(Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics) Ross Hair - Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics) (2010, Palgrave Macmillan) PDF

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

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Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
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Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry
Ross Hair

Ronald Johnson’s Modernist

Collage Poetry
Ross Hair

RONALD JOHNSON’S MODERNIST COLLAGE POETRY
Copyright © Ross Hair, 2010.
All rights reserved.
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.
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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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.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Permissions ix
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: “Congeries of Word and Light” 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 Johnson’s Different Musics 91
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

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Acknowledgments

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 sev-
eral 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 corre-
spondence to Ian Hamilton Finlay. I also thank Philip Van Aver for sharing
his Johnson correspondence, and Harold Bloom for allowing me to repro-
duce 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

viii ● 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 dur-
ing the writing of this book. I dedicate it to them.

Permissions

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 permis-
sion 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 per-
mission 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
Ronald Johnson, from ARK: The Foundations published by North Point
Press. Copyright © 1980 by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of
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.

x ● Permissions
Ronald Johnson, “Form” from The Shrubberies. Copyright © 2001 by

The Estate of Ronald Johnson. Reprinted with the permission of Flood
Editions.
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.

Permissions ● xi
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.
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.


Abbreviations

Ronald Johnson
Frequently cited works of Johnson’s, or critical work on Johnson, are indi-
cated by the following abbreviations.
ARK All references to ARK, unless otherwise stated, are from the com-
plete 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.”
BG The Book of the Green Man (London: Longmans, 1967)
R Radi os (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2005)
RJ Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, ed. Joel Bettridge and Eric
Murphy Selinger (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation,
2008)
U “Up Till Now,” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series,
Volume 30 (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 1998)
V Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses (New York: W. W. Norton,
1969)
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

xiv ● Abbreviations
Ezra Pound
C The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1998)
SP 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)

INTRODUCTION

“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 varia-
tions 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 “pro-
prioceptive metaphysics [that] propose[s] an intimate conductivity between

2 ● Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry
body and galaxy,” mind and nature.4 Burt Kimmelman voices a similar
notion proposing that:
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 tradi-
tion of the American long poem.7 However, the democratic scope and pro-
fuse 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 con-
fronted 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 sharp-
ened their eyesight: explorers, anatomists, botanists, painters, antiquarians,

“Congeries of Word and Light” ● 3
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 fertil-
ity 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 com-
position, “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 multidimen-

sional, 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 sub-
sists on.”16 Such “a many-focused poetry” has the effect of creating compel-
ling “congeries of word and light,”17 as Johnson writes in “Form.” That is,
scintillating assemblages of light (the attribute most evocative of the eye,

as Erikson stresses) and of words, which capture, preserve, and convey the
medium of vision itself. Heaping word and light together, these collagist con-
geries 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 con-
stitution 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 tradi-

tions in Johnson’s work, but rather complementary agents in his “many-fo-
cused 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 mod-
ernist 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 lit-
erary 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

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 “beau-
tiful 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 sup-
per 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)

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’ build-
ing 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, gar-
nered 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 hand-
ful of readers his other poets expect.
So be it. On the whole I think I prefer to write for astronauts any-
way (The Ramparts go from swung garden gate of Eden to planet lift-
off . . .) 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

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 (with-
out 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, imp-
ishly, “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 specifi-
cally to Ashland in Kansas, which Johnson describes in his 1995 interview
with O’Leary: “I come from Kansas [. . .] from a town of about two thou-
sand, on the edge of the prairies, just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It
was a horrible place” (RJ 567).

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 dur-
ing 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.

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)
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 consider-
able 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 ampli-
fied 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 pub-
lished 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

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 inconceiv-
able 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 “ ‘observa-

tions’ 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 registra-
tion 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 influ-
ence 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 champion-
ing 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” com-
pounds 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

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

figures.
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 monolo-
gist, 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 com-
pletely 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)

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-cen-
tury 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 “appropri-
ated” and “expanded on” Zukofsky’s poetics:
Like Zukofsky, these poets (1) foreground language, in order to “repos-

sess 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 lin-

guistic 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 achiev-
ing 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 prin-

ciples of Language poetry, it lacks the radically political agendas character-
izing Language writing or its rigorous theoretical bent. Nevertheless, like
Language poetry, Johnson’ s work foregrounds language in order to “repos-
sess the world” and renew it. That the initial title for ARK was Wor(l)ds

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, appro-
priating 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 pros-
ody 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 modern-
ists 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 fore-
bearers [sic], wrote little that was not ever conscious of god-step at the mar-
gins 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?

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
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 dis-
tinctions 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 fit-
ting 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 retro-
spective, 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

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 valu-
able 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 reduc-
tively 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 man-

ner, 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 iden-
tity” (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 identifica-

tion 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-cen-
tury poetry map. It encourages a reconsideration of the borders that are
often drawn up to demarcate opposing poetry movements and epochs,

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 avant-

garde 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 simi-
larly 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 dem-
onstrated 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) describ-
ing 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 arti-
cle, 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 occur-
ring 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

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 collec-
tive rationale, establishing a stronger position from which to defend and
advance their poetics.
But are they the true inheritors of Zukofsky and the only representa-
tives 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 princi-
pal topic of this book: collage. Collage is an intrinsic and ubiquitous sen-
sibility 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).

Collage also informs Johnson’s cookbook writing, Ed Folsom sug-

gests, evincing “the same sense of diligent gathering” that characterizes his
poetry:
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 sepa-

rate his autobiographical life from his poetry, there are still notable simi-
larities 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 every-
day life. Living hand-to-mouth for most of his life, turning his hand to
whatever the situation offered him (nightclub organizer, restaurant man-
ager, 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, over-
heard 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 vice-
versa). 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,

artefacts and re-creations, past and present, to put another sense of time
and space into poetry. (RJ 547)
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 perspec-
tive of Johnson’s own collage poetics. By tracing the growth and develop-
ment 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 (includ-
ing 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 inter-
ested 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 mod-
ernist 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.

