johnson proposes his modernist confreres as “obstacles” that need to be confronted in order to write his epic equivalent. There is a suggestion of Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence in Johnson’s remarks, albeit without the Oedipal struggles. Johnson, after all, sees Pound, Williams, Olson, and Zukofsky as “confreres” rather than authoritarian father figures. But despite the affectionate respect he shows for these precursors, he still executes what Bloom, after Lucretius’s De rerum natura, calls the clinamen. By “swerving” away from their precursors’ poetry to assert their own, Bloom compares the poet’s move to the clinamen, the term used by Lucretius for describing the infinitesimal and unpredictable swervings and collisions of atoms. Without the clinamen, “the tiniest swerve / Of seeds, at random points in space and time,” nothing would have been created.59 Following Bloom’s reasoning, the clinamen is Johnson’s “corrective movement” in ARK, implying that the precursor poems of Pound and company “went accurately up to a certain point,



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but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem [i.e., ARK ] moves.”60 As Johnson sees it, the “risks” that his confreres took with their epic poems did not pay off. What resulted instead were various “shipwrecks”: perhaps most dramatic of all, Pound, in The Cantos, losing his center “fighting the world” (C 32). But all the long poems that Johnson cites as important precursors display to varying degrees specialized, arcane learning that has created considerable “obstacles” for their readers. “Well, we’ve got Olson and Zukofsky,” Johnson tells O’Leary, “Pound and whatever and William Carlos Williams—and of course then he decided that he had to do another piece and it set it off-kilter—and Pound bogged down before he got there because he misread Chinese. And I don’t know about Louis. I think Louis maybe has gotten it all there, if you can ever figure out what’s there” (RJ 561). For these reasons Johnson swerves away from this company to assert his own maverick spirit: But I knew I’d my own tack to take. If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning, to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. (“A Note”) Johnson’s “corrective” to his confreres is to adopt and sustain a faux-naïf “will to create,” modeled on the examples previously seen in the work of vernacular artists such as Simon Rodia and “the real Transcendentalism” that Davenport identifies in his introduction to Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses (V 14). This puts ARK at opposite poles to The Cantos. Johnson’s “desire to start all over again” and begin from scratch as if time did not exist, contrasts markedly with Pound’s attempts in The Cantos to retrieve a European culture that he believes has gone to hell. By the time of Donald Hall’s interview with Pound in 1967, The Cantos had floundered on its own risks, errors, and “muddles,” and Pound had been incarcerated at St. Elizabeths in Washington. Thus, there is pathetic poignancy in Pound’s self-pitying remarks: If I am being “crucified for an idea”—that is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever other cultures in whatever universality.61 Where Pound is retrospective in The Cantos, keen to retain the “best qualities” of a European culture in decline and ruin, Johnson’s scope is wide-eyed, 10.1057/9780230115552 - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, Ross Hair


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contingent, prospective, and keen, as Johnson writes in “ARK 53, Starspire,” to “Conjure lesson / from the / ground up.” Conjuring lessons from the ground up involves rethinking the role history might play in ARK. To reiterate, in response to Pound’s definition of the epic as “a poem containing history,” Johnson defines ARK as a poem “without history” (RJ 563). Of course, ARK does contain history. Indeed, it is built out of it. But in Johnson’s use, the word “history” becomes a shorthand term for the methods and values implicated by Pound’s quoting strategies in The Cantos. Unlike Pound, Johnson does not reference his sources in ARK in order to inscribe an elite cultural ideal or instruct and educate his reader. Taking his cues from Zukofsky and Moore, Johnson quotes with an egalitarian regard for the intrinsic aesthetic qualities of the material fragments he cements into “The Spires” and “The Ramparts.” Where for Pound such gnosis was the privilege of a select few—those men of unusual genius—in ARK it is there for everyone. In this respect, Johnson comes closer to Williams’s “American vernacular” than he does Pound’s aristocracy of emotion. This is particularly evident in “ARK 96, Arches XXX.” Condensing the gist of Williams’s “The Red Wheel Barrow” from Spring and All into one line, Johnson writes: truths to the World’s edge grace amazing tell outside the door red wheelbarrow glint rain, Anyone might see it let up the blinds In the most quotidian moments and humble everyday images—a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain, for example—and in the most demotic language and reference points—in this instance, the hymn “Amazing Grace”—“Anyone might see” Paradise or “The New Jerusalem” (“ARK 98, Arches XXXII”). It is the “Everyman who attempts creative quest” (“A Note”)—the Rodias and Chevals who have constructed their homemade cosmologies to articulate the ineffable and give it, quite literally, “A local habitation and a name”—that concerns Johnson.62 In “ARK 99” we are presented with a “Fanfare for the Common Man” (which is the title of a composition by the American composer Aaron Copland) composed largely out of vernacular Americana including popular and patriotic hymns and Fourth of July celebrations, in the form of firework displays, and the “Oompapah!” of brass bands (“ARK 99”). Reflecting on ARK ’s Americana, Eric Selinger suggests: “To be at home in this poem we can’t set ourselves apart from these 10.1057/9780230115552 - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, Ross Hair



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pleasures; we can’t be too intellectual, too urbane,” stressing that “Johnson is hardly a pop-culture champion or levelling postmodernist” (RJ 332). As in Ives’s music, the demotic “Oompapah!” of the brass bands resounding in ARK interact comfortably with European art music of Mahler, Bach, and Mozart, without either comprising the integrity of the other. Marianne Moore’s “Mosaic of Quotations” Discussing the musical properties of “The Ramparts” Johnson tells O’Leary: “I tried to make the upper bound music and to make sense out of it. And in some cases I think I managed,” adding that “it’s nice too if you can see something too, along the way” (RJ 566). That final sentence indicates how Pound’s influence persists in the background of Johnson’s work. For a poet obsessed with vision and sight, to completely reject Pound’s ideogrammic methods would be surprising. Yet the egalitarian and democratic spirit of ARK runs counter to the elitist stance of Pound’s work. To implement Pound’s values would undermine ARK ’s own aspirations to engage and celebrate “Everyman.” It is this juncture between Poundian image and Zukofskian music that Moore’s poetry assumes significance in ARK ’s bricolage. Her work retains much of the visual emphasis Johnson values in Pound while also moving in a similar direction to Zukofsky’s in the later movements of “A”, being situated somewhere between the ideogrammic method of Pound and the pure “literal” music of Zukofsky. In Moore’s poetry, Hugh Kenner suggests, we see “the language flattened, the language exhibited, the language staunchly condensing information while frisking in enjoyment of its release from the obligation to do no more than inform.”63 Emphasizing the exhibited quality of her work, Kenner further claims that Moore’s “poems are not for the voice,” stressing that “she once said that she wrote them for people to look at.”64 Picking up on Kenner’s point (and also Williams’s ideas in Imaginations) that Moore’s poetry is for the eye rather than the voice, Gus Blaisdell proposes: “In the poetry of Marianne Moore we begin a shift in which words are pried away from the world, held up for inspection by the eye alone.”65 Blaisdell calls this way of “looking at words and poems as things occurring on the page” Moore’s “optical reification of the word”: Herein is the word, made of sound and breath, held up, imploding toward solidity in print, out there for the eyes’ regard (necessarily cyclopean): first, looked at; second, perhaps, listened to; no longer tasted; no longer felt in the throat, the heart, the chest, the stomach, “until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.”66



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Moore’s “optical reification” decontextualizes the word or phrase. Johnson did a similar thing in the early collage poems he made from “boxes and boxes of words and phrases cut from newspapers”: “They were better than the poems I was attempting to write at the time because I could divorce a word from context and see it more clearly” (RJ 546). But Moore’s own “optical reification of the word,” as Blaisdell sees it, is not simply a matter of divorcing salient words from their semantic contexts but also from their human, physiological context. Here, like the Language poets, Moore moves away from a speech-based poetics in order to examine language more scrupulously. Comparing this optical reification with modernist painting, Blaisdell proposes that “the word is now an object of the eye: judgement is immediate: look and see.”67 What the poet sees is language in the present moment or condition. “Clean, gather, assemble: poetry becomes fieldwork,” Blaisdell reasons, “an archaeology not in past cultures but in the immediate sediment that surrounds the poet.”68 This is an important implication of Moore’s work, which is repeated in Johnson’s bricolage sensibilities. Picking “up the rags of words in the abandoned alleys of language” and releasing words from prior obligations, Moore’s collage poetic questions the cultural hegemonies perpetuated by Pound and Eliot.69 Like Zukofsky, Moore finds history and epos in the modest humble phenomena of contemporary life, “the abandoned alleys of language” without feeling the need to raise them up to the status of “myth.” Moore’s quoting practices have been, as Kenner proposes, “a pivotal discovery of our age” and fundamental in the development of “a twentiethcentury American poetic.” 70 No doubt the poetic that Kenner has in mind is ostensibly the same as that delineated by Johnson in his interview with Barry Alpert: The history of collage has not yet been written. It’s central, I think, to understanding Eliot, Pound, Marianne Moore, W.C.W, and in other ways Zukofsky and Olson. They have all used chunks and snippets, artefacts and re-creations, past and present, to put another sense of time and space into poetry. (RJ 547) Moore was quick to realize that a found phrase becomes far more versatile when freed from the burden of reference. If attention is placed on the quote itself, rather than its author and provenance, it can assume new meaning and relate new ideas. What Kenner calls Moore’s “superb indifference to literary history” becomes a tactical way of negotiating the complexities of authority, tradition, and canon, and the means for asserting one’s own voice within such hegemonic systems of value.71




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Johnson recognizes in Moore a literary equivalent of what the self-taught artists realize in “found objects and honest cement” (U 116). Moore’s “sustained fascination with found and collected objects, and with processes of dislocation and mediation,” as Stacy Carson Hubbard describes, resonates with the trouvere mentality of the vernacular artist.72 It is not surprising that Moore admired Joseph Cornell’s work—which, in its use of found and salvaged material, displays similar qualities to much vernacular art—and maintained a correspondence with him from the 1940s to the 1960s.73 In this regard, Hugh Kenner’s description of Moore’s quotations as “found objects, slivers of excellence incorporated in to the assemblage” is especially apt.74 To be claiming Moore as a key influence on ARK may come as a surprise. Moore is not a name that appears readily in discussions about ARK. The familiar male names of Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, and Williams are more likely to come up, but along with Zukofsky, Moore is as equally important for Johnson’s poetics in the later stages of ARK. With the exception of Zukofsky—circa “A”-22 and “A”-23—it is Moore’s “mosaic of quotations” that Johnson’s bricolage most closely resembles, especially in its egalitarian drive to relieve quotation of historical and cultural burdens. If she is so important, why should Moore be absent from discussions concerning ARK ? Johnson offers an explanation his interview with O’Leary when he discusses the different types of long poem. Referring to The Cantos and Maximus, Johnson tells O’Leary that, “Those are the big examples, and ARK is going to come to join them” and then alludes to “other poems which are major poems that don’t take your whole life to understand,” citing Wallace Stevens’s “The Comedian as the Letter C” and Briggflatts as pertinent examples (RJ 562). Johnson stresses, “ARK is longer than those, longer than something like Briggflatts. Briggflatts should be compared to The Book of the Green Man” (RJ 562). These taxonomies of the long poem help explain why Moore has been overlooked as one of Johnson’s most important models. Moore has not written a poem of the same epic size and scope as her male contemporaries. Although “Marriage” comes close to an epic—particularly with its implicit references to Milton’s Paradise Lost—in terms of length, structure, and the organization of its material, it is a very different poem to The Cantos, Paterson, or Maximus. These taxonomies of the long poem are what Susan M. Schultz neglects to consider in her essay, “Grandmothers and Hunters: Ronald Johnson and Feminine Tradition,” when she claims: Johnson’s use of quotation resembles no other poet as much as Marianne Moore, it seems to me. Not only is her name left off the lists of Johnson’s influences, but it has not appeared until now in this essay. (RJ 151)



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Moore’s absence from Johnson’s discussions about ARK seems reasonable if we remember that ARK is a critical response to the “big examples” of modern American epic. Notably, Johnson doesn’t cite Poem Beginning “The”, Homage to Sextus Propertius, “The Kingfishers,” or “The Desert Music” as models for ARK. But beyond discussions concerning solely ARK, Johnson has repeatedly advocated the importance of Moore’s poetry. In his interview with Alpert, Johnson cites Moore (alongside Pound, Eliot, Williams, Olson, and Zukofsky) as an exemplar of modernist collage (RJ 547). Johnson also singles out Moore’s collage practices in his essay “Persistent Light on the Inviolably Forever Other”: If collage in both music and painting has become acceptable, and such writers as Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore have used it extensively—in Miss Moore’s case exclusively—it is curious that any writer’s use since has been suspect.75 Moore is also mentioned on no less than three occasions in “Hurrah for Euphony,” and praised by Johnson for her “stitched tapestries of rhyme and reason” and her “listing intersections of Dürer-like observation, in the guise of conversation.”76 Furthermore, in “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” Moore is one of the “the fellow poets aloft our time” Johnson acknowledges as “principal” Muses.77 When we start to acknowledge these references, along with his celebration in his essay “Six, Alas!” of Lorine Niedecker, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bowen, Louise Bogan, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Schultz’s belief that there is “the force of the repression of a female tradition” (RJ 141) in Johnson’s work invites reconsideration. Johnson makes a similar claim about his literary heroines in “Six, Alas!” as he does about his male “confreres” in “A Note”: “No matter what I or anyone else says,” Johnson writes, “they will remain adamant in the stream of time, rocks to be steered round (or else to land on and learn from).” 78 Thus, like Johnson’s “confreres” in “A Note,” these women writers are “obstacles” demanding respect and admiration. It is more constructive to assess Johnson’s acknowledgments of poets (not just women poets) by following Barbara Cole’s example. Arguing that Emily Dickinson is “one of the foremost influences on Johnson’s poetics,” Cole claims that the two poets are “linked most profoundly [. . .] by a shared poetics of determined indeterminacy” (RJ 117). Thus, influence is not simply acknowledged by overt referencing, but also inscribed in Johnson’s compositional methods and strategies. In the case of Moore, we do not have to




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look too hard to find evidence of her influence. Sometimes she is implicit in Johnson’s choice of word or image. The use of “katydid” in “ARK 34, Spire on the Death of L.Z.” “lights / executed in pure / katydid,” for example, recalls similar lines from “The Mind is An Enchanting Thing”: “the glaze on a / katydid wing / subdivided by the sun.” 79 And the cumulative effect of Johnson’s eclectic enumerations and his catalogue rhetoric in various Spires and Ramparts (“ARK 34,” “ARK 53, Starspire,” “ARK 55, The ABC Spire,” “ARK 83, Arches XVII,” “ARK 86, Arches XX, The Wreath,” and “ARK 88, Arches XXII, The Cave”), his evocations of “mind in orderly array” (“ARK 91, Arches XXV ”), and the evident pleasure cataloguing elicits for mustering “odd words in legion” (ARK 50, Adamspire”), recall the pleasure Moore shows for enumerating her own “menagerie of styles” in poems such as “An Octopus,” “The Jerboa,” “Those Various Scalpels,” and “Propriety.”80 Moore’s influence, Schultz claims, is most evident in Johnson’s quoting practices, which “resembles no other poet as much as Marianne Moore” (RJ 151). Schultz does not identify at what stage in Johnson’s writing this is the case, but the “The Spires” and “The Ramparts” seem likely. Moore’s influence occurs at the time that Johnson is most critical of Pound’s quoting practices in The Cantos and the elitism and pedagogy it implicates. In poems such as “Marriage” and “An Octopus” (both from 1923) and “The Jerboa” (1932), Moore presents a compelling alternative to the elitist agenda advanced in the quoting practices of Pound and Eliot. “Marriage,” like Zukofsky’s Poem Beginning “The”, is a critical response to The Waste Land whose publication preceded Moore’s “Marriage” by a year. Lorrayne Carroll, for example, suggests that the “shored fragments in Eliot’s poem, propping the ruins of a blasted [patriarchal] literary inheritance, adumbrate the multifarious quotations in ‘Marriage.’ ”81 As much as it is a comment on the institution of marriage, Moore’s poem also responds to Eliot’s high modernism. Moore’s situation within this tradition recalls Johnson’s in ARK. Both poets acknowledge the debt they owe to their peers, all the while trying to avoid the impositions those influences might incur. Moore, as John Slatin notes, “is constantly, though furtively, measuring the degrees of difference and affinity between herself and others,” and “left in the awkward position of having to disavow the debts she has incurred.82 One method of disavowal for Moore, just as it is for Johnson, is by adopting an attitude toward quotation that does not venerate a “high” literary and cultural tradition. Moore’s mosaic of quotation actually subverts such elitist privileging, Cristanne Miller notes, by quoting “more noncanonical than canonical, or even, literary sources—favoring newspapers, popular journalism, advertising, conversation, and private letters” and eschewing “the ostentatious multilingualism of Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s The Waste Land.”83 Miller



