The Unseen Cartographies of Ronald Johnson
Born in Ashland, Kansas in 1935, Ronald Johnson’s early life was shaped by the great flatness of the American heartland, a geography mirrored in the vast textual plains of his later poetry. Often recognized only within the obscure echelons of “poets’ poets,” Johnson’s oeuvre remains largely beyond the radar of mainstream literary discourse. His lifelong devotion to experimentation and enchantment with the American landscape renders him an outsider to conventional canons, yet a central figure for those who seek poetry where language aspires beyond narrative, touching instead the ungraspable outline of mind and earth.
Educated at the University of Kansas and then spending considerable time in the literary crucibles of San Francisco and New York, Johnson was a peer to the Beat poets but never one of them. His poetic voice aligns more naturally with the tradition of Charles Olson’s projective verse and the ecstatic embroidery of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Between gastronomy (he published the cult cookbook *The American Table* in 1984) and a life spent walking landscapes—be they textual or topographic—Johnson charted a cartography as esoteric as it was radiant.
The backbone of Johnson’s poetic reputation rests on *ARK*, his lifelong poetic edifice composed over the span of two decades. Much like Ezra Pound’s *Cantos* or Louis Zukofsky’s *“A”*, ARK resists summarization. It is not a poem but a process: “a dwelling made of verses, a sculpture built from light.”¹ In it, Johnson attempts to reconstruct a cosmos ravaged by modernist fragmentation—not synthetically, but organically, by invoking the recombinant logic of nature itself: “All I could do was walk and build, with words as stones…to construct a habitat for spirit.”²
Johnson coined ARK as “a sacred space built of words,” and the poem is as architectural as it is musical. The 99-part poem is built in trilogies: *The Foundations*, *The Spires*, and *The Ramparts*, and within these divisions is embedded a precise music of vision, akin to poetic geomancy. Much praise has been given to Johnson’s method of textual transmutation—particularly his earlier work *Radi os* (1977), a “writing through” of Milton’s *Paradise Lost*, wherein Johnson erases most of the text, leaving behind a palimpsestic luminescence of holy residue: “O / bright / effluence / of / bright essence / increate.”³
This approach, more than stylistic, evokes a theory of language as adamic—not postlapsarian, but prelapsarian in intent, reaching back before the Fall to a language unsoiled by dominion or commodification. In *Radi os*, what remains is not interpretation, but invocation; not critique, but crystallization. As Susan Howe remarked in her essay “Scare Quotes,” Johnson “emptied language to be refilled with sacred presence, as if poetry could itself compose the world again, without genesis or judgment.”⁴
Reading Johnson today is like walking into a forested glade after the rain, and finding beneath each leaf a tiny cathedral. His work requires deceleration; it necessitates a different temporality—one rhythmic with seedings and meteorologies, with the “sky’s long apprenticeship / in blue.”⁵ Such lines do not instruct so much as they reveal a hidden order beneath appearance. And yet, this slowing down is its own philosophical gesture, a rejection of speed as sovereignty. In this way, Johnson offers not merely poetics, but poethics: a mode of being that reflects attentiveness rather than progress, perceive-ence rather than preeminence.
At the heart of this poetics is an enduring question: What is the relation between the visible and the invisible? In *ARK 47*, Johnson writes:
“a coronet of air / encircling / no throne but the breath / we lend it.”⁶
The image is subtle but total. The human crown—eternally shaped of air, invisibility, breath. There is majesty here beyond temporal authority; a kingdom perceptible only to those who unclench the eye.
This coronet of air—that image haunted me for weeks after first reading it. It began to echo through the corridors of thought, eventually suggesting a metaphysical realization: that perhaps the divine is less of an agent and more of a grammar. We lend breath not just to words, but to Being—it is the human act of voicing that shapes the divine syntax. Thus, Johnson’s poetry becomes a theology-of-the-breath, where sound and space meet in a shared consecration.
I had been rereading Plotinus the same month and found curious resonances between Johnson’s line and the Enneads’ persistent claim that the One—the source from which all emanates—cannot be grasped, only approached in silence. Johnson, however, elegizes silence without abandoning utterance; he seeks the unspeakable through articulation, not through retreat: “Let there be less / to know, / but more / to begin from.”⁷
Yes—more to begin from. In a time when language is deployed like scaffolding around the self, Johnson offers us a form of stripping-down that is not austerity but clarity. There is generosity at the foundations of *ARK*, an open invitation to dwell, not just to read.
It is perhaps telling that Johnson spent the last years of his life battling illness, fading eyesight and retreating income, yet refused to be bitter. Instead, he kept perfecting *ARK*. Each line he laid bore the singular touch of the artisan—the stonemason of verse—like Aquinas at his summa, not to complete the edifice, but to house the silence beyond understanding. When he died in 1998, Johnson left behind a work that remains nearly unassimilable to the literary marketplace, precisely because it resists being anything but itself.
So for those wishing to know Ronald Johnson: do not begin in haste. Begin instead with a long walk. Carry a pebble. Imagine language not as information, but as invocation. Begin with *Radi os*, but dwell in *ARK*. You are entering not a text, but a terrain of lifted veils. As he himself beautifully compels us in *ARK 88*:
“this / is the path / of invisible birds / walked / barefoot.”
May we all someday walk it—luminous, unburdened, attentive to the coronets of sky.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, American poetry, literary architecture
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¹ Paul, Jay. “Ronald Johnson’s ARK: Architectonics of a Postmodern Edifice.” *Contemporary Literature*, vol. 41, no. 3, 2000, pp. 453–481.
² Johnson, Ronald. *ARK*. North Point Press, 1996.
³ Johnson, Ronald. *Radi os*. Sand Dollar Press, 1977.
⁴ Howe, Susan. “Scare Quotes.” In *The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History*. Wesleyan University Press, 1993.
⁵ Johnson, *ARK*, canto 39.
⁶ Ibid., canto 47.
⁷ Ibid., canto 53.