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 ver-
nacular 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 sug-
gests, 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 brico-
lage poetics, which favor vernacular and naïf forms of collage over Pound’s
high modernist model. As Scroggins notes with regard to ARK, “Johnson re-
conceives 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

Alpert how his earliest attempts at writing poetry were experiments in col-
lage, 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 newspa-
pers 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 disap-
peared. 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 col-
lage 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 modern-
ist 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 “newspa-
per 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 his-
torical material without preconception or prescription but pragmatically,

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 dis-

cussing 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.

CHAPTER 1

Johnson’s New Transcendentalism
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
O
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 obser-
vation, Johnson echoes Marjorie Perloff’s distinctions between Wallace

Stevens’s Romanticism and Pound’s Modernist classicism. Perloff empha-

sizes 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 cor-
nerstone 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,” pro-
posed 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 tradi-
tion”) 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 asso-
ciated with this green Emersonian tradition.8 Out of such a body of modern-
ist 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.

Johnson’s New Transcendentalism ● 25
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 stupid-

ity and indifference” (V 11). It is an ideal that recalls the Transcendentalist
desire to overcome “superficial seeing” and apprehend the world with inno-
cent 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 con-
cerned with the “situation of the eye” (V 20). Johnson’s poetry engages
what Martin Jay describes as a dual Western concept of vision: “the alter-
nating traditions of speculation with the eye of the mind and observa-
tion 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 com-
mon, 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)

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 indif-
ferent 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 dedica-
tion 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

Kansas as their primary subject, exploring its history and Johnson’s own
family heritage.
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, settle-
ment, 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 rela-
tionships 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 ob-
jects which should express it & which he
was to keep with great reverence. Usually,
he wrapped them in a rough skin bundle

made by himself, but sometimes the woman

might add her beaded or quilled decoration’.
(V 67)
In these early poems, Johnson’s earnest tone is suggestive of the didac-

ticism 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 per-
vasive presence as Olson in A Line of Poetry, providing a kind of nexus

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

Johnson’s interest in Transcendentalism occurs at a time when the move-
ment 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 cul-
ture 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 con-
temporary 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

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 “intel-
lectual 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 scrip-
ture 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 pos-
sums 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

of Literature and Medicine, a journal concerned with exploring the connec-

tions 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 dedi-

cates 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 fundamen-
tal. “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 con-
nections 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

human organism sets itself in relation to the universe and allows each
side to interpret the other. (OV 404)
Sewell is interested in the way scientific and mythopoeic thought pat-

terns 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 myth-
ological 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 dem-
onstrated 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 post-
logic 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 essen-

tially 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 what-
ever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of

things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to

those enquiries he would put. (N 35–36)
Likewise, Sewell holds that the external world’s manifold morphology is not
deceitful but illuminative. Nature holds the necessary clues for understand-

ing 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.

Groundwork: Transcendental Cosmographies

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 con-
gruent 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 philo-
sophical traditions informing those literary movements. But, rather than
simply seeing this as Johnson going over old ground, it is more construc-
tive 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 “ground-
ing,” 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 long-
standing 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 ini-
tially 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 epistemolo-
gies 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

thinking), letting these antiquities which have in them yet the seeds of
newness guide and help us. (OV 21)
In this spirit Johnson harvests Transcendentalism for “the seeds of new-

ness” 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 foster-
ing 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 recep-
tive to the old wisdoms informing various strains of Western esoteric
theosophy that Transcendentalism revives. The ideas found in this tra-
dition—which, as the word “theosophy” denotes, are concerned with
wisdom of the divine—equip Johnson with a number of epistemologi-
cal 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 individ-
ual 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 circumfer-
ence 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 uni-
verse perpetually flow,” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself”: “All are writ-
ten to me, and I must get what the writing means.”28 The centrality of the

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”:
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 his-
tory 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 associ-
ated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable man-
ner” (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 circumfer-
ence. 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 under-
lying 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

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 organiza-
tions are [perceived] radically alike.”
Johnson, however, does not display the same level of anthropocentri-

cism 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 think-
ing 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 biolo-
gist 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 morphol-
ogy 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 interpreta-
tion of Transcendentalist spirituality.
According to Boller, the Transcendentalists were concerned with find-
ing “meaning, pattern, and purpose in a universe no longer managed by
a genteel and amiable Unitarian God.”31 Although Buell maintains that

“the Transcendentalists were primarily children of the Puritans rather than

children of nature,” it is the natural world they turn to for meaning, pat-
tern, 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 his-
tory 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 hier-
archy. 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) econ-
omy 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.

Johnson condenses most of this information in “BEAM 11, Finial” making

the correspondences between mind, eye, and galaxy even more explicit:
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 cir-
cle. “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

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” perti-
nently recalls Brown’s earlier assertion that “Vision has a hands-on dimen-
sion [. . .] 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 nonhu-
man 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 micro-
cosmic 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 revela-
tion 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

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 spec-

ulative, 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 per-
spective (as a measurement of earth), takes account of the shape and relative
arrangements, properties, surfaces, solids, and higher dimensional ana-
logues 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

could progress to an intuitive perception of the underlying and all-pervad-

ing spiritual reality.”38 It is this kind of empirically grounded intuition that
Johnson adopts in “Four Orphic Poems.” Following Thoreau’s example, evi-
dence of unity-in-diversity is found through the close and meticulous obser-
vation 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 specula-
tive 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 “eter-
nal 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 knowl-
edge 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.