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adds more problematically that Moore’s “quoting also gives no elevation to her verse; it does not place the author in the context of a major tradition.”84 But as Lynn Keller argues, Moore in fact uses “quotations and allusions to demonstrate her right to a place within the established tradition,” singling out “a few figures she wishes respectfully to recognize as forbears or particular uses of language she wishes to establish as exemplary.”85 Nevertheless, Moore’s attitude to that tradition is never as rarefied as Eliot’s or Pound’s. Her willingness to assimilate material sourced from “high” culture with colloquial and popular material indicates that she is “influenced by materials that would ordinarily be snubbed by those who believe in influence and an elevated tradition.”86 The implication of Moore’s quoting practices is that the material used in a poem’s mosaic should not be restricted or prescribed by its provenance. Thus, Moore’s egalitarian approach to quotation levels all material to a core value. Any material, be it from “high” culture or the demotic, is valued in terms of its malleable capacities within a poem. This is especially evident in “An Octopus,” when Moore uses the Department of the Interior’s Rules and Regulations’ National Parks Portfolio to describe the principal subject of her poem, the fauna inhabiting Mt. Rainier. A kind of prelapsarian harmony is implicit in this description as Moore attributes to “bears, elk, deer, wolves, goats, and ducks,” as well as porcupines, rats, and beavers, a mutual property.87 Thus, Mt. Rainier possesses “merits of equal importance” for all its inhabitants, from the lowliest of rodents to the majestic bears, elk, deer, and wolves. The equality in “An Octopus” is mirrored by the diverse material Moore brings to the poem. This material, in addition to the National Parks Portfolio, includes articles from popular publications, the Illustrated London News and London Graphic, travel guides for the American and the Canadian Rockies, and a fragment of conversation “Overheard at the circus”—“They make a nice appearance don’t they?”—which are used to depict “the unegoistic action of the glaciers”: “ ‘They make a nice appearance, don’t they,’ / happy seeing nothing?”88 These humble fragments comfortably cohabit with more prestigious sources—John Ruskin, John Muir, and Cardinal Newman—just as the mighty and majestic bears and wolves share the mountain with humble rats, ducks, and goats. This attitude toward quotation contrasts markedly with Eliot and Pound’s borrowings that, Slatin argues, are limited and predetermined in terms of their use and significance within a poem: A phrase derived from Paradise Lost is after all a phrase from Paradise Lost, with (for Eliot in 1922) a 250-year tradition of commentary behind it; that line refers resolutely to Paradise Lost. But when Moore borrows an anonymous sentence from an anonymous government pamphlet, she




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Looking again at “An Octopus,” it is evident how Moore manipulates her quoted material to relieve it of its prescribed provenance. In the following passage, for example, Moore uses material sourced from both high and low culture to describe the trees of Mt. Rainier. The fir-trees, in “the magnitude of their root systems,” rise aloof from these maneuvers “creepy to behold,” austere specimens of our American royal families, “each like the shadow of the one beside it. The rock seems frail compared with their dark energy of life,”90 We might turn to Moore’s notes for “An Octopus” in order to learn where these quotations have originated. But even after consulting them, these questions still remain unanswered due to their casual nature. Moore states that the phrase “the magnitude of their root systems,” is from the nineteenth-century naturalist John Muir, but does not tell us from which Muir text the quotation is taken. The title in question is Our National Parks, first published in 1901, in which Muir discusses the Giant Redwood or Sequoia tree. Taking Muir out of context, Moore uses his words to describe the fir trees located on Mt. Rainier. Fiona Green points out that the Redwood has assumed considerable significance in the formation of America’s self-identity, “cited time and time again to underwrite the nation’s claims to antiquity, [and] prove America’s natural wonders equal to the man-made heritage of Europe.”91 Moore transposes the symbolic importance of the southern Redwood to the northern fir trees of Mt. Rainier, but nevertheless manages to “preserve that sense of nobility and antiquity Muir ascribed to the Big Tree.”92 This emphasis on natural history, the “austere specimens of our American royal families,” and the “ ‘grandeur and mass’ ” of Mt. Rainier, provides a significant contrast to the predominantly European cultural canon perpetuated by Eliot and Pound.93 The sense of a natural American grandeur and solidity that Moore proposes in “An Octopus” is further compounded by Ruskin’s description (in the fifth volume of Modern Painters) of Turner’s painting, The Source of the Arveron, and its depiction of a pine-clad glacier. Ruskin’s description of the trees, “each like the shadow of the one beside it. / The rock seems frail compared with their dark energy of life,” reasserts the notion that these trees are more stable than the ground they are rooted in. Their roots go deep, allowing



can make it allude to almost anything—even Paradise Lost—because she is not bound by either the reader’s expectations or her own ingrained respect for the cultural status of the text she quotes.89

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them to endure the “creepy” shifting maneuvers of the soil. Whereas Muir and Ruskin can be called prestigious literary sources, the phrase “creepy to behold,” that Moore includes in her mosaic of quotation is sourced from a more colloquial province; namely, an article by Francis Ward that appears in the August 11, 1923, issue of the Illustrated London News. Moore manipulates this material in such a way that line “creepy to behold,” denotes the shifting movement of soil and makes a statement on how America’s noble trees endure what is unstable and difficult to “behold.” Holding fast, these monarchs define the character and spirit of a nation, articulating its own claims to antiquity and nobility. In this brief passage from “An Octopus,” it is apparent how Moore’s poems do not, as Stacy Carson Hubbard stresses, “accrue resonance and complexity by metonymically calling up a recognizable context,” but “forego the nostalgia of restoration, opting instead for the construction of new meaning through extraction, arrangement, organization and cataloguing.”94 Thus, by changing the context, Moore changes the meaning of her material. Moore’s mixing of high culture with the colloquial and demotic is also evident in the statement beginning her notes accompanying “Marriage,” her poem written around the same time as “An Octopus”: “Statements that took my fancy which I tried to arrange plausibly.”95 There is an echo of the bricoleur or vernacular artist’s contingent acquisition of material in this remark which William Carlos Williams amplifies in his 1925 essay on Moore: The general effect is of a rise through the humanities, the sciences, without evading “thought,” through anything (if not everything) of the best of modern life; taking whatever there is at it comes, using it and leaving it drained of its pleasure, but otherwise undamaged.96 In “taking whatever there is as it comes” from “the best of modern life,” Moore collects her literary found objects with the resourceful opportunism of the bricoleur. Indeed, everything is of potential use: be it material scored from the sciences and humanities or from the demotic and vernacular environs of circuses and popular magazines. This deceptively casual approach to history and literary canon is a way of reassessing it, enabling Moore to promote a different value system to those advanced by Eliot and Pound. Indeed, Moore’s casual, self-effacing notes to “Marriage” and “An Octopus” contrast markedly with Eliot’s belief in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that one obtains tradition and the “historic sense” “by great labour.”97 As Keller notes, Moore “does not treat these quotations as treasured evidence of past cultural achievements; they are simply, as she says in ‘Poetry,’ the ‘raw




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materials’ of her art,” which reinforce “awareness of intertextuality rather than influence.”98

In a notebook from 1986, Johnson reflects that, “These notebooks are my lumberyard.”99 This comment demonstrates just how similar Johnson’s approach to quotation is to Moore’s. Both treat their material pragmatically as the raw materials for their poetry. Indeed, Johnson appropriates and develops the intertextual scope of Moore’s mosaic of quotation in order to address his own questions concerning influence, authority, and tradition in the American long poem. The notebooks Johnson kept while writing ARK ’s “Spires” and “Ramparts” shed considerable light on the changing nature of his collage poetics in the face of these questions. These notebooks bear notable similarities with Moore’s quoting practices, particularly her use of popular and demotic material and casual approach to reference and documentation. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, while working on the poems that would become “The Spires” and “The Ramparts,” Johnson used small, pocket-sized Hytone Memo books (approximately five inches by seven inches) of yellow ruled paper, which contrast with the book Johnson kept for his earlier collections, A Line of Poetry and The Book of the Green Man. For these, Johnson used a leather, ring-bound notebook, A5 in size, full of typed quotations sourced from the likes of Jung, Thoreau, Ruskin, John Clare, and Carl Sauer. This early notebook also contained a typed bibliography with later additions made in pen and pencil, which indicates that Johnson was keeping a careful record of his reading and referencing pertinent material for his poetry. Compared to the carefully typed notes in Johnson’s earlier notebook, the memo pads are full of scribbled notes and lines that later appear in ARK. For example, lines initially sketched in a notebook from around 1990: blown dandelion beyond the pale minutia sublime miraculous eclipse100 - reappear in “ARK 93, Arches XXVII,” dedicated to Jess: blown dandelion, soapbubble beyond the pale “miraculous eclipse”



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Of particular interest in this transition from notebook to poem is the way the line “miraculous eclipse” acquires quotation marks. Whether this is a found phrase is not entirely clear. One assumes that this refers to the “miraculous eclipse” believed to have occurred during Christ’s crucifixion. Johnson may have jotted the phrase in his notebook without bothering to add the quotation marks or he may have added them subsequently in order to emphasize that particular line or indicate its colloquial ubiquity. Either way, it is a strange addition. To add quotation marks to such a commonplace phrase seems unnecessary. But, whatever Johnson’s reason, this ambiguous use of quotation marks recalls Moore’s own inconsistencies in her quotations. As Hubbard points out with regard to “An Octopus,” “Moore’s quotations are themselves often not what they seem; she fails to set quotation marks around what some of the poem quotes, while placing marks around much of what has been rephrased, or telescoped into more workable rhythms.”101 As well as these prosodic reasons, the inconsistent quoting practices of Moore and Johnson also have the effect of confusing distinctions between original and replicated material, as well as undermining the emphasis commonly placed on identifying the provenance of quoted material. Johnson’s notebooks also contain a large amount of quotes, although these are never referenced with the same thoroughness as the earlier ring-bound notebook. Occasionally in the earlier “Foundations” notebooks dating from the mid 1970s, more details will accompany a quote. For example: “Darwin: ‘The tangled bank’ / p. 65 in Act of Creation” or “ ‘We must rise from history to / mystery . . . The presence in the present.’ / N. O. Brown p. 214 / Love’s Body.”102 Such referencing has largely disappeared in the later notebooks. For example, in a 1986 notebook, Johnson quotes William Blake. “I walked the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my finger” —Blake103 What is most important is the quote itself, not that Blake authored it or that it is found in Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake. An abridged version of this, in quotation marks, appears in “ARK 92, Arches XXVI” excised of any superfluous grammatical determiners—“the,” “and,” “my”— and with no reference to Blake. “I walked the other evening to the end of earth, touched sky with finger”




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The concision in this quote recall Zukofsky’s similar use of quotation in “A”-22 and “A”-23. For example, in “A”-22 Zukofsky quotes from Blake’s “A Vision of the Last Judgement”: “Poverty is the fool’s rod which at last is turned on his own back,” eliminating unnecessary discursive elements (prefixes, determiners, and adjectives) from Blake’s text.104 Stripped of anything that identifies it with Blake, Johnson’s quotation also recalls Moore in “Marriage” and “An Octopus.” Like Moore, Johnson is not concerned with duplicating his quotation but conveying the gist of it. In the context of “ARK 92,” Blake is used to convey a brooding supernatural sense of death and expiration: “dread apparition / . . . so knock The Messenger.” Proof and authenticity is not Johnson’s concern. Whether the quote derives from Blake, a popular novel, or a television advertisement is not the issue. What matters for Johnson is that the quote functions as raw material, literary lumber, for his poem. The casual approach to quotation that Johnson displays in “The Ramparts” and his notebooks reiterates William Carlos Williams’s claim in Paterson that, “Anything is good material for poetry.”105 A lesson, no doubt, that Williams learned from Moore. Nowhere is this sentiment more evident than in the later ARK notebooks that indicate just how much material Johnson was finding outside the literary canon. One source of material for Johnson is overheard conversations. In a 1994 notebook, Johnson records a fragment of a conversation: “overheard: ‘I cannot afford to think.’ ”106 Comments, often humorous and suggestive, made by Johnson’s partner Mario Pirami are also recorded in the later notebooks: “Mario: ‘I just want to be given a semicolon now and again.’ ”107 Other quotes come from popular figures such as Sarah Vaughan: “I have lots of problems—I just know how to get out of them.”108 Even Ronald Reagan appears in one notebook from the late 1980s: “ ‘And how stands the city on this winter night’ Jan 11, ’89 Reagan.”109 Jotted down as cryptic fragment and out of context, Reagan’s line sounds rather eloquent. Without Johnson’s note, “Jan 11, ’89 Reagan,” indicating its origins, one could be forgiven for thinking that this is Emerson or James. Johnson also records dialogue transposed from television in his notebooks. In one from 1986, Johnson notes, “T.V. ‘when music goes there is no revolution,’ ” which suggests MTV as well as musica mundana, the music of the spheres.110 In the same notebook Johnson scans a phrase from a television advert for Odor Eaters: from T.V.: “tamé fĕrócioŭs snéakĕr ódŏr” ↑ - and they call me . . .111



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Scanning the fragment’s iambs and trochees indicates that Johnson’s main interest is prosody. Perhaps it was the soft stresses in “sneaker” and “odor” that caught his attention, or the vowel rhymes in “ferocious” and “odor.” Although Johnson doesn’t use the quote in ARK, it does demonstrate his pragmatic use of quotation and demonstrates how a phrase changes with context. “Tame ferocious,” for example, becomes oxymoronic if “tame” is read as an adjective rather than a verb. Johnson’s scansion and the syntactic ambiguity that ensues from such truncation indicate that it is not solely semantic content that concerns him. “I simply listen for words to cement,” Johnson writes in one notebook, adding a quote from Goethe: “Architecture is frozen music.” This quote is, indeed, cemented into ARK. In “ARK 73, Arches VII” it appears condensed without quotations marks: “an architecture, music frozen.”112 Transfiguring History To fully grasp the implications of Johnson’s literary lumber we have to see the way it functions in ARK. One example occurs in “ARK 60, Fireworks I” when Johnson quotes Abraham Lincoln. “Will light us down to the latest generation” – Lincoln vast smithy spray ignite to day scribe sky, spark clay Lincoln’s message, delivered to Congress on December 1, 1862, reads: “The fiery trial through which we pass will light us; in honour or dishonour, down to the latest generation.” These, Lincoln’s concluding remarks concerning the ideals of the Union, articulate his speculations about the way those ideals will be perceived in history. The opening line is pertinent in the context of Johnson’s own conception of history in ARK. Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honour or dishonour, to the latest generation.113 Excising the moral subtext of Lincoln’s phrase—“in honour or dishonour”— Johnson manipulates the quote for the context of a fireworks display. The




