The Forgotten Lucidity of Ronald Johnson: A Hermetic Pilgrim of American Poetics
In the sonorous underbrush of postmodern American poetry, amid the titans of grand publicity, there remains Ronald Johnson (1935–1998), a poet whose work—divergent, luminous, operating on a subterranean blueprint of the cosmos—has increasingly drawn scholarly and esoteric attention. Born in Ashland, Kansas and largely self-educated, Johnson shared affinities with the Black Mountain School and the objectivist precision of Charles Olson, but his true vocation was one of arch syntax and metaphysical inquiry, attuned more to Pliny and Lucretius than to the grim hum of post-war America. His voice, resonant with the proportions of silence, refined the art of omitting as a form of augmenting.
Best known during his lifetime for his concrete poetry and his epic erasure of John Milton’s *Paradise Lost*, aptly titled *Radi Os* (1980), Johnson carved meaning from absence. He was a companion of the New American poetry milieu, drifting with equal comfort among organicists and formalists, yet remaining elusive, unclassifiable. His poetry is tinctured with the pastoral, the alchemical, and the contemplative. It remained an inner notation for those bent to decipher sigils in saffron light.
To approach Johnson’s work is to violate our cognitive tendency for linear pilgrimage. His oeuvre leaps through histories and ontologies like dew on a spiderweb: distributed yet coherent. “Those who long for clarity best learn to read stars backwards,” he wrote, suggestively, in *The Book of the Green Man* (1967), a compendium of poems both travelogue and hymn. He balanced a sensual lyricism with metaphysical rigour, finding the same order in English hedgerows as in Newton’s physical laws.
His commitment to natural phenomena as sacred text is nowhere more profound than in *ARK* (published incrementally between 1980 and 1996), his masterpiece. This ambitious long poem comprises 99 sections divided into “beams,” a structural metaphor that reflects Johnson’s fascination with architecture and the body as resonant vessels. A trans-America ode and mystical vessel, *ARK* is Johnson’s cathedral “built by heat, beat, and breath.” In Beam 30, he writes:
> “On the skin we touch cosmos —
> and as green as lamb’s-ear leaf
> soft atoms dream
> each in its orbit
> a song to keep the void at bay.” *
Here, Johnson’s lyricism extends nature into metaphysics, not abstracting it, but listening to its latent itinerary. One may read *ARK* not only as a poetic epic but as a kind of philosophical ethics: replace the Cartesian disjoint with a resonant geometry of phenomena.
The poet’s interest in Gnostic structures and culinary metaphors—his early vocation as a cookbook author culminated in the publication of *The American Table* (1984)—verges on peculiar. Indeed, his poetic project mirrors alchemical procedure: transmutation of warping language into gold-lettered cellular life. His experimental cookbook is not entirely unpoetic, nor are his poems without recipe. Johnson did not delimit experience by its conventionally ascribed genre.
Within *Radi Os*, we come upon his most daring gesture: a carving away of Milton’s original to produce, through erasure, a diaphanous new poem. For Puritanical consonance, he substituted radiating silence. In this act, Johnson themed an implicit metaphysical rebellion: undo the moral firmament to reveal its quiet underscript.
> “o tree
> into the hill
> light.” **
That is the first stanza of *Radi Os*. It begins not with the fall of Satan but with ascension into form. Light is not metaphor but source code. As poetic gesture, this is radical idealism—the divine contained not in dogma but in apperception molded by absence.
Such efforts mirror a broader philosophical question: can erasure restore being to language? Or is the poetic word always parasitic upon a prior loss, contouring only around forgotten shapes?
My own encounter with Johnson occurred amid my re-reading of the poet in a hospital in Antalya, with the chirping of ibises substituting the cathedral choirs he so often invoked. This was the page I’d re-encountered:
> “Each word must be chosen as if one were building the visible part of a vast underground system for transmitting light.” ***
A line from *ARK*, Beam 63. Not merely a metaphor for writing, it posits language itself as conductance: plasma through the nervous architecture of thought. Unlike his contemporaries, Johnson does not infect language with excess; he carefully attenuates, decants until each phoneme must account for its own light-bearing.
To live, then, in the arc of Johnson’s work is to adopt a rare humility—to relinquish the ego of expression and instrumental language, and instead to dwell in the frequencies emitted by seed-pods and magnetic north. He, more than any American poet of his wilderness-era contemporaries, eschews the dominant anthropocentric code and listens with bardic disdain to non-human phenomenologies. He reminds us, quietly, that intelligence is not property but emergence.
Philosophically, Johnson raises an important proposition: what if paradise is not lost, but hidden under overlay? By returning to silence, can the poet re-sound the Edenic sphere of sound itself? Contrary to John Donne’s bowing before the trumpets of God’s hierarchy, Johnson wires the underground chamber from which silence blooms into speech.
This spiritual subterfuge, akin to Sufi poetics or the Zen calligrapher’s void, acts not in opposition to inherited Western poetics, but as a deviant tributary. While peers asphalted the roads of ‘identity’, Johnson sought tunneling systems beneath symbolic logic, towards what Charles Burchfield called “the spiritual rhythm within the interstices of things.” ****
So when you next consider the poet—to read him is not enough—you must *walk* Johnson, like an architectural plan walked in silence. Begin at the origins of things, their smallest indexes. A bird’s throat before the song. He is the poet not of the Real, but of the *really seen*.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, architecture, silence
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* Johnson, Ronald. *ARK*. Flood Editions, 2013.
** Johnson, Ronald. *Radi Os*. Sand Dollar Press, 1977.
*** Johnson, Ronald. *ARK*, Beam 63. Op. cit.
**** Burchfield, Charles. *Collected Journals*. Ed. J. Benjamin Townsend, University of Buffalo, 1993.