The Western philosophia perennis was especially prominent in the late-

medieval 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 sig-
natures, 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 indi-
vidual’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 simili-
tudes 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 seven-
teenth- century German theosopher, Jacob Boehme, are particularly impor-
tant. 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,

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 circumfer-
ence of the invisible world. (N 54)
“By degrees,” Emerson goes on to write, “we may come to know the primi-

tive 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 sig-
natures; 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

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 plow-
contour, 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 pri-
macy 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 any-
thing 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 inti-
mates 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,

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 indi-
cates 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

which speak
to the intelligent.
NATURE CONSPIRES.
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 auton-

omy 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 “con-
spires” also reiterates the lines “NATURE WILL BE” and “& is.” Olson
(paraphrasing Ernest Fenollosa) indirectly reiterates Emerson’s idea of con-
spiring, 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

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 convinc-
ing 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 perspec-
tives 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 quali-
ties 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 sub-
tle ways it does. On the one hand, the word “conspires” evokes the invis-
ible, 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

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 interpreta-
tion. 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).


CHAPTER 2

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 vision-
ary 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 inte-
grated 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 com-
ment 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 ques-
tion Pound’s high modernism, finding more instructive examples in the
work of Zukofsky, Moore, Charles Ives, and a host of vernacular artists.

Nevertheless, as Johnson’s remark indicates, Pound remains an impor-

tant reference point for his collage aesthetics. Indeed, Johnson only
comes to these later models by first schooling himself in two major col-
lage 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 col-
lage 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 inte-
gral 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 innova-
tions 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,

Luminous Detail ● 53
Gaudier-Brzeska, Cocteau, Gourmont, or again, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot,

H.D., John Quinn). (R 95)
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 incarcera-
tion 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

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 ener-
gies’ 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 partic-
ular” 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 abstrac-
tion, 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

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, how-
ever, Pound’s collage organization reveals a more subjective, more imagina-
tively 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 gen-
eralisation. 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 com-
ment” (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,” some-
thing 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 ideogram-
mic 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

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), present-
ing 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 cre-
ate “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

together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental

relation between them. 26
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 exist-
ing 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 reso-
nating 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 per-
sonal 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 polyma-
thic in the way this pedagogy is implicated through a syllabus of “mul-
tiple 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 expecta-
tion 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

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 fundamen-

tal 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 possibil-
ity of such “suggestions,” which operate through variance and indetermi-
nacy 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 pend-
ing 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 assert-
ing 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 unargu-
able 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 par-
ticularly 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

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 exem-
plars, Pound references these individuals in his own work by presenting
factual evidence of them—their writings, reported conversations, or bio-
graphical 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 “predi-
cated 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

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 dis-
crete interpretive strategy in Pound’s “New Learning.” “Pound’s removal
of the signs of authorial presence” is, Longenbach claims, “finally a politi-

cal 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 irrefut-
able 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 mem-
ber 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

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 elit-
ist 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 antici-
pate 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

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 manipu-
late 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 tran-
shistorical scope of The Cantos, negotiating particular detail (i.e., historical
facts) and universal truths or grand narratives (mythic, cyclical, and ahis-
torical conceptions of time). Thus, the Platina quote displays what Ming-
Qian Ma describes as the representational bounds of quotation whereby “a
quotation circumscribes a representational bound of two mutually recip-
rocal levels: local/microcosmic and universal/macrocosmic.”52 Historic and
mythic time intersect in the historical specifics of quotation. Thus the reit-
eration of the phrase, “Both of ancient times and our own,” in Canto XI
emphasizes the Janus-faced nature of the quote, signaling the particular his-
torical 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 prin-
ciple,” 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 actuali-
ties 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, arte-
facts 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 ideogram-
mic method as part of his own attempt to reconcile scientific observation

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 spe-
cialized “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 equiva-
lent 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

Pound as prime master for his collage poetics. In fact, tracing the trajec-
tory 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.”

CHAPTER 3

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)
T
he Book of the Green Man was published in 1967 under the aus-
pices 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 book-
length poem garnered considerable praise from notable figures includ-
ing Herbert Read and Harold Bloom. Bloom even wrote a “fan letter” to
Johnson expressing his admiration:
Dear Mr Johnson-
I 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 plea-
sure and insight, and think that you have renewed vision.
Sincerely—Harold Bloom1
Bloom’s remark about “renewed vision” highlights the ongoing ocu-

larcentric concerns of Johnson’s poetry and the questions it raises regard-
ing the dual concepts of vision—subjective and objective, speculative and

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 impres-
sions 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 signifi-
cant 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 som-
nambulant 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.

Visual Integrity ● 67
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 false-
ness in all our impressions of external things.”4

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)

Kilvert here momentarily “perceives wrongly,” as Ruskin would say, allow-

ing 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 percep-

tion 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 allud-
ing 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” percep-
tion is the turtledove. Johnson explains to Davenport, the bird holds “per-
sonal” 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 turtl-
eturtle 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

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 dem-

onstrates 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 incorpo-
rates 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 pow-
ers 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 con-
tinuing influence of Transcendentalism is evident as part of the poem’s ocu-
lar 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

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 contro-
versial 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 his-
tory 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 tradi-
tion 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 semi-
nal 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 cul-
tural history.

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 differ-
ence 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, draw-
ing 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 differ-
ent 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

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
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 reverber-
ating 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 bull-
frogs and out of what earths I have tried to cultivate new growth” (BG 83).
Cultivating new growth out of decaying literature—what Jed Rasula, fol-
lowing 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 vivid-
ness 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

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 exacer-

bated 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 situa-
tion, however, using it as an opportunity to see his subject with a clarity and
lucidity—“a vividness and strangeness,” as Middleton writes—that more-
accustomed 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 prescrip-
tion. 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 pres-
ents 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 histori-
cal 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.

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 possi-
ble 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 sin-
gle, 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 pil-
grimages 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

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 vio-
let” 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 inconsisten-
cies 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 cat-
tle. 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 par-
ticular 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

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.