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solemn urgency of Lincoln’s speech is diffused as the hazardous “fiery trial” of a political ideal becomes a display of pyrotechnics, perhaps, as part of Independence Day celebrations. The lines “Will light us down / to the latest generation” now suggest the momentary illumination of a night sky filled with exploding fireworks that “ignite to day.” But Lincoln also transfigures the fireworks into something revelatory, even apocalyptic, by evoking Adam. As well as suggesting a golem, the animated creature in Jewish folklore made from clay, Johnson’s phrase “spark clay” also recalls Adam who is formed from the earth. Thus, Lincoln’s words “latest generation” pertinently echo the generations of Adam enumerated in Genesis. Furthermore, the awe and wonder that the fireworks elicit not only become analogous for the kind of wonder witnessed by Adam—the first human—but also imply that we all still retain something of that prelapsarian light within us. In “ARK 35, Spire Called Arm of the Moon” Johnson encourages this prelapsarian light to dawn once more by alluding to a staple of alchemical literature, the fifteenth-century tract Aurora Consurgens (The Rising Dawn), which, for a long time, was attributed to Thomas Aquinas. Become Adam, become his sparks and limbs. And you will see it too. Exact as Ezekiel amidst the long way back Aurora consurgens! “that the inwardes of my head be like the sun” I build. A similar process of transmutation and transfiguration is implicit in “ARK 60” so that spectators find themselves, to quote Johnson in “ARK 61, Fireworks II”: “back in the Garden / no Fall before.” With that enduring Adamic light illuminating “us down / to the latest generation,” it is still possible, Johnson suggests, “ ‘To do as Adam did’ ” and behold the world as if for the first time (“BEAM 30, The Garden”). Johnson’s bricolage encourages us to read ARK with innocent Adamic eyes. Although Johnson’s language is never “emptied of names” to the same extent as Zukofsky’s in “A”-22 and “A”-23, he still emphasizes a literal approach to language and quotation. Despite the clear reference to Lincoln in “ARK 60,” Johnson wants us to read the text without prescription. Johnson may be making an implicit statement about Lincoln as an American Adam, who, in his Message to Congress urges his country to think anew and act anew. He



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may also be using Lincoln to emphasise the patriotic nature of the Fireworks Arches. But these associations are secondary to the poem. Johnson is not implying that we need to read Lincoln in order to elucidate the poem; rather, we read Lincoln in the new, scintillating light Johnson’s poem offers. As Joel Bettridge notes, The Fireworks Arches act less “as the remembrance of the American Revolution or the sacred, official history of the country than they are as revelling in the energy of cultural experiences and common traditions” (RJ 355). These collective experiences are imbued with cosmological significance. But unlike Pound’s guarded allusions to the Eleusian mysteries in The Cantos, the spiritual dimensions Johnson evokes reside in common cultural experiences and customs. The gnosis Johnson advocates is not protected and withheld by a select few, as it is for Pound, but experienced by everyone. This is a point that Johnson expressed back in A Line of Poetry with “Emerson, On Goethe”: “The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; & every object covered over with hints” (V 49). One simply needs to train one’s eyes to see it and ARK, time and again, offers valuable examples for doing so. Indeed, ARK is something of a manual for seeing the world “exact as Ezekiel” and “lucid and Euclid” (“BEAM 20, Labyrinthus”). When one’s eyes are adjusted, as Johnson writes in “ARK 98, Arches XXXII,” the world is transfigured: frome byss to abyss all elements transfigured, give voice to prophecy The italicized line suggests the vocabulary used by Jacob Boehme who writes about the byss and abyss in Mysterium Magnum or An Exposition of the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (1623). The suggestion of esotericism continues with the strong suggestion of alchemy in its reference to “elements” (air, earth, water, fire) that would traditionally be “transfigured” in the alchemist’s alembic or crucible. The alchemist’s prima materia would undergo various stages of dissolution, taking it “ frome byss to abyss” and back again, as it underwent various processes including calcination, congelation, distillation, putrefaction, and sublimation.114 But these transfigured “elements” are also ARK ’s elements, the literary lumber with which it is constructed. Transfiguration is especially important in terms of Johnson’s attitude toward history in ARK. Meaning to transform into something more beautiful or spiritual, “transfigure” does not carry the suggestion of escape that a word such as “transcend” does. Indeed, ARK is a poem that repeatedly transfigures history but never gets beyond, or




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transgresses, its limits. History is always “midway between the absolute / and man” (“BEAM 11, Finial”). After all, how can one transcend what is continually being defined and understood in relation to one’s self and experiences? History may be transfigured and transvalued in ARK but it is never transcended. “count down for Lift Off” Transfigured history is evident in the changes that Johnson’s “frozen architecture” undergoes in ARK ’s concluding Arches. We may recall that Johnson initially conceived ARK as “a kind of naïf architecture,” placed, “if place could be put, on those shelving prairies between Ashland and Dodge City, Kansas.”115 However, by “ARK 99, Arches XXXIII,” Johnson’s poem has become a spaceship, a space-age ark, with its sights set on the stars. ARK finishes anticipant and ready, counting down “for Lift Off.” The poem’s penultimate line, which quotes the Kansas state motto “ad astra per aspera” (“to the stars through difficulties”), reminds us that future horizons are conditioned by historic particulars in the present moment. Thus, “ad astra per aspera” not only reasserts Johnson’s own Kansas origins—his story—but also stresses that ARK ’s celestial trajectory is anything but a transcendent escape from the “difficulties” of the present moment. So why this shift from a fixed, albeit hypothetical, locale in Kansas to an ambiguous locale somewhere in outer space? This has to do partly with Johnson’s assessment of history. If history is understood as a contingent construction of multiple discourses, ARK ’s “frozen music” could actually compromise and undermine those very discourses, cementing them into one totalizing structure or pattern. As Eric Keenaghan proposes, Johnson may very well have “desired to be in a present moment, but he did not want to be stranded there” (RJ 390). Such stranding would drastically counteract what Keenaghan sees as Johnson’s “radical humanism”: A radical humanism like Johnson’s presupposes that literature produces a future set of subjective relations, and so it implicitly questions, rather than merely preserves, social values and communal identity. (RJ 390) ARK ’s “frozen music” has to remain prospective and contingent if it is to maintain the possibility of future sets of relations. Unlike its physical material counterparts. The Watts Towers, The Ideal Palace, etc. Johnson’s trouvailles cannot afford to be set in cement too literally because the transfiguring Adamic epistemology that ARK repeatedly presents rests on prospect and possibility.



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As Johnson writes in a late notebook, circa 1995: “The artist or scientist or philosopher sets out to find something new in the world so the world will never be the same again, what Emily Dickinson calls: ‘a certain slant of light.’ ”116 To “set out” is key: What Johnson proposes is a voyage of discovery. But it is a voyage of discovery that also necessitates a certain level of preservation. This is especially evident in Johnson’s desire in “ARK 99” “to save mankind, and the animal and vegetable and mineral world” (RJ 564). Johnson tells O’Leary: “I set off on a kind of science fiction, kind of like building a time capsule of everything that I’ve heard and seen, to go out to the dark, to the stars” (RJ 564). To “remake mankind,” on one level, implies re-membering mankind and recalls the figure of Adam Kadmon that Johnson introduced in “BEAM 10.” As Robert Duncan writes in “Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife,” Adam Kadmon is “the Adam in whom all the species have their identity. In the traditions of the Jewish Kabbala, this Adam falls apart into the lives of all men, his identity hidden in our identities.”117 Likewise, to “remake mankind” is to see and gather the shards and fragments of that lost cosmological reality as they occur in the present moment. However, this is not another instance of modernist anxiety and the shoring of fragments against ruin. According to Keenaghan, “The world that Johnson’s poetry offers us in not rooted in a present he seeks to preserve,” but in fact proposes “some future world” (“RJ 391). Although ARK ultimately aims for “Dawn in Erewhon” as “BEAM 29” stresses, that future “nowhere” is inextricably rooted in the present world “now here”: no where now here no where now here It is only in temporal ambiguity, situated somewhere between present time and futurity that historic “particulars evolve” (“BEAM 29”). Futurity and the present are dependent on each other. The same temporal principle of transfiguration articulates Johnson’s quoting practices in “The Ramparts.” Lincoln, for example, is at once “now here” in a specific historic/cultural context and “nowhere” transfigured as timeless Adamic revelation. Likewise, the “upper bound music” of “The Ramparts” also proceeds along a similar principle of simultaneity. “I just tried to reach for lines that have at least two meanings and have a balance,” Johnson tells O’Leary (RJ 566). And as he writes in “BEAM 25, A Bicentennial Hymn”: “(all meaning is an angle).” Just as it is for the quantum physicist observing




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Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (that it is impossible to observe the location of an atom and know how it is moving simultaneously), the light that ARK sheds on the present moment and its anticipated future also depends upon the stance assumed in its “mosaic of Cosmos.” Although the “The Ramparts” conclude ARK with the upper limit music of “The Mind,” we have nevertheless come full circle—and we might recall Johnson’s belief that the universe is built on circles—back to the ocular imperatives initiated in A Line of Poetry and the belief that Paradise rests ultimately on the “situation of the eye” (V 20): ‘And where are you, Mr Johnson’? quoth the Matron, & I ‘I am, madame, here,’ I said, though it were much too simple a conviction for her, (V 71)



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Felix Culpa: Innocence and Renewal

All Bliss Consists in this; To do as Adam did; —Thomas Traherne, “The Apostasy”1 . . . and the angel at the gate of Eden is viz-ability itself . . . —Stan Brakhage, “Angels”2

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ad it existed when he visited Cornwall with Jonathan Williams in 1965, Johnson would have found much to admire in the Eden Project. Located in a barren china clay pit, approximately sixtyfive yards deep with a ground space covering approximately 35 acres, the Eden project is testimony that it is possible to breed “Lilacs out of the dead land” and renew waste land.3 If the Project’s vast array of natural plant species and cultivars were not enough, then Johnson would certainly appreciate the massive biomes dominating the site, which are based on his friend R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome design. Johnson, we may recall, initially conceived Radi os as a geodesic dome roof, “a ceiling of light,” for ARK.4 But even without a geodesic Biome roofing it, ARK (and all of Johnson’s poetry more generally) can be seen as a kind of “Eden Project.” Like the site located outside St. Austell, ARK is a world in microcosm, a paean to the creative human spirit working with the processes and dynamics of a “more-than-human-world.”5 ARK reconnects us with that world and demonstrates that it is possible to achieve a renewal of basic, first things by facing the future, embracing or stepping out into futurity, with



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optimism and pragmatic resourcefulness. If nothing else, ARK demonstrates that from “A heap of broken images,” to quote Eliot, and in what Johnson calls “the congeries of word and light,” one can renew latent paradises and make the most barren soils once again fertile.6 Tim Smit, Chief Executive of the Eden Project, explaining the reason behind the project’s name, could almost be speaking about Johnson’s poetry when he writes: What drives us? Well, cynicism doesn’t seem to have made the world a better place, so we thought we’d try innocence. We chose the name Eden, not for religious reasons, but because we liked the idea that, if Man was thrown out of paradise for eating from the tree of knowledge, maybe the way to return was to eat more of the same.7 Smit makes an important point, distinguishing between innocence and ignorance. They are not the same. As I hope this book has demonstrated, innocence is not a moral condition in Johnson’s poetry, neither is it a religious one. Johnson’s poetry proposes innocence as an epistemological condition, denoting a way of experiencing and responding to the world of events without prescription. As bricoleurs such as Cheval and Rodia have demonstrated, innocence represents prospective scopes. Likewise, the innocence to which Johnson subscribes is one that necessitates making the most of out of a given situation by drawing on one’s own resources. As Davenport stresses, “it requires enormous resourcefulness, sureness of hand, clarity of vision, and genius” (V 14), not to mention pragmatism, contingency, and imagination. This innocence is the very tenet of the self-reliance underscoring Johnson’s poetics. Although it might suggest artlessness, simplicity, and naivety (particularly in the context of vernacular and folk art practices), innocence is not about being uninformed, unknowing, or unlearned. It was this kind of ignorance, after all, that got Adam and Eve into trouble. Barbara Cole, in her illuminating essay on “Johnson’s Dickinsonian Poetics of (Not) Choosing,” stresses this, proposing that “Johnson urges his readers to follow his example—and Dickinson’s before him—in more actively rejecting [biblical] stories like The Fall and The Flood that privilege ignorance, obedience, and inequality” (RJ 120). Indeed, we have seen evidence of this rebellious stance in “BEAM 2” when Johnson writes of a “balanced dissent: enlightenment—on abysm bent.” In his disagreement with what is assumedly official Biblical authority, we can hear the implications that ensue from such disobedience: descent and Fall. But it is a descent into enlightenment, making the poet something of a Lucifer—the “light-bearing,” thus enlightening, rebel of



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Like Dickinson, Johnson rejects the Edenic parable of the “chosen” who must submit to normalizing rules, opting instead for the rebellious courage of Eve who chooses multiplicity over singularity, complexity over simplicity. [. . .] Of course, the significant difference from Genesis—for both Dickinson’s verse and Johnson’s ARK—is that knowledge is not denied. Johnson invites his readers to wander through his garden of a poem, to taste freely, to know ambitiously all of the poems and books— the trees—growing within its leaves or pages. (RJ 127) Johnson opts for “knowledge as opposed to obedience,” Cole argues, “choosing multiplicities as opposed to mindless submission,” choosing “to build a new Eden, a new ARK as opposed to the same old ark that set sail before” (RJ 131). Or, to adopt Smit’s rhetoric, Johnson creates his Eden by eating from the tree of knowledge that precipitated such a happy Fall. Johnson’s Edenic situation can be compared to that of Elizabeth Bowen, one of the “six women writers, hardly unknown but alike disregarded at present by fashion” that Johnson “toasts” in his essay “Six, Alas!”8 Johnson cites Bowen’s editor, Spencer Curtis Brown: “What she saw was as an Eden in the seconds after the apple had been eaten, when Evil was known, immanent and unavoidable but while there was till awareness of what innocence had been.” This alone is reason for reading Elizabeth Bowen.9 Johnson’s work evokes a similar moment as Bowen’s, positing the possibility of renewing innocence in the material manifestations of the present moment. It is another instance of how Johnson, as Cole argues, “chooses multiplicity over singularity, complexity over simplicity.” Oscillating between the fallen present and a utopian futurity of plenitude, Johnson’s poetry refuses to choose between the two but maintains them in fruitful dialogue. This rich multiplicity underscores the opening lines of “ARK 85, Arches XIX,” which offer a gnomic and apposite summary of Johnson’s Eden project: Craft, to seek renewal askew all question & exit in resonance genesis



Heaven’s imposing orders. But as Cole sees it, such dissent aligns Johnson more with the figure of Eve than Adam, Lucifer, or Satan.