“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 contain-
ing 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 // war-
ble 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

Johnson’s allusion to Thoreau, that is as much bibliographic as it is the

earthy loam of Grasmere graveyard.
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

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

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 sweet-
briar & 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

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,
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,
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, how-
ever, 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 con-
text of The Book of the Green Man, its significance is amplified consider-
ably 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

voices (those which Johnson acknowledges through reference) and those

absent echoes implicitly evoked throughout the poem. For example, in know-
ing 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 associa-
tion, “Robin Goodfellow” discretely invokes what is perhaps the most famous

British literary figure in Johnson’s “British” poem: Shakespeare. A hidden ref-
erence 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 char-
acter 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)

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 & straw-
berry 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 read-
ing 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, cran-
berries, 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)

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 col-
lage 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 tradi-
tional 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 ques-
tioned 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, believ-
ing 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

But Johnson’s extensive use of quotation and his ability to break down
commonly held distinctions regarding subject and object are an accomplish-
ment, 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 spec-
tator 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 aes-
thetic 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 arti-
cles 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

old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake!

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

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 inter-
jectory 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 plac-
ing 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 dis-
tinct 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

voyage into the visible” and can repeatedly assert: “I saw that at Shoreham”
(BG 65).
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 singu-
lar, these moments of visual intensity cannot be easily ascribed to one indi-
vidual. 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 perceiv-
ing 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 sub-
ject. 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

that concludes The Book of the Green Man stems from a detailed descrip-
tion of painting: Palmer’s Shoreham harvest scene entitled The White Cloud
(c.1833–4):
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 pro-
ceeds to embellish Palmer’s painting just has he does his notebooks. For
example, Johnson adds precision and detail to Palmer’s rendering of a dilapi-
dated 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 objectiv-
ity become blurred. It is difficult to ascertain whether it is Palmer’s paint-
ing 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 enu-
merating 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.

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.
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 observa-
tions jotted down in a notebook. While these stanzas evoke the subjec-
tive 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 perspec-
tive. 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

final movement, peals of thunder merge with the sounds/songs of the earth:
“peal after peal / rang out of earth.”
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, black-
bird and cuckoo appear together in what is at once a “dissonance / & musi-
cal 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 disso-
nance 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.”


CHAPTER 4

Johnson’s Different Musics
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 ideogram-
mic 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 quot-
ing practices, along with his innovations in dissonance and polyphony,
provide a valuable model for Johnson’s desire to achieve such simultaneity
of perception.

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 consoli-
dation 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 prac-
tices 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 ongo-
ing reassessment and revision of the modernist collage aesthetic informing
A Line of Poetry and The Book of the Green Man, because, Ives (and bri-
colage 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

Johnson’s Different Musics ● 93
music parallels the modernist innovations occurring in art and literature

during the early decades of the twentieth century:
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 diffu-

sion 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 quota-
tion and, like Joyce, pastiche and paraphrase liberally. In short, quota-
tion 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 col-
lage could be used to effect” (U 115). Ives’s musical dissonance and his
method of quoting various other musics are aspects that Johnson finds par-
ticularly 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 real-
ity,” 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 dis-
sonance, which permits the co-existence and superimposition of different
musics in one composition, “blend[ing] the music of highly diverse tradi-
tions 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.

“The Different Musics”

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

“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 run-
ning 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 com-
position, 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 mys-
terious 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 pre-
senting 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 expli-
cate 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

DUST, THEISM: c.f.

FEBRUARY, FURY, PERFUME, THYME”.
(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 ety-
mological 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 origi-
nal 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)

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 propos-
ing that, “The old forest is decomposed for the composition of the new for-

est. 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 construc-
tions 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 para-
graphs were only collections of ‘infinitely repellent particles.’ ”19 These “repel-
lent 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 differ-
ent 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 dili-
gent listener, reveal itself. This Ivesian notion of unity-in-diversity or
unity-within-chaos—depicted by Johnson as “A choric turbulence, to which the

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 com-
post 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 I put my ear to

to the ear, 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, & whispered as they grew: new
created 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 New extremities, new labyrinth
& branching, new inextricable windings.
swelling, out of the silent A new foliage of sensings:
shell. sings & sings . . .
(V 86–87)

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 con-
vergence 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 confu-
sion 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 cho-
rus 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

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 efful-
gence” 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.”

Ives and Self-Reliance

Although Ives’s collage strategies resemble the modernist art and literature
of its time, it also extends and enhances a number of the principles under-
pinning Transcendentalism. Guy Davenport stresses this connection when
he suggests that Ives “was staging, almost alone, a transcendental move-

ment in music paralleling the same movement in literature.”26 According to
Burkholder, there are “two meanings of the term Transcendentalism” appli-
cable to Ives:
[O]n the one hand it represents a literary tradition, limited in Ives’ experi-
ence 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 per-
sonality and not drawn from one’s peer group.”30 Donald Pease defines self-
reliance 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 major-
ity 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)

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 independent-
minded 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 integ-
rity, 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 bal-
lads to the Tin Pan Alley hits of his own time, and he attempted to reveal
the power this music had for him.35

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 pur-

pose 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 tradi-
tion 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 eschew-
ing (or accepting) the European art music tradition, Ives discriminately
appropriates aspects of it in his music in conjunction with American musi-
cal 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 writ-
ten, 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

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 accu-
rately 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 sincer-
ity 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 identi-
fies 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 integ-
rity. 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.

The Naïve and Vernacular

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 self-
reliance. 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 strik-
ing that Johnson should compare Ives to the Watts Towers, the vernacular
environment that the Italian bricoleur Sabato Rodia built in the Watts dis-
trict 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 per-
tinent 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 bri-
colage. 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 foun-
tain of action and thought” that cannot be instructed but only realized
via the inner resources of the individual (N 187). “We denote this pri-
mary wisdom as Intuition,” Emerson proposes, “whilst all our teachings

are tuitions” (N 187). Intuition implies a creative spontaneity and integ-

rity, 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, work-

ing “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 iden-
tify 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 jun-
gles, 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

“dark piper piping out darkness,” is depicted “ ‘charming’ a moon of purest

whiteness / into the sky”:
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 cre-
ated single-handedly “out of found objects and honest cement” vernacular
environments that express their visions and dreams (U 116). Jargon pub-
lished 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 vernacu-
lar 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

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 environ-
ments 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 gentle-
man’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 disenfran-
chised 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 con-
struct his Palace from it over the next thirty-four years.

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 con-
tinued 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 transla-
tions.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 pres-
ents 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

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, claim-
ing 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 awk-
wardness 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,

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” com-
prises 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: try-
ing 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

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 disappoint-
ment 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 com-
pletely 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)

“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 compos-
ers 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, how-
ever, 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

Repeating the word “earth” three times in each of the poem’s six lines,
Johnson discloses a series of interrelating words. Indeed, the poem reiter-
ates (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) estab-
lished 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 P r i n g
s P r i n g
s P R I N G
s P R I N G
s P R I N G
S P R I N G
be l l to
l l be l l
to l l be
l l to l l74

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 reso-
nance 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 read-
ing 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 par-
allel 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

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 ter-
rific 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 struc-
tural 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 conscious-
ness 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 encour-
aged 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.

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 breath-
ing, 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, preg-
nant 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 open-
ing page of his poem with the implication that natural processes of epigen-
esis 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 illustra-
tions, 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 celebra-
tions 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

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 associ-
ates 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, “mod-
eled 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 present-
ing “the palpable stuff of the nation’s soul”—patriotic hymns, ceremonies,

rituals, and popular images or references—giving vernacular expression to

what is both a socially egalitarian and cosmological verity.83
Conditions of the Present

“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 meaning-
ful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.84
As his “place of spiritual concentration,” the Tower afforded Jung a perspec-

tive 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 sea-
sons. 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 ver-
nacular environments. Jung’s Tower is imbued with a cosmological signifi-
cance 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 resource-
fulness 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

an idea that resonates poignantly with Roger Cardinal’s observations of the

Watts Towers and their enclosure walls:
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 weak-
ness 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 sin-
gly,” 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 genu-
ine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you
have already done singly will justify you. Greatness appeals to the future.
(N 184)

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 embarrass-

ing, 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


CHAPTER 5

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 inevi-
tably 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

The poem’s beginnings date back to 1973 when Johnson temporarily relo-
cated 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 “with-
out 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)

Orphic Apocrypha ● 125
The syntactic and grammatical ambiguity of this passage encourages a vari-

ety 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 interac-
tions 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 sta-
tus 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 rein-
terpretation 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 illus-
trating 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

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 sound-
ing 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

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 con-
sider 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, pro-
viding 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—apply-
ing 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 discus-
sion 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 politi-
cal 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.

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 destabi-
lizes the epic poet’s language” so that words “no longer [. . .] require foot-

notes” (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 appro-
priation 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 arch-
ing continuity” (U 118). One way this “arching continuity” operates is the

manner in which the poem taps into a strong Romantic tradition of reading
Milton, while also advancing a modernist collage praxis. As McCaffery pro-
poses, Radi os “reconnects with the radical Romanticism of William Blake,”
while confirming “the characteristically modern praxis of fragmentary col-
lage 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 onomas-
tics” and “a breaking of the experientially syntagmatic structure of the signi-
fying 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 con-
text 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 stan-
dard, 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

Davenport makes a similar point, calling Radi os “a sustained quotation

from a single source”:
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 chap-
ter, “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 read-
ing; 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 read-
ing,” 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 rein-
terpretations of Paradise Lost, just as Johnson does in Radi os.
Johnson’s reinterpretation of Milton draws considerably on twentieth-cen-
tury forms of collage praxis and intertextuality, which, as we have seen, owe
a considerable debt to Pound. However, “on the strength of a common tech-
nique” that he identifies as bricolage, Steve McCaffery proposes an “alterna-
tive 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

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 [. . .] lit-

erary 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 superi-
or . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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 omis-

sion, 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, unex-
pected contexts. This is evident in two influences that Johnson claims were

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 tech-

niques 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 introduc-
tion 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

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 scor-
ing 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 col-
laboration 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 bri-
colage. Whereas for Phillips bricolage represents the “lowest” form of col-
lage, 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

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

Being “worked, mined, or excavated,” Ellis’s “drab” prose yields a series of

overtly sexual and homoerotic poems rich with suggestive puns and associa-
tions. “History VIII,” for example, reads:
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 “gar-
net 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 gram-
matically indeterminate text. In this respect, Radi os more closely resembles
Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark’s “excavations,” which Williams acknowl-
edges 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

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

excavations:
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 inter-
preting 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 punctua-
tion, the interpretation changes. But however one reads the poem, Clark’s
editing of Palmer turns the painter’s words into another reflection on inten-
sive 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

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 correspon-
dences 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

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 con-
taining 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 syn-
tax, 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

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 jux-
taposition 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 pro-
cesses 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, emerg-
ing from Milton’s “theological backstory,” becomes, as Peter O’Leary sug-
gests, 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,

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 num-
ber 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 ban-
ished 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 trac-
tates (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 apoc-
ryphal 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 syn-
creticism 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 primor-
dial 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

undefinable reservoir of divinity, the ultimate source out of which every-

thing 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

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
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 vari-
ous name.” In this respect, the Adamic figure implicit throughout Radi os,
like Adam Kadmon and the Divine Anthropos, functions as “a cosmic met-
aphor, 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 imme-
diately, 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 circum-

ference 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

of Paradise Lost comprise a compendium that would make “sun-lover, sun-

worshipper, 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); “lus-
tre” (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); “dawn-
ing 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)

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 particu-
lar 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 noth-
ing, 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 self-
reflexive cosmos occur in contemporary science. Indeed, Sewell claims that
“mind and body are not a camera and tape-recorder, but makers and orga-
nizers 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

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.