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These lines brilliantly encapsulate ARK ’s driving aspirations and the Edenic vision motivating Johnson’s poetry from A Line of Poetry onward. “Craft, to seek renewal”: The opening line of “ARK 85” anticipates the poem’s transformation into a spaceship (or spacecraft) in the concluding line of “ARK 99”: “countdown for Lift Off.” The destination of which, “with everything on board” is the stars: “Off to explore the universe with enough of the old blooming buzzy earth to get on with under alien skies” (U 121). ARK is indeed a craft of sorts that seeks renewal with its sights set prospectively on the open frontier and futurity of space itself. But “craft” here also recalls Pound’s use of the word in Canto I: “Circe’s this craft,” which refers not to Odysseus’s ship or to his cunning and guile, but to Circe’s magic, her own witchcraft (C 3). Indeed, ARK is a poem that enchants and casts its own unique spells in order to renew the world and our perceptions of it. “Reality is ‘make’ believe,” Johnson proposes in “BEAM 8,” drawing attention to another meaning of “craft”: to make. In this respect, “craft” also tacitly acknowledges the faux-naïf stance Johnson adopts in ARK and the emphasis he places on making one’s vision by hand, just as Rodia, Cheval, and Isidore have done in their vernacular environments. As far back as A Line of Poetry, Johnson wanted his poems to possess the integrity of handcrafted objects. that poems might be made as Harry Partch makes music, his instruments built by hand (V 69) Here, in “Of Circumstance, The Circum Stances,” Johnson evokes the example of Harry Partch, another American maverick in the tradition of Ives. The fact that Partch constructed and modified a variety of instruments to meet the demands of his microtonal “just intonation” scales makes him something of a bricoleur in the tradition of Rodia, Cheval, and Isidore. Sporting such fantastic names as the Quadrangularis Reversum, Eucal Blossom, Harmonic Canon, and Chamber Bowls, Partch’s instruments are made from a range of materials including “bamboo from the Philippines, Japan, San Diego; American redwood, Brazilian rosewood, African padouk, eucalyptus, sitka spruce,” and junk: “light bulbs, bottles, guitar strings, Pyrex bowls, brass cartridge shells, hubcaps.”10 When displayed on stage looking “like the artefacts of some imaginary ethnic group, a compost of allusions to flower stems, tendons, human sexual organs, claws, stamens, dismembered limbs, petals,” these instruments assume the appearance of an assemblage sculpture.11 No doubt, this would have appealed to Johnson’s collage



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sensibility when he saw Partch play them in a performance of Revelation in the Courthouse Park, in Washington D.C., April, 1961 (V 65). Johnson’s emphasis on “hand-work & / art-skill” (“ARK 40, Herm”) continues throughout his poetry, as Johnson “makes” poems in the way that Partch makes instruments: out of found material. As Johnson writes in “ARK 34, Spire on the Death of L.Z,” he has with “head wedded nail and hammer to the / work of vision / of the word / at hand,” assembled a paradise, palpable and tactile, out of the concrete properties of language itself. Returning to “ARK 85,” “renewal” captures the very essence of Johnson’s vision. The word suggests something altogether different from Pound’s recovery project in The Cantos. “The world, [Pound] was convinced,” Kenner writes, “had once known the order it now lacked, and what has been should not be difficult to recover, a simple matter of reactivating knowledge.”12 “Renewal,” however, is not about rediscovery. Neither is it simply about the recovery, restoration, reclamation, or retrieval of what is lost or missing. Rather, “renewal” is about re-imbuing what is already there, to give fresh life to something and make it glisten, gleam, and shine once more, just as Rodia renews a piece of broken glass by cementing it into a mosaic, or as Ives finds “a true pigment of the universal color” in the “inartistic [. . .] vociferous sentimentality” of folk idioms and popular music.13 But this renewal is not just about improving the object of vision, but changing the way that the object is perceived. Selinger suggests as much when, considering ARK in the context of visionary vernacular environments such as the Watts Towers, he puns on Dorothy’s dog, Toto, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: That it takes the world in toto to be a fit and saving partner for the soul, that this totality plays, and that we come into our own, redeemed by what we see, when we play with it, and love it dearly: rarely has American transcendentalism been so effortlessly glossed. (RJ 340) As much as we redeem what we see and value, we are also redeemed by that material; redeemed “by what we see” and how we see it. Johnson’s is a heuristic process, a matter of changing, undoing, learning, and re-learning how to look at and see things. It is a matter of starting from scratch and conjuring lessons from the ground up. Johnson’s friend, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, offers a good example of this innocence when, in Metaphors on Vision, he invokes “an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through



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Once vision may have been given—that which seems inherent in the infant’s eye, an eye which reflects the loss of innocence more eloquently than any other human feature, an eye which soon learns to classify sights, an eye which mirrors the movement of the individual toward death by its increasing inability to see.15 With Johnson, as with Brakhage, the ideal of innocence is a way of regaining the ability to see. But, as Selinger points out, this innocence is something that the Transcendentalists and the naïve self-taught vernacular artists have also advocated in their respective practices. It is also something that the quoting practices of both Moore and Zukofsky have reaffirmed in their desire to unburden poetry of the histories, traditions, and cultural values in which Pound and Eliot’s writings are entrenched and, instead, objectify good writing wherever it is found. This condition of innocence is also implicit in the line “askew all question” in “ARK 85.” In typical Johnson style, this suggests two things simultaneously, both of which bear significantly on his work. On the one hand, in “askew” it is possible to hear “ask you.” Ask you “all question,” which returns us to Cole’s theory that Johnson invites curiosity in his reader, encouraging them “to wander through his garden of a poem, to taste freely [and] to know ambitiously.” The line proposes that we eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But “askew” also invokes its close etymological cousin in the form of “eschew” (from the Old French, eschiver). As well as inviting curiosity, Johnson’s line also encourages us to shun any questions of doubt. This is a major implication of the faux-naïf stance that Johnson adopts in his later work, allowing him to meet the world with “a brave innocence,” as Davenport calls it, in order to see and respond to its phenomena with integrity and sincerity (V 13). Expulsion or ejection from Eden is evident in the final line of “ARK 85”—“& exit in resonance genesis”—which evokes the book in which the story of Adam and Eve appears. In meaning to be born or produced, “genesis” also posits possibility, optimism, and futurity. Thus, an “exit” becomes a “beginning.” Indeed, we should note how Johnson playfully puts “exit” and “in” next to each other. This new beginning, this renewal, is a resonant one that endures, continuing to sound and ring throughout our lapsed world. Adam and Eve’s “exit” from Eden becomes a genesis (rather than terminus) that is perpetually manifesting in “The objects of my life, my attentions of a particular / time,” as Johnson writes in “A Still Life” (V 51). Rather than being conditioned by an irretrievable innocence, our



an adventure of perception.”14 Recalling Emerson in Nature, Brakhage proposes this “adventure of perception” as an “innocent” childlike condition:

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lapsarian origins are oriented by a futurity, and the perpetual possibility of renewal: “in the homage of attentions ‘all things / are in flux’ ” (V 51). This is a key implication of Johnson’s poetry as a whole: Attention is a form of renewal that is also redemptive. In this context, Susan Howe’s beautiful claim that “Poetry is redemption from pessimism” speaks as poignantly for Johnson’s poetry as it does Dickinson’s.”16 Poetry gives hope and encouragement. It offers light. It renews. However, there is a trenchant skepticism, maybe embarrassment, about poetry’s ability to restore hope or confidence in the present and future. The idea of poetry being predominantly a means for questioning and critiquing the discourses that construct our worlds now seems a given. “To look for—& make—problems,” as Bruce Andrews proposes in “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis,” is integral in poetry’s practical “desire for social, political dimension in writing,” and the idea of “writing as politics, not writing about politics.”17 The innocence and naivety that Johnson’s poetry embraces, not to mention the joy, delight, and wonder it elicits, seems questionable when set against such “knowing” cynicism, doubt, and political praxis. Indeed, as Eric Murphy Selinger notes, Johnson’s tenacious celebration of Beauty, rather than confrontation with the Beast, “certainly puts him at odds with much modern experimental verse.”18 But despite its remove from the overtly “social, political dimension in writing,” Johnson’s poetry is still instructive, fulfilling Sidney’s Aristotelian claim that poetry should “teach and delight.”19 However, Johnson reminds us that these two terms are not exclusive. That is to say, Johnson’s poetry teaches by being delightful and by celebrating beauty. Indeed, beauty, James Hillman explains, is itself instructive and possesses a didactic function. As an “epistemological necessity,” Hillman proposes, it can “touch our senses, reach the heart, and attract us into life.”20 It is also an “ontological necessity, grounding the sensate particularity of the world.”21 Beauty, then, makes “SENSE sings,” as Johnson writes in “BEAM 8.” Without beauty, Hillman argues, “the world of particulars becomes atomic particles. Life’s detailed variety is called chaos, multiplicity, amorphous matter, statistical data.”22 Cosmos regresses back to chaos. A further consequence of perceiving the phenomenal world as nothing more than amorphous matter and statistical data is that curiosity for and about the world also diminishes. Notably, implicit in “curiosity” (from the Latin, cura) is “care.” Thus, when curiosity for the world wanes, so does its care. For, to be curious about the world is, as Robert Duncan suggests, a question of open dialogue and responsibility: “Responsibility is to keep / the ability to respond.”23 Johnson’s poetry reminds us that the diligent and responsive observer becomes something of a curator, carer, or custodian of their world, their cosmos. It is in this respect, in what Devin Johnston



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poignantly calls “Johnson’s lifelong ethics of intently looking” (RJ 540), that Johnson’s poetry teaches and delights. It comes as no surprise that a similar ethics of vision should occur in some of Johnson’s influences. It is there in Samuel Palmer, for example, Thoreau, and the observed particulars of Johnson’s close contemporaries, Jonathan Williams, Thomas A. Clark, and Lorine Niedecker. Similar careful perceptions are also evident in the bricoleurs Johnson admires, all of whom have built their worlds by carefully heeding what lies about them. In fact, all of these figures possess the ability to “see the miraculous in the common,” as Emerson writes in Nature (N 80). And, of course, Emerson does, too. Indeed, Sherman Paul identifies a similar “ethical nature of seeing” in Emerson and Loren Eiseley.24 “The eye is so much the soul for Emerson (and for Eiseley),” Paul writes, recalling Johnson’s Orphic episteme of resemblance, “that redemption itself depends on seeing rightly. Since this involves seeing things in their relations, it, in turn, restores the unity of the world [and] gives us again a cosmos.”25 The ethical implications of this “careful” seeing can also be comprehended in the “new subtlety of eyes” (C 534) demonstrated by Pound in The Pisan Cantos. As Ronald Bush implies, it is Pound’s humbled and subtle eyes, sharpened by his incarceration in Pisa, which redeemed him for a generation of younger poets. It was his ability to portray moments when “the mind swings by a grassblade” (Canto 83) that made a new generation regard him not as a patriarch but as an outcast who lived long enough to doubt his strongest convictions and make haunting poetry of the remaining disarray.26 Johnson’s poetry, Pierre Joris notes, reminds us that, “To write, then, (is) (as) a paradise.”27 Like Johnson, Pound “tried to write Paradise” (C 816) and “make Cosmos” (C 809) but ultimately failed. He failed for many reasons: antisemitism; paranoia; arrogance; misogyny; and elitism, to name but a few. But Pound also failed because, to quote Paul, he lost the ability “to see rightly.” If, as Brakhage proposes, “the angel at the gate of Eden is viz-ability itself,” then Pound’s visual capacities are what exiled him from his own “paradise.” Indeed, by The Pisan Cantos, he is “outcast” from the “paradise” he attempts to fabricate and cohere in The Cantos. Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel but spezzato apparently it exists only in fragments unexpected excellent sausage, the smell of mint, for example, Ladro the night cat; (C 452)



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But as this famous passage from Canto LXXIV indicates, from Pound’s failure emerges the possibility of redemption. Pound discovered in Pisa that, “When the mind swings by a grass blade,” the “spezzato” (broken) fragments of near, low, and common phenomena can become redemptive (C 547, 452). Paradise, as Johnson repeatedly demonstrates, is found in and made from the tiniest details and instances of life or “beauty.” These not only “attract us into life,” as Hillman proposes, but also renew it. In The Pisan Cantos, there is also renewed regard for “the quality / of the affection” (C 471) that quotidian phenomena can elicit: “excellent sausage,” “the smell of mint,” “Ladro the night cat,” staggering ants in dawn sunshine (C 545), and “clover leaf smells” (C 547). When Johnson’s own lifelong poetic Eden project is considered against the example of his ultimate master and measure, Pound, the significance of his Adamic stance is considerable. To write a poem “without history” becomes in itself an instance of “writing as politics, not writing about politics,” a distinction that Pound muddled when he lost his center “fighting the world” (C816). In the “congeries of word and light,” as Johnson writes to Philip Van Aver, “The eyes have it.”28 The ears have it too. And by these twin faculties, Johnson’s poetry, via an innovative and ambitious collage poetics, delights and teaches in equal measure, avoiding the alienating pedagogy of Pound but, nevertheless, advancing valuable lessons learned from his collage mode and “new subtlety of eyes.” Johnson’s poetry gently shows, or reminds us, how to re-engage with the phenomenal world—to reconsider our relation, identity and interdependence with it—and care about it. This is why Johnson’s “mosaic of Cosmos” remains important and valid. In terms of subject and method, Johnson’s is a cosmetic poetry, renewing the luster of the world’s multifaceted face, leading us back to it with renewed eyes, attention, and awareness. Doubt and cynicism may very well make us aware of the problems of the world and equip us with ways for addressing those problems but, as Smit notes (and as Pound was all too aware), it does not necessarily make it a better place. But the Adamic scope and renewing vision of Johnson’s poetry makes it possible for us to believe, however momentarily, that it can be.



Felix Culpa




Introduction: “Congeries of Word and Light” 1. Ronald Johnson to Philip Van Aver, October 3, 1988. Courtesy of Philip Van Aver. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 2. Joan M. Erikson, “Eye to Eye,” in The Man-made Object, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (London: Studio Vista, 1966), 59. 3. Ronald Johnson, The Shrubberies, ed. Peter O’Leary (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2001), 123. 4. Jed Rasula, Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 249. 5. Johnson, The Shrubberies, 123. 6. Mark Scroggins, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Berkeley: Shoemaker Hoard, 2007), 425. 7. Cited in Ronald Johnson’s Simple Fare: Rediscovering the Pleasures of Humble Food (New York and London: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 365. 8. Ronald Johnson, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, ed. Emmett Williams (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), 336. 9. Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination (Boston: David R. Godine, 1997), 192. 10. Dirk Stratton, Ronald Johnson, Western Writers Series No.122 (Boise Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1996), 17. 11. By major work I mean Johnson’s larger collections: A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (1964); The Book of the Green Man (1967); The Different Musics in Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses (1969); Radi os (1977) and ARK (1980–96). 12. 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. 13. Rasula, Syncopations, 249. 14. O’Leary, “Quod Vides Scribe In Libro,” ix. 15. Ronald Johnson, “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” Northern Lights Studies in Creativity 2 (1985–86), 4.



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16. Ronald Johnson to August Derleth, July 24, 1969. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 17. Johnson, The Shrubberies, 124. 18. Guy Davenport to Johnson, February 7, 1966. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of the Guy Davenport Literary Estate. 19. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 56. 20. Guy Davenport to Ronald Johnson, November 26, 1966. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of the Guy Davenport Literary Estate. 21. Eric Murphy Selinger, “ ‘I Composed the Holes’: Reading Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os,” Contemporary Literature 33.1 (1992), 46. 22. Johnson, The Shrubberies, 123–4. 23. Johnson, Simple Fare, 365. 24. Johnson is one of Finkelstein’s subjects in The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1988), which offers valuable insights into Johnson’s early quoting practices. Selinger’s essay “ ‘I Composed the Holes’: Reading Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os” was the first on Johnson to be published in an academic journal, followed by his 1996 entry on Johnson in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, which is still one of the best introductions to Johnson’s work. Selinger, “Ronald Johnson,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 169: American Poets Since World War II, fifth series, ed. by Joseph Conte (Detroit: Gale, 1996): 146–56. Johnson is one of the subjects of Finkelstein’s most recent book, On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010). 25. Johnson’s distributed these Xeroxes to a small coterie of readers. 26. Ronald Johnson to Jonathan Williams, undated letter. PCMS-019, Jargon Society Collection, 1950–, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 27. Tim Woods, The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 235. 28. Ezra Pound, Personae: Collected Shorter Poems, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 185. 29. Jonathan Williams, Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, and Photographs (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2000), 228. 30. Ibid., 228. 31. 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. 32. 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.