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 imagina-

tive seed. Just as the seed is a dry sealed packet of solid “matter,” so the

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 orga-
nized form of life, because it is still bound to nature.” According to Frye,
“The animal symbolizes a higher stage of development by breaking its navel-
string, 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 ascend-
ing 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 radi-
cal 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

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 con-
cerned 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)

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 cos-
mic justice.”99

As underworld goddess, Eurydice is at the very heart of Radi os, form-
ing 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 formu-
lated 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

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 dark-
ness 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 nine-
ty-nine poems. However, in addition to “The Foundations,” “The Spires,”
and “The Ramparts,” Johnson foresees Radi os, as “ARK 100,” conclud-
ing 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

Radi os, which would suggest that Johnson’s intention was to attempt all
twelve books of Paradise Lost (RJ 556). This project, however, was subse-
quently 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 bri-
coleur, 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 pro-
vides 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 some-
thing 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 fate-
fully 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,

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 homopho-
nic pun of “dissent”/“descent” indicates. Implicit in this is Milton’s impi-
ous 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, “consti-
tutes 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 tik-
kun, 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 super-
nal 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 addi-
tional ‘D,’ permutes into “diamond.” And by omitting the superfluous “I,”

“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 ada-
mans, 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 inclu-
sion, 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 sig-
nificance 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

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 con-
text. According to Jung, the Neopythagoreans believed “the soul was swal-
lowed 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;

And I will bring thee

image
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 com-
pound 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 consti-
tute 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 re-
ascent, 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 cos-
mological 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 anthro-
pological plane to Adam Kadmon, the ontological primary man.”129 This,

Scholem notes, indicates “the connection between man’s fall and the cos-
mic 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 com-
parison, “The Foundations” is more akin to the situation of Adam Rishon,
engaging what is ostensibly the same cosmology as Radi os but from a post-
lapsarian perspective. (It is worth recalling that “The Foundations” con-
cludes in “BEAM 33” at “High Noon [which] stands still as a just picked
apple.”) In “The Foundations,” the verities of cosmic integrity and propor-
tion 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 Spinther-
like vitalities in ARK ’s cosmology. Like Isis re-membering Osiris–Kadmon,
“the scatterd first light,” in Duncan’s poem “Osiris and Set,” ARK re-mem-
bers 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”).


CHAPTER 6

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 innova-
tions 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

a single volume, an indication, perhaps, that Johnson’s poetry by the

early 1990s had been largely neglected in favor of either the more politi-
cally 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 mod-
els 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 incon-
sistencies 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)

A “mosaic of Cosmos” ● 159
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:

[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 con-
cerning 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 anony-
mous 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 myster-
ies 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

intersects space. “Y is space. X, time,” Johnson proposes in “BEAM 28, The

Book of Orpheus,” and in “BEAM 29” claims that:
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 vision-
ary 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 autono-
mously of any overt references, but because of its inescapable literary asso-
ciations 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

“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 pat-
terning. 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 weav-
ing, 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

of the herm and crossroads. Indeed, in Book X of the Odyssey, Odysseus

recounts how “Hermes god of the golden wand / crossed [his] path,” giv-
ing 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 enchant-

ment and exile.
The fundamental difference in reading Canto XXXIX and “BEAM 5”
is that Johnson does not presume that his reader knows their Homer; nei-
ther 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 denot-
ing 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 inter-
lacing 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

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 intel-
lect among words.”15 From this schema, it is evident how the early imag-
istic 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, help-
ing 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, par-
ticularly 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’

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 aban-
dons 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 col-
lage 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 noncanoni-
cal 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

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 mod-
ernism. If The Cantos and The Waste Land are understood as pedagogic exer-
cises 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, tex-
ture, design, and pattern. As the etymology suggests, the idea of mosaic as
a cosmetic principle adumbrates Johnson’s cosmographies in ARK, encour-
aging 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 ideologi-
cal agendas implicated in Pound’s poem “containing history.”22 With eyes
cleansed one can, to quote James Hillman, “enter the world without pre-
conceptions, startled by the phenomena where everything is given and
nothing taken for granted.”23 This is a crucial factor in ARK ’s Adamic aspi-
rations 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, sug-
gested 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 inno-
cent 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 atti-
tude toward history is a way of getting back to an “authentic individual self”

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 per-
sona 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 preposi-
tion, “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 con-
temporary history and Marxist politics into his poem. William Carlos

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, some-
times 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 ide-
als. 26 If history is to hold any significance or meaning for the individual,
it must relate to, and communicate, the present moment. When con-
structed 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 cheer-
ful 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.”

Zukofsky, Music, History

It is striking that Emerson’s idea of history’s “impertinence” should be para-
phrased by Zukofsky in “A”-22 as part of his response to the problems he rec-
ognizes 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 regard-
ing 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 para-
mount. 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 give-
and-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

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 glean-
ings of song” are condensed and truncated in “The Ramparts.”31 More
generally, the ellipses, compression, transliteration, and ambiguous syn-
tax, 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 predomi-
nates sense. And the linguistic and syntactic instability that such atten-
tion 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

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”:
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 per-
sonal and passionate control of verse” communicating meaning via juxtapo-
sition, “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 con-
solation 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 represen-
tational 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 mosa-
iclike 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 lan-
guage, spatialized and nonlinear, functioning by agglutinations, cementing

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 rela-
tions outside of logical conventions,” is developed extensively in “A”-22 and
“A”-23.43 This is particularly so in “A”-22, when Zukofsky advocates sim-
ply 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 order-
ing 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, ambi-
guity, 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.

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, word-
by-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, origi-
nally 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

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

Parlement of Foules:
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 suc-
cessive 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 quota-
tions 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 gener-
ates 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 signifi-
cance 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

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 feed-

ing 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 propos-
ing 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 “chro-
mographic specifications” for the Unicorn Press postcard “An,” also carries
musical implications.55 At the very least, it amplifies the aerial motif play-
ing 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 correspon-
dence 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.