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33. Hugh Kenner, preface to Portrait Photographs, by Jonathan Williams (London: Coracle Press, 1979), n.p. 34. For more on Davenport and Johnson see John Shannon, “What is the Matter,” VORT: Twenty-First Century Previews 3.3 (1976), 100–11; Gus Blaisdell, “Building Poems,” VORT: Twenty-First Century Previews 3.3 (1976), 125–135; and, Andre Furlani, “ ‘Yours Be the Speech’: Ronald Johnson’s Milton and Guy Davenport’s Bashō” (RJ 73–98). 35. Ronald Johnson to Philip Van Aver, May 17, 1968. Courtesy of Philip Van Aver. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 36. Subsequently reprinted 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), 294–5. 37. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of American Poetics (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), 148. 38. Ibid., 148–9. 39. Woods, Poetics of the Limit, 235. 40. 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. 41. C.f. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 126–7. 42. Ronald Johnson, “Hurrah For Euphony: Dedicated to Young Poets,” The Cultural Society ( Januar y 14, 2002), http://culturalsociet y.org. RJ.html. 43. Charles Boer, “Watch Your Step,” Spring 59 (Spring, 1996), 95. 44. Ibid., 97. 45. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 30. 46. Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 12. 47. The No Name, Johnson writes in “Up Till Now,” was “a bar infamous enough to attract tourists from Europe and New York. Within a year I had to maintain a line at the door. I believe—and Thom Gunn would concur—The No Name, encouraging fantasy, was the farthest-out bar ever” (U 118). 48. Mark Scroggins. Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 291. 49. Scroggins, The Poem of a Life, 463. 50. Peter Levi Strauss, Poetry Flash The Bay Area’s Poetry Calendar and Review 135 (June 1984), 10. 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. 51. Ibid., 241. 52. Ibid., 254.



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53. Ibid., 252. 54. Johnson edited Sharpless’s collected poems, Presences of Mind, published by Gnomon in 1989. 55. Jonathan Skinner, in his essay “Upper Limit Tu-Whit: Ronald Johnson’s Field Guide Poetries,” discusses “ARK 38” in more detail (RJ 402–4). 56. 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. 57. Stratton, Ronald Johnson, 17. 58. Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), 12. 59. Rasula, Syncopations, 255. 60. Thanks to Peter O’Leary for pointing out to me that this refers to John Chamberlain, former Black Mountain student and sculptor. 61. Stratton, Ronald Johnson, 9. 62. 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). 63. Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation, 11. 64. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1984), 111.

1


1. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25–6. 2. Dirk Stratton, Ronald Johnson, Western Writers Series No.122 (Boise Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1996), 9. 3. Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance 1910–1950 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2. 4. Ronald Johnson, “Hurrah for Euphony: Dedicated to Young Poets,” The Cultural Society (January 14, 2002), http://culturalsociety.org/RJ.html 5. Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 11. 6. H. Daniel Peck, introduction to The Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul, ed. H. Daniel Peck (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 2. 7. Paul Rosenfeld, By Way of Art: Criticisms of Music, Literature, Painting, Sculpture and Dance (New York, Coward-McCann, 1928), 302–3. 8. See Peck’s introduction to The Green American Tradition, 7.



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9. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), 29. 10. Lee Rust Brown, The Emersonian Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 173. 11. Johnson, “Hurrah For Euphony.” 12. Brown, The Emerson Museum, 172–73. 13. Johnson, “Hurrah for Euphony.” 14. Ronald Johnson to Edward Dahlberg, May 1, 1967, in Johnson’s Dahlberg Festschrift, 1967. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 15. Robert von Hallberg, “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature Vol. 8, Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1955, ed. Sacan Berchovitch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33. 16. Charles Capper, “ ‘A Little Beyond’: The Problem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History,” in Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), 21. 17. Paul F. Boller, Jr. American Transcendentalism, 1830–1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons and Capricorn Books, 1974), xxii. 18. Charles Capper, “ ‘A Little Beyond’: The Problem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History,” in Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), 19. 19. Ibid., 19. 20. Johnson, “Hurrah for Euphony.” 21. Ibid. 22. Rita Charon “In Memoriam: Elizabeth Sewell,” Literature and Medicine 20.1 (2001), 3. 23. C.f. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, ed. Stephen Fender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 272. 24. Stephen Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), vii. 25. Ibid., vii. 26. Lawrence Buell, “Emerson in His Cultural Context,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lawrence Buell (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993), 58–59. 27. Conrad Edick Wright, preface to Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), x.



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28. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), 82. 29. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 174. 30. Stan Brakhage and Ronald Johnson (with Jim Shedden), “Another Way of Looking at the Universe” (1997), Chicago Review 47/48, 4/1 (Winter 2001/ Spring, 2002), 31. 31. Boller, American Transcendentalism, xx. 32. Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 146. According to Buell, “The central preoccupation of the movement was the relationship between self and God; compared to this, nature was of secondary importance.” Ibid., 146. 33. Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 3. 34. Eric Murphy Selinger, “Important Pleasures and Others: Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson,” Postmodern Culture 4.3 (1994), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v004/4.3selinger.html 35. Brakhage and Johnson, “ ‘Another Way of Looking at the Universe,’ ” 33. 36. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 149. 37. James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World (Woodstock, Connecticut: Spring Publications, 1997), 43–4. 38. Kenneth W. Rhoads, “Thoreau: The Ear and the Music,” American Literature 46 (Nov, 1974), 324. 39. Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism, trans. Christine Rhone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), xiv. 40. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 19. 41. Attracted by his understanding of mythology as “an instrument of inquiry” Sewell explains that Pico della Mirandola in his Dignitate Hominis, endeavoured “to show how mythology, Christian theology, and natural philosophy could be regarded as a unity” (OV 64–65). 42. Jacob Boehme, The Signature of All Things and Other Writings, trans. John Ellinstone (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 1981), 9. 43. Ibid., 12. 44. Ibid., 10. 45. See Eric Murphy Selinger, “ ‘I Composed the Holes’: Reading Ronald Johnson’s Radi os,” Contemporary Literature, 33.1 (Spring, 1992), 53–4. 46. Ronald Johnson to Ian Hamilton Finlay, April 15, 1967. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. Osman quotes from Finlay’s side of this correspondence in “Paronomastic Migrations” (RJ 237). 47. Johnson to Finlay, February 13, 1967. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 48. Johnson to Finlay, April 15, 1967. 49. See W. B. Yeats, “Mona Lisa,” in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935, ed. W. B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 1.



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50. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 83. 51. Johnson’s use of the term “Spires” in ARK carries something of the meaning of “conspires” too. Although principally suggesting architectural spires or the organic shoots and stems of plants (the grass spires of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, perhaps), ARK ’s “Spires” also propose breath as an agency of creation. 52. Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), 242. See also Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco, City Lights), 14–5. 53. Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 147. 54. Johnson and Stan Brakhage (with Jim Shedden), “Another Way of Looking at the Universe,” 31.

2 Luminous Detail: Ezra Pound and Collage 1. Ronald Johnson, “Persistent Light on the Inviolably Forever Other,” Margins 13 (August-September, 1974), 14. 2. Pierre Joris, A Nomad Poetics: Essays (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 88. 3. For Johnson’s assessment of Bunting see his essay, “Take a Chisel to Write: Key to Briggflatts” in Sagetrieb 14.4 (Winter 1995), 7–17, and “A Flag for Bunting,” in Conjunctions 8 (1985), 197. 4. David Antin, “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” Boundary 2 1.1 (Autumn, 1972), 120–1. 5. Cid Corman, “Paul,” Six Pack 7/8 (Spring / Summer, 1974), 106. 6. Christopher Beach, ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1992), 1. 7. Jonathan Williams, Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, and Photographs (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2000), 228. 8. John Shannon, introduction to “Guy Davenport: A Symposium,” ed. John Shannon, Margins 13 (August-September, 1974), 4. 9. Guy Davenport to Ronald Johnson, February 7, 1966. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of the Guy Davenport Literary Estate. Andre Furlani notes the intellectual rapport between Davenport and Kenner in Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 25, n.1. 10. Ronald Johnson, “Hurrah For Euphony: Dedicated to Young Poets,” The Cultural Society (January 14, 2002), http://culturalsociety.org/RJ.html 11. Ronald Johnson, “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” Northern Lights Studies in Creativity 2 (1985–86), 3–4.



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11. Kenner wrote two books on Fuller: Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller (1973) and Geodesic Math and How to Use It (1976). In 1962 Jargon published Fuller’s book of poetry, An Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization. 12. David Fite, “Kenner/Bloom: Canonmaking and the Resources of Rhetoric,” Boundary 2 15.3 (Spring-Autumn, 1988), 118. 13. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 145. 14. Ibid., 153. 15. Fite, “Kenner/Bloom,” 118. 16. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 75. 17. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 4. 18. According to Ronald Bush, “no programmatic use of the term ‘ideogram’ or ‘ideograph’ appears until 1927.” Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976), 10. 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Bruce Comens, Apocalypse and After: Modern Strategy and Postmodern Tactics in Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1995), 60. 21. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 325. 22. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Peter Owen, 1966), 51, 58. 23. Kenner, The Pound Era, 434. 24. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991), 3. 25. Ibid., 9–10. 26. Ibid., 10. 27. Ibid., 10. 28. Ibid., 22. 29. Kenner, The Pound Era, 92, 343. 30. Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 27. 31. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 32. 32. Joseph Conte, “The Smooth and the Striated: Compositional Texture in the Modern Long Poem,” Modern Language Studies 27.2 (Spring, 1997), 59. 33. George Dekker, Sailing After Knowledge: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 132. 34. Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 67. 35. Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination. (Boston: David R. Godine, 1997), 174. 36. Robert Duncan, A Selected Prose, ed. Robert J. Bertholf (New York: New Directions, 1995), 93. 37. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London. Faber and Faber, 1961), 26. 38. Pound, Literary Essays, 5.



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39. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 325. 40. Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 1991), 4. 41. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 79. 42. James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 143. 43. Ibid., 142–143. 44. Bob Perelman, The Trouble With Genius: Reading Joyce, Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), 44. 45. Longenbach, Modernist Poetics, 43. 46. See Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), 57. 47. Michael Andre Bernstein, “Making Modernist Masterpieces,” Modernism/ Modernity 5.3 (1998), 3. 48. Davenport, Geography, 151. 49. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 2009), 60. 50. Ibid., 61. 51. Ming-Qian Ma “A ‘No Man’s Land!’: Postmodern Citationality in Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning ‘The,”’” in Mark Scroggins, ed. Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 132. 52. Jerome Rothenberg, “Pre-face,” in Jerome Rothenberg, ed. Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry 1914–1945 (Boston, MA: Exact Change, 1974), xvii. 53. Ibid., xvii. 54. Peter Riley “Quotation: ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing,’ ” Jacket 32 (April 2007), http://jacketmagazine.com/32/k-riley.shtml 55. Pound, ABC of Reading, 46. 56. Ronald Johnson, undated letter. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate.

3 Visual Integrity in The Book of the Green Man 1. Harold Bloom to Ronald Johnson, August 8, 1968. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of Harold Bloom. 2. Johnson uses parts of “Samuel Palmer: The Characters of Fire” in the concluding poem in The Book of the Green Man (BG 80–81). 3. George Hart identifies a similar schema, proposing that each season in the poem has a specific genius loci; locus; mode; symbol; process; and product (RJ 174). Hart, however, does not recognize birds as part of this schema. And, instead of pathetic fallacy, Hart identifies the mode of Spring as travel writing.



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4. John Ruskin, Selected Writings, ed. Diana Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 71. 5. Ibid., 71. 6. Ibid., 73–4. 7. Ronald Johnson to Guy Davenport, “February 26th Van! Dale! Yah!” Reprinted by permission of The Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 8. Ibid. 9. Samuel Palmer, The Parting Light: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Abley (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985), 28. Blake was a major influence on Palmer and fellow painters Edward Calvert and George Richmond. All three were part of a circle of artists called “The Ancients.” 10. Ronald Johnson to Guy Davenport, “February 26th Van! Dale! Yah!” Reprinted by permission of The Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 11. Ibid. 12. Norman Finkelstein, The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry (Lewisburg, London, and Toronto: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Presses, 1993), 96. 13. Ronald Johnson to August Derleth July 24, 1969. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Literary Estate. 14. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 275. 15. C. C. Barfoot and R. M. Healey, introduction to “My Rebellious and Imperfect Eye”: Observing Geoffrey Grigson, ed. C. C. Barfoot and R. M. Healey (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), 2. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Geoffrey Grigson, The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook (London: Allison and Busby, 1982), 153. 18. Seamus Perry, “ ‘The Grandeur of the Actual’: Grigson, ‘Negative Capability,’ and Romantic Sensibility,” in “My Rebellious and Imperfect Eye”, 135. 19. Steve McCaffery, “Synchronicity, Ronald Johnson and the Migratory Phase,” VORT: Twenty-First Century Previews 3.3 (1976), 113. 20. Denise Levertov to Ronald Johnson, August 1965. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of Paul A. Lacey, trustee of the Denise Levertov Literary Trust. 21. For some readers, the notes are too pompous. William Harmon, for example, criticizes Johnson’s notes as “homiletic Eliotizing.” William Harmon, “The Poetry of a Journal at the End of an Arbor in a Watch,” Parnassus 9 (Spring/ Summer, 1981), 229. Finkelstein is more diplomatic in his assessment of Johnson’s references: “Johnson has no qualms about displaying his erudition, and at his weakest (like his precursors) he is something of an ink-horn poet, a passionately pedantic collector and name dropper.” Finkelstein, The Utopian Moment, 96. 22. Denise Levertov, proposal to Norton for the publication of The Book of the Green Man, quoting Johnson’s letter, September 1965. Courtesy of Special



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23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

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Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of Paul A. Lacey, trustee of the Denise Levertov Literary Trust. Taking Thoreau’s fertile Ohio soil and Whitman’s poem “This Compost” as leads, Jed Rasula coins the terms “compost library” and “compost poetry” to describe what he sees as an organic and ecologically minded mode of intertextuality characterizing a large portion of twentieth-century American poetry. “In the compost library books have a way of collapsing into each other,” Rasula proposes, “not in the improvements of more ‘authoritative’ editions or versions, but by constant recycling.” Jed Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 17. Jeremy Hooker, “Geoffrey Grigson—English Writer,” “My Rebellious and Imperfect Eye,” 32. Geoffrey Grigson, The Shell Country Alphabet (Frome and London: Michael Joseph, 1966), 9. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1998), 6. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1999), 2, 4. Jonathan Williams, Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, and Photographs (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2000), 229–30. According to Peter O’Leary, only one of Johnson’s journals still exists, although it is likely that he kept more. Some of the pages from one journal are reproduced in The Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry, which also reproduces the entire text of The Book of the Green Man: http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/ rj-gm-1.htm Ronald Johnson, “Notebooks for Ronald Johnson’s The Book of the Green Man,” Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry (2001), http://www.thing.net/~grist/ ld/rjohnson/rj-nt1.htm. Ibid., http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/rj-nt3.htm. Ibid., http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/rj-nt2.htm; http://www.thing. net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/rj-nt3.htm. Ronald Johnson to Guy Davenport, “February 26th Van! Dale! Yah!” Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. “It seemed simple,” Johnson writes in his essay on Davenport, “for Blake to suggest to Samuel Palmer that all one must do is ‘work the thing up to Vision.’ But Time needed the time to see with the physical eye before trusting fully what the mind makes is reality.” Johnson, “Persistent Light on the Inviolably Forever Other,” Margins 13 (Aug–Sep 1974), 13. Ronald Johnson, “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” Northern Lights Studies in Creativity 2 (1985–6), 1. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).



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37. Meena Alexander, Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 80. 38. Grigson, The Shell Country Alphabet, 380–1. 39. Agnes Arber, The Mind and the Eye: A Study of the Biologist’s Standpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 119. 40. Grigson, The Shell Country Alphabet, 381. 41. See William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 28–9. 42. Peter Warlock, A Book of Songs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, n.d.), 28. 43. See John Gerard, Gerard’s Herbals: The History of Plants, ed. Marcus Woodward (London: Senate, 1994), 42, 44, 135, 253, 274. 44. McCaffery, “Synchronicity, Ronald Johnson and the Migratory Phase,” 114. 45. Ibid., 114. 46. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 28. 47. “Sweet-briar” is a species of rose (rosa rubiginosa, rosa eglanteria) whose autumn hips provide birds with food in the winter months. As a summer visitor to the British Isles, this is not something that the cuckoo would eat. Thus, Truth gives way to Calliope in the interests of Johnson’s poem. 48. Jonathan Williams, The Magpie’s Bagpipe: Selected Essays, ed. Thomas Meyer (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 106. 49. McCaffery, “Synchronicity, Ronald Johnson and the Migratory Phase,” 114. 50. Denise Levertov to Ronald Johnson, August 1965. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of Paul A. Lacey, trustee of the Denise Levertov Literary Trust. 51. Ibid. 52. McCaffery, “Synchronicity, Ronald Johnson and the Migratory Phase,” 113. 53. Ibid., 113. 54. Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (New York: New Directions, 1960), 64. 55. In his interview with Michael Andre Bernstein and Burton Hatlen, Duncan claims his “complicated syntax comes from an over-articulation, an over-coding of the syntax.” Robert Duncan in interview Michael Andre Bernstein and Burton Hatlen, Sagetrieb 4. 2/3 (Fall and Winter, 1985), 97. 56. See A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samue1 Palmer Painter and Etcher (London: Seeley and Co., 1892), 113. 57. H.D., Collected Poems 1912–1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1986), 548–9. 58. Johnson may also be referring to other paintings by Palmer that have dilapidated farm buildings as their subjects: A Barn With a Mossy Roof, c. 1828–9 and A Cow-lodge with a Mossy Roof, c. 1828–29. 59. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 76.