Swerving History
Zukofsky is also important for Johnson in the way that his emphasis on
contingency and process offers a useful alternative to Pound’s static, totaliz-
ing 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 ship-
wrecks 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 writ-
ing 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 pre-
cursor poems of Pound and company “went accurately up to a certain point,

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 learn-
ing 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 quali-
ties” of a European culture in decline and ruin, Johnson’s scope is wide-eyed,

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 his-
tory 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 “with-

out 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 egali-
tarian 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 wheel-
barrow 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 cel-
ebrations, in the form of firework displays, and the “Oompapah!” of brass
bands (“ARK 99”). Reflecting on ARK ’s Americana, Eric Selinger sug-
gests: “To be at home in this poem we can’t set ourselves apart from these

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 cel-
ebrate “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 “lit-
eral” music of Zukofsky. In Moore’s poetry, Hugh Kenner suggests, we see
“the language flattened, the language exhibited, the language staunchly con-
densing information while frisking in enjoyment of its release from the obli-
gation 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 pro-
poses: “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

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 mat-
ter 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 sur-
rounds 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 obliga-
tions, 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 dis-
covery of our age” and fundamental in the development of “a twentieth-
century 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, arte-
facts 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

Johnson recognizes in Moore a literary equivalent of what the self-taught

artists realize in “found objects and honest cement” (U 116). Moore’s “sus-
tained 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 impor-
tant 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 perti-
nent 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)

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 mod-
ern 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 repeat-
edly 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 celebra-
tion 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 poet-
ics of determined indeterminacy” (RJ 117). Thus, influence is not simply
acknowledged by overt referencing, but also inscribed in Johnson’s com-
positional methods and strategies. In the case of Moore, we do not have to

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 quot-
ing 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 inheri-
tance, 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 adopt-
ing 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 journal-
ism, advertising, conversation, and private letters” and eschewing “the osten-
tatious multilingualism of Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s The Waste Land.”83 Miller

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 particu-

lar 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 col-
loquial 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 pos-
sesses “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 pres-
tigious 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 pre-
determined 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

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
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 ques-
tions 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 quota-
tion 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 con-
siderable 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 signifi-
cant contrast to the predominantly European cultural canon perpetuated by
Eliot and Pound.93
The sense of a natural American grandeur and solidity that Moore pro-
poses 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 com-
pared 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

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 manipu-

lates 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 recogniz-
able context,” but “forego the nostalgia of restoration, opting instead for the
construction of new meaning through extraction, arrangement, organiza-
tion 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, with-
out 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 envi-
rons of circuses and popular magazines. This deceptively casual approach to
history and literary canon is a way of reassessing it, enabling Moore to pro-
mote a different value system to those advanced by Eliot and Pound. Indeed,
Moore’s casual, self-effacing notes to “Marriage” and “An Octopus” con-
trast 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

materials’ of her art,” which reinforce “awareness of intertextuality rather

than influence.”98
Johnson’s Notebooks

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 pragmati-
cally 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”

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 quota-

tion 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”

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 any-

thing 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 note-
books. 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

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 con-
cerns him. “I simply listen for words to cement,” Johnson writes in one note-
book, 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 dishon-
our, 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

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 ani-
mated 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 prelapsar-
ian 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 pos-
sible, 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

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 cosmo-
logical 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 experi-
enced 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 alche-
mist’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, distil-
lation, 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

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 expe-
riences? 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 archi-
tecture” 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 con-
ditioned 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 trans-
figuring Adamic epistemology that ARK repeatedly presents rests on pros-
pect and possibility.

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 dis-
covery. 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 man-
kind” 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 quot-
ing 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

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 “situ-
ation 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)

CONCLUSION

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
H
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 sixty-
five 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 spe-
cies and cultivars were not enough, then Johnson would certainly appreci-
ate 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 roof-
ing 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

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 reli-
gious one. Johnson’s poetry proposes innocence as an epistemological condi-
tion, denoting a way of experiencing and responding to the world of events
without prescription. As bricoleurs such as Cheval and Rodia have demon-
strated, 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 underscor-
ing 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 illuminat-
ing 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 inequal-
ity” (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

Felix Culpa ● 197
Heaven’s imposing orders. But as Cole sees it, such dissent aligns Johnson
more with the figure of Eve than Adam, Lucifer, or Satan.
Like Dickinson, Johnson rejects the Edenic parable of the “chosen” who
must submit to normalizing rules, opting instead for the rebellious cour-

age 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 pos-

sibility 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

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 prospec-
tively 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 atten-
tion 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 instru-
ments 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, dismem-
bered limbs, petals,” these instruments assume the appearance of an assem-
blage sculpture.11 No doubt, this would have appealed to Johnson’s collage

Felix Culpa ● 199
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 “inar-
tistic [. . .] vociferous sentimentality” of folk idioms and popular music.13
But this renewal is not just about improving the object of vision, but chang-
ing 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 heu-
ristic 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 unpreju-
diced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of
everything but which must know each object encountered in life through

an adventure of perception.”14 Recalling Emerson in Nature, Brakhage pro-

poses this “adventure of perception” as an “innocent” childlike condition:
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 regain-

ing the ability to see. But, as Selinger points out, this innocence is some-
thing 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 ques-
tion” in “ARK 85.” In typical Johnson style, this suggests two things simul-
taneously, 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

Felix Culpa ● 201
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 beau-
tiful claim that “Poetry is redemption from pessimism” speaks as poignantly

for Johnson’s poetry as it does Dickinson’s.”16 Poetry gives hope and encour-
agement. 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 pro-
poses 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 neces-
sity, 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

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 compre-
hended 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 gen-
eration of younger poets.
It was his ability to portray moments when “the mind swings by a grass-
blade” (Canto 83) that made a new generation regard him not as a patri-
arch 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-abil-
ity 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)

Felix Culpa ● 203
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 poli-
tics,” 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 peda-
gogy 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.


Notes

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.

206 ● Notes
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 permis-
sion 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
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 sub-
jects 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.

Notes ● 207
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
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.

208 ● Notes
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 Johnson’s New Transcendentalism

1. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25–6.
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.

Notes ● 209
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.

210 ● Notes
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 cen-
tral 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/jour-
nals/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, endeav-
oured “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 cor-
respondence 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.

Notes ● 211
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 mean-
ing 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
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.
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
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
in Creativity 2 (1985–86), 3–4.