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217


1. Raymond Isidore, translated by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 2. Ronald Johnson, Arches notebook, c. 1986. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 3. Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1997), 276. 4. Ibid., 276. 5. Ronald Johnson, “Persistent Light on the Inviolably Forever Other,” Margins 13 (August–September, 1974), 13. 6. David Michael Hertz, Angels of Reality: Emersonian Unfoldings in Wright, Stevens, and Ives (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 95. 7. J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 425. 8. Ibid., 3. 9. Ibid., 413. 10. Charles E. Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), 87. 11. Charles Ives, cited in Philip Lambert, The Music of Charles Ives (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 187. 12. Ives, Memos, 106. Ives also saw the piece as having four sections. In addition to a prelude of percussion, Ives lists these as: “I. [Section A] (Past) Formation of the waters and mountains. / II. [Section B] (Present) Earth, evolution in nature and humanity. / III [Section C] (Future) Heaven, the rise of all to the spiritual.” Ibid., 106. 13. Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), 94. 14. Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow (New York: New Directions, 1968), 48. 15. Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations, 108. 16. 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), 85. 17. Ives, Memos, 106. 18. Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (London: Calder & Boyars, 1969), 22. 19. Rosalie Sandra Perry, Charles Ives and the American Mind (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1976), 30. 20. Ibid., 30. 21. Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (New York: New Directions, 1973), 8.



4

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22. “Maximus calld us to dance the Man,” Duncan writes. Ibid., 9. Olson dedicates The Maximus Poems to Robert Creeley, “the Figure of Outward.” Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1983), 4. 23. Duncan, The Opening of the Field, 8. 24. Duncan refers to his ideogram in “The Fire” as “a dawn-of-man-scene.” Robert Duncan, Fictive Certainties (New York: New Directions, 1985), 33. 25. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, ed. Stephen Fender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 297. 26. Davenport, Geography, 276. 27. J. Peter Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 26. 28. Ibid., 108–9. 29. Ibid., 109. 30. Paul F. Boller, Jr. American Transcendentalism, 1830–1860: An Intellectual Inquiry. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons / Capricorn Books, 1974), 89. 31. Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 203–204. 32. Lawrence Buell, “Emerson in His Cultural Context,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lawrence Buell (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993), 52. 33. Ibid., 58. 34. Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, 422. 35. Ibid., 423. 36. Eric Salzman, Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1988), 134. 37. J. Peter Burkholder, “Ives and Nineteenth-Century European Tradition,” in Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition, ed. Geoffrey Block and J. Peter Burkholder (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 11. 38. Ibid., 15. 39. Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (London: Calder & Boyars, 1969), 18. 40. Ibid., 80. 41. Ibid., 81. 42. Ibid., 80–1. 43. Ibid., 81. 44. Ibid., 21. 45. Davenport, Geography, 276. 46. John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation: Environment by Visionary Artists (New York and London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2003), 163. 47. Lawrence Buell, “Transcendentalist Literary Legacies,” in Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), 613. “This educational disadvantage is perhaps artificial,” John Beardsley



218

48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

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proposes, “we all learn from somewhere. But to my mind, there is an important distinction between learning in the academy and learning on the street—or in the woods. In the latter case one is surely more innocent of rules.” Gardens of Revelation, 11. Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, Collage: Personalities, Concepts, Techniques (Philadelphia, New York, London: Chilton Book Company, 1967), 5. Ibid., 3–4. Johnson owned a number of memory jugs and describes one of them in an unpublished autobiographical piece entitled, “If I Die Before I Awake”: “Passed down in the family is a ‘putty jug’ sitting proudly on my desk. No one seems to remember these keepsakes now. One simply saved up beads, buttons, pins, brooches, dolls’ eyes, foreign coins, seashells, and what-not small mementoes and stuck them jigsaw into a putty covered whiskey jug. Some of these treasured jugs are more eloquent of the past than Alexander Pope’s grotto.” Ronald Johnson, “If I Die Before I Awake” (typescript). Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. Ronald Johnson, The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk: Eccentric Translations of Two Eccentrics (New York: Jargon, 1969), n.p. All subsequent references refer this edition. Tutara 10 (Summer 1973), 2–9. FlashPoint 6 (Winter 2004), http://www.flashpointmag.com/sprtwalk.htm Barbara Jones, Follies and Grottoes (London: Constable: 1974), 1. Ferdinand Cheval, translated by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. Ibid. Raymond Isidore, translated by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. Johnson tells Alpert that he “translated their complete works and then pieced fragments of them together to make the poems” (RJ 553). The translations exist in two typescript drafts. Raymond Isidore, translated by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 153. Ibid., 2. Dirk Stratton, Ronald Johnson, Western Writers Series No.122 (Boise Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1996), 28. “I found my inspiration upon finally visiting Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers.” Johnson writes in “Up Till Now.” “I knew from photographs the major towers and some of mosaic work, but I was not prepared for the majesty of the actual [. . .] The walls surrounding the spires were a bricolage of broken tiles, colored glass and mirror, broken crockery set in a mosaic arch after arch, and intricate clash in patterns like a Persian carpet” (U 121). See Guy Davenport to Ronald Johnson, “Beethoven 1972” and Guy Davenport to Ronald Johnson, June 9, 1978. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer



Notes

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

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Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of the Guy Davenport Literary Estate. Ronald Johnson, ARK 50: Spires 34–50 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), 56. “Wor(l)ds 24, (for Robert Duncan)” was published in the Robert Duncan issue of MAPS 6 in 1974, 68–69. “Wor(l)ds 22, Charles Ives: Two Eyes, Two Ears” was published in Parnassus: Poetry in Review 3.2 (Spring/Summer, 1975), 345–9. Ibid., 345. Ibid., 348. Ronald Johnson to Andrew Hoyem, October 13, 1970. Courtesy of Philip Van Aver. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. Robert P. Morgan, “Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses at the End of an Era,” 19th-Century Music 2.1 (July, 1978), 73. Ronald Johnson, To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems, ed. Peter O’Leary (Jersey City, New Jersey: Talisman House, 2000) 65. Ibid., 67. Jonathan Williams, The Magpie’s Bagpipe, ed. Thomas Meyer (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 67. Johnson, To Do As Adam Did, 65. Ibid., 69. Ronald Johnson, ARK: The Foundations (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980). All these endorsements appear on the rear dust jacket of ARK: The Foundations. Duncan’s blurb is printed on the front inner flap of the book’s dust jacket. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 150. Ibid., 240. Harry Partch, Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos, ed. Thomas McGeary (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 310. Incidentally, one of the movements from Partch’s Revelation in the Court House Park—that Johnson saw performed in Washington D.C., April, 1961 (V 65)—is entitled “These Good Old Fashioned Thrills—Fireworks Ritual” and includes a refrain, “heavenly daze,” which would not be out of place in a Johnson poem. Ibid., 357. Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation, 21. Erika Dross, “Wandering the Old Weird America: Poetic Musings and Pilgrimage Perspectives on Vernacular Art Environments,” in Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists, ed. Leslie Umberger, (New York and Sheboygan, Wisconsin: Princeton Architectural Press and John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2008), 29–31. Ibid., 32. C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 214. Ibid., 213.



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86. Ibid., 214. 87. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 171. 88. Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art (London: Studio Vista, 1972), 170. 89. Thoreau, Walden, 288. 90. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 62. 91. Ibid., 62. 92. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 61. 93. Olson, The Maximus Poems, 56. 94. Ronald Johnson, The American Table (New York, London, Toronto: Fireside / Simon Schuster, 1991), 250.

5

Orphic Apocrypha: Radi os and the Found Text

1. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 229. 2. W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion: A Study of the Orphic Movement (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 97. 3. William Harmon, “The Poetry of a Journal at the End of an Arbor in a Watch,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 9 (Spring/Summer 1981), 224. 4. John Milton, The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Ward, Lock & Bowden, Limited, n.d.), 2. 5. Ibid., 3. 6. Ibid., 2. 7. Dustin Griffin, “Milton’s Literary Influence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Donald Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 252. 8. Ibid., 252. 9. Ibid., 252. 10. William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 110. 11. Robert Duncan, Roots and Branches (New York: New Directions, 1964), 48. 12. Milton, according to William Hazlitt, “has borrowed more than any other writer and exhausted every source of imitation, sacred or profane; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer. He is a writer of centos, and yet in originality scarcely inferior to Homer. The power of his mind is stamped in every line. The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials.” William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson and Son, 1818), 115. Davenport reiterates Hazlitt when he notes how “Milton found his poem in the Bible, in Homer, in Virgil, in Joshua Sylvester’s translation of Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas’s La Semaine, called Divine Weeks and Workes (and



Notes

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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as Milton scholars tend not to know) in Serafino della Salandra’s Adamo Caduto” (R 93). Eric Murphy Selinger, “ ‘I Composed the Holes’: Reading Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os,” Contemporary Literature 33.1 (1992), 52. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 39. Steve McCaffery, “Corrosive Poetics: The Relief of Composition of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, 11.2, (2002), 125. Stephen C. Behrendt, The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustration of Milton (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 11. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 346. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 171. John Milton, Areopagitica (1664), ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham: English Reprints, 1868), 70. Guy Davenport to Ronald Johnson, “Birthday of Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, Baron Corvo, 1973.” Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literart Estate. McCaffery, “Corrosive Poetics,” 121. Thomas A. Vogler, “Re: Naming MIL/TON,” in Unnam’ d Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986), 142. Dirk Stratton, Ronald Johnson, Western Writers Series No.122 (Boise Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1996), 25. Guy Davenport to Ronald Johnson, August 29, 1977. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of the Guy Davenport Literary Estate. See William T. Dobson, Literary Frivolities: Fancies, Follies, and Frolics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880), 176–7. See also Pierre Allix’s The Judgement of the Ancient Jewish Church Against the Unitarians in the Controversy Upon the Holy Trinity and the Divinity of Our Blessed Saviour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1821), v. Genette, Palimpsests, 230. Steve McCaffery, “Synchronicity, Ronald Johnson and the Migratory Phase,” VORT: Twenty-First Century Previews 3.3 (1976), 15. Jerome Rothenberg, “Marcel Duchamp,” in Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry 1914–1945. ed. Jerome Rothenberg (Boston, MA: Exact Change Press, 1974), 24. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. Anon., “The Richard Mutt Case,” The Blind Man 2 (May, 1917), 5. Tom Phillips, “Notes on A Humument,” in Tom Phillips, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), n.p.



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33. See Jonathan Williams, Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, and Photographs (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2000), 229. Phillips would later provide drawings for Williams’s Imaginary Postcards (Clints Grikes Grips Glints), published by Trigram Press in 1975. 34. Phillips, “Notes on A Humument,” n.p. 35. Phillips uses an 1892 edition—“a popular reprint of a successful threedecker”—of A Human Document that he purchased for threepence at “Austin’s, the furniture repository.” Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Phillips, A Humument, 1. 40. Phillips, “Notes on A Humument,” n.p. 41. Phillips, “Notes on A Humument,” n.p. Philip Clark, obituary for Lukas Foss, Gramophone (April 2009), 8. 42. Ronald Johnson to Jonathan Williams, November 30 1979 or 1980. PCMS019, Jargon Society Collection, 1950–, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 43. Jonathan Williams, Blues & Roots / Rue & Bluets: A Garland for the Appalachians (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971), n.p. 44. Jonathan Williams, The Loco Logodaedalist in Situ: Selected Poems 1968–7 (London: Cape Goliard Press, 1971), n.p. 45. Ibid., n.p. 46. Ibid., n.p. 47. Johnson retains the original spacing and layout of the 1892 Milton edition he uses for Radi os: John Milton, The Poetical Works of John Milton (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, 1892). “It’s a lovely post-transcendental edition,” Johnson tells Alpert, “in olive green with black and gold and it says MILTON on it, Milton’s poems” (RJ 557). The Sand Dollar Press edition of Radi os uses facsimiles of the pages from this edition. 48. Whilst on their honeymoon, Thomas A. and Laurie Clark visited Johnson in San Francisco in 1972, introduced through a mutual friendship with Williams. 49. Thomas A. Clark to Jonathan Williams, undated. PCMS-019, Jargon Society Collection, 1950–, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Reprinted by permission of Thomas A. Clark. 50. Clark acknowledges the poem as an early influence: “At a very early stage, The Book of the Green Man was a revelation for me, introducing me to an odd assortment of reading, to visionary landscape and the Pastoral. It began a love affair with the English landscape that lasted many years.” Thomas A. Clark, email to the author, August 21, 2006. 51. Thomas A. Clark, Some Particulars (Kendal, Westmorland: Jargon Society, 1971), n.p.



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52. Samuel Palmer to John Linnell, Dec 21, 1828, in A. H. Palmer, The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer (London: Seeley and Co.: 1892), 176. 53. Palmer, Life and Letters, 175. 54. Clark, Some Particulars, n.p. 55. John Milton, The Poetical Works, 9. 56. Ibid., 9. 57. Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller (London: Vintage Books, 1998), 183. 58. The Blakean use of capitals would suggest this. However, these capitals do not appear in other editions of the poem. 59. Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 127. 60. Hans-Josef Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2003), 1. 61. Peter O’Leary, afterword in “The Book of Adam (Book V of Radi os),” Chicago Review 53.2/3 (Autumn, 2007), 187. 62. Ibid., 1–2. 63. Ibid., 2. 64. Ibid., 2. 65. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 22. 66. See James M. Robinson, ed. The Nag Hammadi Library (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 402–30. 67. G. R. S. Mead, Thrice Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis. Book I: Prolegomena (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 2001), 137. 68. Ibid., 137. 69. Ibid., 96. 70. G. R. S. Mead, Thrice Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis. Book III: Excerpts and Fragments (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 2001): 181, 183. 71. Norman Finkelstein, On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 70. 72. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 171. 73. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1993), 162. 74. Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004), 34. “Beginning with the Neoplatonist version of Kabbalah,” Arthur Green explains, “we may view the sefirot through either temporal or spatial lenses as stages or rungs in the self-manifestation of Deity. As stages in an ongoing process of inner divine revelation, the sefirot will emerge one after another, each deriving from and dependent upon the one before it.” Ibid., 35. 75. See Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 403, 405.



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76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

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Ibid., 15. O’Leary, afterword in “The Book of Adam,” 187. Schwartz, Tree of Souls, 15. Blake, another advocate of the cosmic significance of the human form divine (either as Albion and the Eternal Man or in the physiology of the human body) would no doubt agree with Johnson’s claim that the Man of Light is Paradise. In Milton, Blake writes that it is in “the Portals of [the] Brain” that “The Eternal Great Humanity Divine. [sic] planted his Paradise, / And in it caus’d the spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms / In likeness of himself.” Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 96. Schwartz, Tree of Souls, 15. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Harry Crosby, “Madman,” in Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry 1914–1945, ed. Jerome Rothenberg (Boston, MA: Exact Change Press, 1974), 124. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, 96. Stan Brakhage and Ronald Johnson (with Jim Shedden), “Another Way of Looking at the Universe” (1997), Chicago Review 47/48, 4/1 (Winter 2001/ Spring 2002), 31–32. Jacob Boehme, The Signature of All Things and Other Writings, trans. John Ellinstone (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 1981), 31. Ibid., 22. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 4. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 4. Selinger, “ ‘I Composed the Holes,’ ” 56. Ronald Johnson, “Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid” notebook, c. 1994. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 347. Ibid., 348. Ibid., 348. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 39. Henry David Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, ed. H. Daniel Peck (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995, 45. Ibid., 45. Christine Downing, “Looking Back at Orpheus,” Spring 71 Orpheus. A Journal of Archetype and Culture (Fall, 2004), 27. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes,” in New Poems, trans. Stephen Cohn (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), 125. Downing, “Looking Back at Orpheus,” 31. Ronald Johnson, “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron” Northern Lights Studies in Creativity 2 (1985–86), 3.



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103. Ronald Johnson, “The Book of Adam (Book V of Radi os),” Chicago Review 53.2/3 (Autumn, 2007), 163–87. 104. O’Leary, afterword in “The Book of Adam,” 187. 105. Johnson, “The Book of Adam,” 183. 106. Ron Silliman, “Space May Produce New Wor(l)ds,” Montemora 4 (1978), 289. 107. Virgil, The Eclogues and The Georgics, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 124. 108. Milton, Poetical Works, 3. 109. Finkelstein, On Mount Vision, 70. 110. See Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 265–68. 111. Selinger notes that the configuration of the lines, “Man / the chosen / song,” in Radi os resembles either a diamond or a cross. Selinger, “ ‘I Composed the Holes,’ ” 56. 112. Finkelstein, On Mount Vision, 67. 113. See Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1984), 180 and 242. C.f. George F. Butterick, A Guide to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978), 256–57. 114. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 107. 115. Peter O’Leary, “ARK as Spiritual Phenomenon,” Sagetrieb 14.3 (Winter, 1997), 33. 116. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 107. 117. Ibid., 109. 118. Finkelstein, On Mount Vision, 68. 119. Scholem, Major Trends, 265. 120. Finkelstein, On Mount Vision, 69. 121. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 301. 122. June Singer provides a comprehensive overview of this theme in her essay, “The Evolution of the Soul” in The Allure of Gnosticism: The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Psychology and Contemporary Culture, ed. Robert. A. Segal (Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1995), 54–69. 123. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 301. 124. Ibid., 302. 125. Selinger, “ ‘I Composed the Holes,’ ” 66. 126. Ibid., 66. 127. Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (Louisville, Kentucky: Fons Vitae, 1997), 36. 128. Finkelstein, On Mount Vision, 70. 129. Scholem, Major Trends, 278. 130. Ibid., 279. 131. Duncan, Roots and Branches, 68. 132. Ronald Johnson, “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” Northern Lights Studies in Creativity 2 (1985–86), 2.



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A “mosaic of Cosmos”: ARK’s Bricolage Poetics

1. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1971), 318. 2. Marianne Moore, The Complete Prose, ed. Patricia Willis (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 506. 3. According to Robert von Hallberg, in Radi os “Johnson feels his way along Milton’s text, alert to the buried senses” rather than the “history of [his] words” and therefore does not follow “the path recommended by Emerson and Pound.” Robert Von Hallberg, Lyric Powers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 30. 4. Charles Simic, dust jacket blurb in Ronald Johnson, ARK 50: Spires 34–50 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984). 5. Ronald Johnson to Jonathan Williams, undated. PCMS-019, Jargon Society Collection, 1950–, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 6. Ronald Johnson, “ARK: The Ramparts (Arches I-XVIII),” Conjunctions 15 (1990), 189. 7. Ronald Johnson, “ARK: The Ramparts (Arches I-XVIII),” Conjunctions 15 (1990), 148–99. Ronald Johnson, “ARK 97–99, Arches XXXI-XXXIII,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 17.2/18.1 (1990), 273–81. 8. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), 237. 9. This visual is absent in the Living Batch Press edition of ARK, which also omits approximately a third of the text of “BEAM 5.” 10. Kathleen Raine writes at length on this painting and Blake’s symbolic use of sea and loom imagery in Blake and Antiquity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2002), 1–15. 11. Johnson recycles other poems or phrases from Songs of the Earth in “BEAM 2,” “BEAM 14,” and “BEAM 24.” 12. Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow (New York: New Directions, 1968), 12. 13. Homer, The Odyssey, 239. 14. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 25. 15. Ibid., 25. 16. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 54. 17. Ibid., 78–9. 18. Ronald Johnson, undated letter (typescript). Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 19. Marianne Moore, The Complete Prose, 512. 20. See Louis Zukofsky, “A” (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 185. 21. Julia Kristeva, The Julia Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 37.



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22. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London. Faber and Faber, 1961), 46. 23. James Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis,” Sulfur: A Literary Tri-Quarterly of the Whole Art 1 (1981), 42. 24. Ibid., 41–2. 25. R. Bruce Elder, “Brakhage: Poesis,” in Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, ed. David E. James (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 101. 26. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, ed. Ernest Rhys (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc, 1938), 181. 27. See Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions +: The Collected Essays, ed. Mark Scroggins (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 12. Bruce Comens, Apocalypse and After: Modern Strategy and Postmodern Tactics in Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1995), 171. 28. Zukofsky, “A”, 511. 29. Schelb, “The Extraction of Song,” 351–2. 30. Burton Hatlen, “From Modernism to Postmodernism: Zukofsky’s “A”-12,” in Upper Limit Music, 214. 31. Johnson, “ARK: The Ramparts (Arches I-XVIII),” 189. 32. See Zukofsky, “A”, 1, 536. 33. Ibid., 262, 517. 34. See Louis Zukofsky’s letter to Guy Davenport, September 23, 1967, cited in Mark Scroggins, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Berkeley: Shoemaker Hoard, 2007), 393. 35. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crisis in Poetry,” trans. Bradford Cook, in Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950, ed. Melissa Kwasny (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 157. 36. Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Letters, trans. Rosmary Lloyd (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 86. 37. Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 5. 38. Matthew Potolsky, “Crise de Vers (à Soie): Mallarmé and the Scene of Revision,” MLN 110.4 (1995), 715. 39. Kent Johnson, “A Fractal Music: Some Notes on Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers,” in. Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, ed. Mark Scroggins (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1997), 261. 40. Ibid., 261. 41. Tim Woods, The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 213. 42. Ibid., 214. 43. Edward Schelb, “The Extraction of Song: Louis Zukofsky and the Ideology of Form,” Contemporary Literature 31.3 (Autumn, 1990), 337. 44. See Zukofsky, “A”, 528. Zukofsky proposes a similar case for the literal sense of reading in his 1971 essay, “For Wallace Stevens.” See Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions +, 24.



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45. Ronald Johnson, The Round Earth on Flat Paper (Urbana, Illinois; The Finial Press, 1968), n.p. 46. Ibid., 10. 47. Schelb, “The Extraction of Song,” 336, 351. 48. C.f. Zukofsky, “A”, 511. 49. Comens, Apocalypse and After, 151. 50. Ibid., 234. 51. See Zukofsky, “A”, 508. 52. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Foulys, ed. D. S. Brewer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 71. 53. C.f. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1999), 251. 54. Chaucer, The Parlement of Foulys, 80. 55. Michele Leggott, Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, 34. 56. Ibid., 37. 57. Comens, Apocalypse and After, 184. 58. Robert Creeley’s endorsement of ARK appears on the back cover of the Living Batch Press edition of ARK. 59. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 65. 60. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 14. 61. Donald Hall, “Interview with Ezra Pound,” Paris Review 28 (Summer/Fall, 1962), http://www.theparisreview.org/media/4598_POUND.pdf 62. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Arden, 2001), 104. 63. Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (London: Marion Boyars, 1977), 106. 64. Ibid., 98. 65. Gus Blaisdell, “Building Poems,” VORT: Twenty-First Century Previews 3.3 (1976), 131. 66. Ibid., 131–2. 67. Ibid., 132. 68. Ibid., 132. 69. Ibid., 132. 70. Kenner, A Homemade World, 106. 71. Ibid., 110–111. 72. Stacy Carson Hubbard, “ ‘The Many Armed Embrace’: Collection, Quotation, and Mediation in Marianne Moore’s Poetry,” Sagetrieb 12.2 (Fall, 1993), 12. 73. See Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta, “Acts of Containment: Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure,” Journal of Modern Literature 29.4 (2006), 124–44. 74. Kenner, A Homemade World, 102.



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75. Ronald Johnson, “Persistent Light on the Inviolably Forever Other,” Margins 13 (August-September, 1974), 13. 76. Ronald Johnson, “Hurrah for Euphony: Dedicated to Young Poets,” The Cultural Society (January 14, 2002), http://culturalsociety.org/RJ.html 77. Ronald Johnson, “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” Northern Lights Studies in Creativity 2 (1985–86), 1, 3. 78. Ronald Johnson, “Six, Alas!” Chicago Review 37.1 (1990), 41. 79. Marianne Moore, Complete Poems (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), 134. 80. Ibid., 74. 81. Lorrayne Carroll, “Marianne Moore,” in American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, ed. Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 105. 82. John Slatin, The Savage’s Romance: The Poetry of Marianne Moore (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), 7. 83. Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 177. 84. Ibid., 177. 85. Lynn Keller, “ ‘For Inferior Who Is Free?’ Liberating the Woman Writer in Marianne Moore’s ‘Marriage,’ in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 225. 86. Ibid., 226. 87. Moore, Complete Poems, 72. 88. Ibid., 273, 73. 89. Slatin, The Savage’s Romance, 9. 90. Moore, Complete Poems, 71. 91. Fiona Green, “ ‘The Magnitude of their Root Systems’: ‘An Octopus’ and National Character,” in “A Right Salvo of Barks”: Critics and Poets on Marianne Moore, ed. Linda Levell, Cristanne Miller, and Robin G. Schultze (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 140. 92. Ibid., 140. 93. Moore, Complete Poems, 71. 94. Stacy Carson Hubbard, “The Many Armed-Embrace: Collection, Quotation and Mediation in Marianne Moore’s Poetry,” Sagetrieb 12.2 (Fall, 1993), 15. 95. Moore, Complete Poems, 271. 96. Williams, Imaginations, 319. 97. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1940), 49. 98. Lynn Keller, “ ‘For Inferior Who Is Free?’ ” 233. 99. Ronald Johnson, Arches Notebook c.1986. Quoted with permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 100. Ronald Johnson, Arches Notebook c. 1990. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 101. Hubbard, “The Many-Armed Embrace,” 19.



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102. Ronald Johnson, Notebook c. 1975. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 103. Ronald Johnson, Arches Notebook c.1986. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 104. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 561. C.f. Zukofsky, “A”, 528. 105. William Carlos Williams, Paterson, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1992), 222. 106. Ronald Johnson, Notebook c.1994. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 107. Ronald Johnson, “Thoreau & Van Gogh” Arches Notebook c.1989. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 108. Ronald Johnson, “ARK 51” & ARK Essay Notebook. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 109. Ronald Johnson, “Thoreau & Van Gogh” Arches Notebook c.1989. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 110. Ronald Johnson, Arches Notebook c. 1986. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 111. Ibid. 112. According to Mark Scoggins, this Goethe paraphrase (which Scroggins quoted to Johnson in a letter and which Johnson subsequently cemented into “ARK 73”) is an example of what Johnson called a “hyrda” quote”: “A ‘hydra’ quote, one assumes, because it springs up everywhere, but has no single determinate source.” The point, Scroggins argues, “is that the words’ source—for Johnson, and for the readers of ARK—doesn’t matter. The words have gone in to make part of one of the tercets of an Arch, fitting in with the poem’s intricate imagery of sound and architecture” (RJ 9–10). 113. Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Letters, ed. Merwin Roe (London and New York: J. M. Dent & Sons and E. P. Dutton & Co., 1943), 202. 114. See John Read, From Alchemy to Chemistry (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 28–40. 115. Ronald Johnson, “A Note on ARK ” in Johnson, ARK 50, 56. 116. Ronald Johnson, Notebook c.1995. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 117. Robert Duncan, Fictive Certainties (New York: New Directions, 1985), 115.

Conclusion: Felix Culpa: Innocence and Renewal 1. Thomas Traherne, Poems, Centuries and Three Thanksgivings, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 87. 2. Stan Brakhage, Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (New York: McPherson, 2001), 140. 3. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 63.



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4. Ronald Johnson to Jonathan Williams, February 22, no year. PCMS-019, Jargon Society Collection, 1950–, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate. 5. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human-World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 6. Eliot, Collected Poems, 63. Ronald Johnson, The Shrubberies, ed. Peter O’Leary (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2001), 124. 7. Tim Smit, “Welcome to Eden,” in Eden Project: The Guide 2007/8 (London: Eden Project Books/Transworld Publishers, 2007), 1. 8. Ronald Johnson, “Six, Alas!” Chicago Review 37.1 (1990), 26. 9. Ibid., 36. 10. Bob Gilmore, Harry Partch: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 1. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 377. 13. Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (London: Calder & Boyars, 1969), 80–1. 14. Brakhage, Essential Brakhage, 12. 15. Ibid., 12. 16. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 1985), 138. 17. Bruce Andrews, “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis,” in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994), 669–70. 18. Eric Murphy Selinger, “Important Pleasures and Others: Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson,” Postmodern Culture 4.3 (1994), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ postmodern_culture/v004/4.3selinger.html 19. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry; or, The Defense of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1973), 101. 20. James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 1997), 45. 21. Ibid., 45. 22. Ibid., 45. 23. Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (New York: New Directions, 1960), 10. 24. Johnson includes the natural science writer (misspelled “Eisley”) in his list of inf luences in “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” Northern Lights Studies in Creativity 2 (1985–86), 4. Sherman Paul, For the Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 200. 25. Ibid., 200.



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26. Ronald Bush, “The Cantos: The Pisan Cantos LXXIV-LXXXIV,” in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulis and Stephen J. Adams (Westpark, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 43. 27. Pierre Joris, Justifying the Margins (Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2009), 130. 28. Ronald Johnson to Philip Van Aver, October 3 1988. Courtesy of Philip Van Aver. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate.



Notes




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Adam, 2, 25, 29, 40, 69, 70, 71, 139, 140, 141, 142, 150–5, 190, 195–7, 200 see also Adam Ha-Rishon; Adam Kadmon; anthropos Adam Ha-Rishon, 154–5 Adam Kadmon, 140–2, 151–4, 193 alchemy, 43, 152, 191 Andrews, Bruce, 11, 15, 201 Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 144–5 anthropos, 140, 141, 142, 145, 151, 152, 153 Antin, David, 24, 52 apocrypha, 131, 139, 140, 155 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 45, 131 Arber, Agnes, 31, 37, 78 assemblage, 3, 17, 20, 57, 107, 108, 131, 180, 185, 198 see also collage; naïve art Aver, Philip Van, 1, 203 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 37, 133, 160, 162, 178 Bacon, Sir Francis, 31, 32, 33, 125 Baum, L. Frank, 7, 111, 166 see also Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Bernstein, Charles, 11, 12 Black Mountain, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 52 Blake, William, 1, 43, 64, 72, 77, 84, 110, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 137,

140, 144, 145–6, 187, 188, 214n9, 215n34, 224n58, 225n79, 227n10 “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” 188 “Auguries of Innocence,” 160 Jerusalem, 110 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 40, 67, 127 Milton, 126, 127, 129 Blaisdell, Gus, 158, 178, 179 Blanchot, Maurice, 149 Bloom, Harold, 65, 77, 175 Boehme, Jacob, 43, 144, 145, 191 Bogan, Louise, 181 Bowen, Elizabeth, 181, 197 Brakhage, Stan, 18, 37, 40, 195, 199, 200, 202 Breton, André, 108 bricolage, 13, 20, 21, 92, 105, 110, 113, 115, 124, 127, 130, 133, 154, 155, 157, 158, 162, 164, 165, 168, 175, 178, 179, 180, 190, 219n62 see also collage; naïve art Brown, Bob, 131 Bunting, Basil, 9, 51, 53, 168, 211n3 Briggflatts, 180 Burroughs, William, 132 Cage, John, 133–4 Calvino, Italo, 138 Cavell, Stanley, 54, 119, 120, 121 cento, 127, 130, 221n12



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Index

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 173 Cheval, Ferdinand “Le Facteur,” 107, 108, 110, 119, 121, 167, 177, 196, 198 Clare, John, 66, 186 Clark, Laurie, 223n48 Clark, Thomas A, 135–7, 202, 223n48, 223n50 collage, 3–5, 9, 17–24, 25, 35, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61–4, 66, 79, 83, 84, 91–4, 99, 101, 105, 106, 111, 124, 129–30, 132, 133, 139, 155, 157, 161, 164, 165, 179–86, 198–9, 203 and Charles Ives, 91–4 and Ezra Pound, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61–4 and Marianne Moore, 179–86 see also bricolage; ideogrammic method Cornell, Joseph, 180 Creeley, Robert, 9, 52, 135, 157, 175, 218n22, 229n58 Crosby, Harry, 143 Dahlberg, Edward, 9, 26, 47, 52 Dante, 159 Davenport, Guy, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 25, 52, 53, 57, 61, 68, 73, 76, 92, 93, 101, 104, 107, 128, 130, 145, 165, 176, 196, 200, 221n12 Delius, Frederick, 82, 83 Dewey, John, 61–2 Dickinson, Emily, 30, 181, 193, 196, 197, 201 Divine Anthropos, 140, 141 Duchamp, Marcel, 130–1, 134 Duncan, Robert, 6, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 24, 43, 52, 58, 83–6, 94, 96, 99–100, 116, 126, 155, 160, 161, 175, 193, 201, 216n55, 218n22, 218n24 Eiseley, Loren, 202, 232n24 Eliot, T.S., 14, 18, 53, 59, 93, 129, 165, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 196, 200

Ellis, Havelock, 134, 135 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 23–6, 30, 31, 32, 34–41, 43–9, 64, 65, 69, 80, 97, 114, 119, 121, 154, 167, 168 and self-reliance 101–4, 105–6, 120, 172, 188, 191, 200, 202 see also transcendentalism Eurydice, 13, 139, 145–9, 150–1, 160, 166 Faivre, Antoine, 42 Fenollosa, Ernest, 47, 53, 54, 56–8, 211n52 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 9, 45 Foss, Lukas, 132, 133 Foucault, Michel, 42 found objects, see assemblage Frye, Northrop, 23, 25, 127, 145–6 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 53–4, 104, 116, 134, 149, 195, 212n11 Furnival, John, 9 Genette, Gerard, 123, 130, 131, 133 Gerard, John, 80 gnosticism, 42, 140, 144, 152, 160, 226n122 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 32, 46, 189, 231n112 Gray, Asa, 146, 148 Grigson, Geoffrey, 9–10, 31, 70–1, 73, 78, 84, 87 Grigson, Jane, 9 Gunn, Thom, 11, 116, 207n47 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 13, 14, 53, 86 Handel, George Frideric, 133 Harrison, Lou, 134 Hazlitt, William, 221n12 Henry, Pierre, 17 Heseltine, Philip, see Warlock, Peter Hermes, 24, 161–2, 169 Herme Trismegistus, 169 Herrick, Robert, 81, 173



252

Hillman, James, 41, 149, 165, 201, 203 history, 9, 70, 73, 187, 189, 191–2 and Emerson, 36–8, 167 and Johnson, 26, 62–3, 124, 127, 128, 157, 165–7, 175–7, 191–2, 203 and Moore, 179, 185 and Pound, 9, 54, 59–63, 165 and Zukofsky, 164, 167, 168–72, 179 Homer, 130, 159, 162, 221n12 Odyssey, the, 158, 159, 160, 162, 166 Howe, Susan, 201 Hoyem, Andrew, 112, 113 ideogrammic method, 52, 55–62, 64, 69, 71, 72, 79–89, 91, 159, 164, 169, 178 in The Book of the Green Man, 79–89 see also Pound, Ezra Isidore, Raymond, 91, 107, 108, 109–10, 119, 121, 198 Ives, Charles, 4, 10, 18, 19, 20, 51, 91, 92–104, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, 116–17, 118, 121, 124, 134, 178, 198, 199, 217n12 John of Patmos, St., 86 Johnson, Ronald Adamic sensibilities, 21, 69, 71, 72, 73, 92, 105, 115, 116, 142, 154, 165, 166, 168, 174, 190, 192, 193, 203 assemblage sculptures, 17, 20 bricolage poetics, 13, 21, 92, 105, 110, 113, 115, 124, 127, 130, 133, 154, 155, 157–62, 164, 165, 168, 175, 178, 179, 180, 190, 219n62, see also bricolage; collage; history cookery, 5, 6, 9, 18, 121 and Jonathan Williams, 8, 10, 66, 74, 195 notebooks, 74–6, 186–9

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253

and Orpheus, 13–14, 33, 106–7, 139, 148–9, 150, 166 romantic sensibilities, 4, 5, 8, 14, 19, 23–4, 31, 34, 49, 70, 125–6, 128–9 sexuality, 15 and transcendentalism, 23–49 translations of Raymond Isidore and Ferdinand Cheval, 107, 109–10 visit to the Watts Towers, 110, 219n62 Xero-Ox editions, 6, 158, 164, 206n Johnson, Ronald, work of A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees, 1, 3, 8, 26, 28, 31, 34, 35, 38, 41, 51, 64, 66, 80, 85, 92, 186, 191, 194, 198; “Emerson, On Goethe,” 45–9, 114, 191; “Four Orphic Poems,” 31, 33, 37, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 85; “Landscape with Bears, for Charles Olson,” 41; “Lilacs, Portals, Evocations,” 26, 28, 31, 92; “Of Circumstance, The Circum Stances,” 12, 26, 27–8, 98; “Quivara,” 26; “Samuel Palmer: The Characters of Fire,” 25, 28, 66, 213n2; “Shake, Quoth the Dove House,” 28, 66; “Still Life,” 26, 31, 39, 200; “When Men Will Lie Down as Gracefully & as Ripe,” 45 The American Table, 6, 121 ARK, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 34, 35, 37, 63–4, 71, 92, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 124, 134, 137, 144, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 157, 158, 162–6, 167, 168, 169, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191–2, 194, 195–8, 199, 211n51, 231n112; ARK: “The Foundations,” 2, 30, 38–41, 42, 47, 112, 115–19, 123, 143, 149, 150, 154–5, 157, 158, 159, 162–3, 164, 187; “BEAM 1,” 115, 159;



Index

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Index

Johnson, Ronald, work of—Continued “BEAM 2,” 150–1, 196, 227n11; “BEAM 4,” 37, 38, 39, 40, 118, 143, 144; “BEAM 5, The Voices,” 13, 37, 151, 158–62, 173, 227n9; “BEAM 7,” 37, 115; “BEAM 8,” 120, 169, 198, 201; “BEAM 10,” 151–4, 160, 193; “BEAM 11, Finial,” 39, 115, 118, 153, 192; “BEAM 12,” 33, 40, 118; “BEAM 14,” 4, 151, 227n11; “BEAM 16, The Voices,” 4, 24, 119, 150, 169; “BEAM 17,” 25, 40, 71; “BEAM 18,” 39–40, 43; “BEAM 20, Labyrinthus,” 41, 191; “BEAMS 21, 22, 23, The Book of Orpheus,” 30, 150, 151; “BEAM 25, A Bicentennial Hymn,” 117–18, 193; “BEAM 26,” 119; “BEAM 27,” 119; “BEAM 28, The Book of Orpheus,” 19, 144, 160; “BEAM 29,” 2, 160, 193; “BEAM 33,” 115, 155; ARK: “The Spires,” 2, 6, 9, 13, 18, 137, 149, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 168, 174, 177, 182, 186, 211n51; ARK 50: Spires 34–50, 6, 157; “ARK 34, Spire on the Death of L.Z.”, 166, 199; “ARK 35, Spire Called Arm of the Moon,” 2, 25, 118, 151, 190; “ARK 38, Ariel’s Song to Prospero,” 17, 164, 208n55; “ARK 50, Adamspire,” 182; “ARK 53, Starspire,” 177, 182; “ARK 55, The ABC Spire,” 182; ARK: “The Ramparts,” 2, 6, 9, 18, 137, 149, 157, 158, 162–4, 165, 168, 169, 174, 177, 178, 182, 186, 188, 193, 194; “ARK 60, Fireworks I,” 189–90; “ARK 61, Fireworks II,” 190; “ARK 83, Arches XVII,” 182; “ARK 85, Arches XIX,”197, 198– 200; “ARK 86, Arches XX, The Wreath,” 182; “ARK 88, Arches XXII, The Cave,” 182; “ARK 91, Arches XXV,” 182; “ARK 92,

Arches XXVI,” 187–8; “ARK 93, Arches XXVII,” 186; “ARK 96, Arches XXX,” 177; “ARK 98, Arches XXXII,” 158, 177, 191;”ARK 99, Arches XXXIII,” 155, 158, 165, 177, 192, 193, 198 The Book of the Green Man, 10, 51, 62, 64, 65–89, 92, 97, 105, 108, 129, 136, 164, 165, 173, 180, 186, 213n2, 223n50 The Different Musics, 80, 91–4, 105, 106, 110, 113, 123, 124; “Assorted Jungles: Rousseau,” 106; “The Different Musics,” 94–9, see also Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses “Hurrah for Euphony,” 13, 23, 26, 30, 31, 53, 181 “If I Die Before I Awake,” 219n50 Io and the Ox-Eyed Daisy, 9 “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,” 3, 53, 149, 181, 232n24 Radi os, 35, 44–5, 123–55, 157, 195, 223n47, 226n11, 227n3 The Round Earth on Flat Paper, 171 The Shrubberies, 1, 5 “Six, Alas!,” 181, 197 Songs of the Earth, 112–15, 151, 161, 227n11 The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will Talk, 106–10 “Up Till Now,” 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18, 20, 41, 51, 69, 93, 107, 108, 110, 112, 117, 123, 128, 139, 150–1, 154, 163, 168, 180, 198, 207n47, 219n62 Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, 92, 176 Wor(l)ds, 12–13, 110–12, 113, 115, 124, 126, 149, 150, 158, 220n65 Jones, Barbara, 107 Jung, Carl Gustav, 119, 126, 140–1, 152, 153, 186 Jungian psychology, 29, 37, 148, 155 kabbalah, 42, 140, 141, 224n74 Kansas, 5, 7, 27, 52, 63, 110–11, 115, 192



254

Kenner, Hugh, 10, 14, 53–4, 55, 56, 57, 58, 116, 178, 179, 180, 199, 212n11 Kilvert, Francis, 67–8, 74, 75, 82, 83 Kristeva, Julia, 164 Language Poetry, 10–11, 12–16, 19 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 152 Levertov, Denise, 65, 71–2, 83, 84 Lincoln, Abraham, 118, 189–91, 193 Loy, Mina, 8, 19, 24, 131 Lucretius, 31, 175 Mahler, Gustav, 112, 113, 114, 115, 178 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 128, 157, 169–71, 172, 174 Mead, G. R. S., 140 memory jugs, 106, 219n50 Milton, John, 64, 84, 123–9, 130, 133, 137, 138–9, 143, 146, 150, 151, 180, 221n12, 223n47, 227n3 Moore, Marianne, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 51, 157, 164, 165, 177, 178–86, 187, 188, 200 “The Mind is An Enchanting Thing,” 182 “An Octopus,” 182, 183–5, 187, 188 see also collage Muir, John, 183, 184, 185 Nag Hammadi Library, The, 140 naïve art, see bricolage neoplatonism, 60, 143, 152, 153, 224n74 Niedecker, Lorine, 24, 181, 202 Olson, Charles, 8, 9, 10, 13, 18, 19, 21, 24, 26–8, 31, 41, 47, 51, 52, 53, 63, 92, 94, 96, 100, 121, 134, 152, 166, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, 218n22 Orpheus, 13, 14, 31–3, 107, 139, 147–9, 150, 166 see also Eurydice; Phanes

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255

Pagels, Elaine, 140 Palmer, Samuel, 25, 26, 28, 66, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 84, 85, 86–9, 135, 136–7, 202, 214n9, 215n34, 216n58 Partch, Harry, 117, 198–9, 220n80 Pater, Walter, 46, 55, 174 Phanes, 143 Phillips, Tom, 132, 133, 223n33 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 43, 210n41 Pound, Ezra, 2, 4, 5, 8–9, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 35, 51–64, 66, 69, 71, 79, 83, 84, 91, 93, 94, 96, 124, 143, 157, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 191, 198, 200, 202–3 The Cantos, 2, 4, 9, 51, 54, 56, 57–63, 83, 84, 93, 96, 129, 158–60, 198, 199, 202–3 and Fenollosa, Ernest, 56–8 and ideogrammic method, 55–8 Raine, Kathleen, 140, 227n10 Rexroth, Kenneth, 11, 43 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 13, 32, 149 Robin Goodfellow, 79–82 Rodia, Sabato (Sam), 6, 7, 19, 20, 105, 107, 108, 119, 120, 121, 158, 176, 177, 196, 198, 199, 219n62 Rothenberg, Jerome, 24, 62 Rousseau, Henri, 106–7 Ruggles, Carl, 92, 134 Ruskin, John, 67–8, 70, 111, 183, 184–5, 186 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 4 Schaeffer, Piere, 17 Sewell, Elizabeth, 30–41, 42, 43, 46, 49, 76, 125, 144, 148, 210n41 Shakespeare, William, 32, 80, 81, 117, 177 Sharpless, Jack, 17, 208n54



Index

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Index

Sidney, Sir Philip, 201 Sitwell, Edith, 79, 81, 181 Stein, Gertrude, 19, 108, 137 Stevens, Wallace, 23–4, 180 Thomson, James, 66 Thoreau, Henry David, 1, 4, 10, 23–4, 25, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40–1, 42, 48, 54, 70, 72, 77, 80, 97, 100, 101, 104, 111, 113, 114, 119, 120, 121, 134, 146–7, 148, 173, 186, 202, 209n23, 215n23 Todd, Glenn, 112 Todd, Ruthven, 84 Toklas, Alice B., 108 Traherne, Thomas, 195 transcendentalism, 3, 4, 8, 12, 14, 23–49, 69, 70, 92, 101–4, 106, 116, 119, 165, 176, 199, 210n32 Vendler, Helen, 6, 158 Virgil, 130, 150, 159, 221n12 Warlock, Peter, 80, 83 Watts Towers, the, see Rodia, Sabato White, Gilbert, 68, 74, 80, 82, 83, 129, 135

Whitman, Walt, 2, 4, 24, 25, 30, 35–6, 70, 72, 80, 84–5, 97, 104, 111, 167, 211n51, 215n23 Williams, Jonathan, 8, 10, 52, 53, 66, 74, 77, 82, 112, 114, 134–5, 137, 195, 202 Williams, William Carlos, 4, 9, 19, 24, 52, 157, 176, 181, 185, 188 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The, 7, 111, 199 see also Baum, L. Frank Wordsworth, Dorothy, 77–9 Wordsworth, William, 32, 66, 67, 68, 70, 74, 77–9, 125, 129, 130 Yeats, W. B., 43, 46, 52, 153 Zukofsky, Louis, 2, 6, 7, 10, 11–13, 14, 16–17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 37, 51, 52, 53, 92, 137, 157, 163, 164–5, 166, 167, 168–75, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 188, 190, 200 “A,” 164, 168, 169, 170, 172–4, 175, 178, 180, 188, 190 Poem Beginning “The,”173, 181, 182



256

Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

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Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in New American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Reading Modernist Poetry

Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science

Contemporary Poetry

Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Holding Patterns: Temporary Poetics in Contemporary Poetry

Haiku and Modernist Poetics

Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Modern Poetry after Modernism

Modern British Poetry

Modern English War Poetry

A Usable Past: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics

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