212 ● Notes
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.

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.

Notes ● 213
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
Reprinted by permission of Harold Bloom.
2. Johnson uses parts of “Samuel Palmer: The Characters of Fire” in the conclud-
ing 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.

214 ● Notes
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.”
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

Notes ● 215
Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted

by permission of Paul A. Lacey, trustee of the Denise Levertov Literary Trust.
23. 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 intertex-
tuality 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.
24. Jeremy Hooker, “Geoffrey Grigson—English Writer,” “My Rebellious and
Imperfect Eye,” 32.
25. Geoffrey Grigson, The Shell Country Alphabet (Frome and London: Michael
Joseph, 1966), 9.
26. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT
Press, 1998), 6.
27. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1999),
2, 4.
Turtle Point Press, 2000), 229–30.
29. 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
30. 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.
31. Ibid., http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/rj-nt3.htm.
32. Ibid., http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/rj-nt2.htm; http://www.thing.
net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/rj-nt3.htm.
by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate.
34. “It seemed simple,” Johnson writes in his essay on Davenport, “for Blake to sug-
gest 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.
36. Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).

216 ● Notes
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.
50. Denise Levertov to Ronald Johnson, August 1965. Courtesy of Special
Reprinted by permission of Paul A. Lacey, trustee of the Denise Levertov
Literary Trust.
51. Ibid.
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-cod-
ing 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 dilapi-
dated 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.

Notes ● 217
4 Johnson’s Different Musics

1. Raymond Isidore, translated by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of
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.
1973), 8.

218 ● Notes
22. “Maximus calld us to dance the Man,” Duncan writes. Ibid., 9. Olson dedi-
cates 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.
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.
(London: Calder & Boyars, 1969), 18.
40. Ibid., 80.
41. Ibid., 81.
42. Ibid., 80–1.
43. Ibid., 81.
44. Ibid., 21.
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

Notes ● 219
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.
48. Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, Collage: Personalities, Concepts, Techniques
(Philadelphia, New York, London: Chilton Book Company, 1967), 5.

49. Ibid., 3–4.
50. 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 trea-
sured 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
51. 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.
52. Tutara 10 (Summer 1973), 2–9. FlashPoint 6 (Winter 2004), http://www.flash-
pointmag.com/sprtwalk.htm
53. Barbara Jones, Follies and Grottoes (London: Constable: 1974), 1.
54. Ferdinand Cheval, translated by Ronald Johnson. Reprinted by permission of
55. Ibid.
57. 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.
59. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 153.
60. Ibid., 2.
62. “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).
63. See Guy Davenport to Ronald Johnson, “Beethoven 1972” and Guy Davenport
to Ronald Johnson, June 9, 1978. Courtesy of Special Collections, Spencer

220 ● Notes
Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries. Reprinted by permission of

the Guy Davenport Literary Estate.
64. Ronald Johnson, ARK 50: Spires 34–50 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), 56.
65. “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.
66. Ibid., 345.
67. Ibid., 348.
68. Ronald Johnson to Andrew Hoyem, October 13, 1970. Courtesy of Philip Van
69. Robert P. Morgan, “Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses at the End of an Era,”
19th-Century Music 2.1 (July, 1978), 73.
70. Ronald Johnson, To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems, ed. Peter O’Leary (Jersey
City, New Jersey: Talisman House, 2000) 65.
71. Ibid., 67.
72. Jonathan Williams, The Magpie’s Bagpipe, ed. Thomas Meyer (San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1982), 67.
73. Johnson, To Do As Adam Did, 65.
74. Ibid., 69.
75. Ronald Johnson, ARK: The Foundations (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1980).
76. All these endorsements appear on the rear dust jacket of ARK: The
Foundations.
77. Duncan’s blurb is printed on the front inner flap of the book’s dust jacket.
78. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T.
Vaughan (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 150.
79. Ibid., 240.
80. 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.
81. Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation, 21.
82. 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.
83. Ibid., 32.
84. C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and
Clara Winston (London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 214.
85. Ibid., 213.

Notes ● 221
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

222 ● Notes
as Milton scholars tend not to know) in Serafino della Salandra’s Adamo

Caduto” (R 93).
13. 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.
14. Steve McCaffery, “Corrosive Poetics: The Relief of Composition of

Ronald Johnson’s Radi os,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, 11.2,
(2002), 125.
15. Stephen C. Behrendt, The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustration of
Milton (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 11.
16. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 346.
17. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 171.
18. John Milton, Areopagitica (1664), ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham: English
Reprints, 1868), 70.
19. 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 permis-
sion of the Ronald Johnson Literart Estate.
20. McCaffery, “Corrosive Poetics,” 121.
21. 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.
23. Guy Davenport to Ronald Johnson, August 29, 1977. Courtesy of Special
Reprinted by permission of the Guy Davenport Literary Estate.
24. 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.
25. Genette, Palimpsests, 230.
26. Steve McCaffery, “Synchronicity, Ronald Johnson and the Migratory Phase,”
VORT: Twenty-First Century Previews 3.3 (1976), 15.
27. 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.
28. Ibid., 29.
29. Ibid., 25.
30. Ibid., 26.
31. Anon., “The Richard Mutt Case,” The Blind Man 2 (May, 1917), 5.
32. Tom Phillips, “Notes on A Humument,” in Tom Phillips, A Humument:
A Treated Victorian Novel (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), n.p.

Notes ● 223
33. See Jonathan Williams, Blackbird Dust: Essays, Poems, and Photographs
(New York: Turtle Point Press, 2000), 229. Phillips would later provide draw-
ings 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 three-

decker”—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. PCMS-
019, Jargon Society Collection, 1950–, The Poetry Collection, University at
Buffalo, The State University of New York. Reprinted by permission of the
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 assort-
ment 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.

224 ● Notes
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
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.
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.

Notes ● 225
76. Ibid., 15.

77. O’Leary, afterword in “The Book of Adam,” 187.
78. Schwartz, Tree of Souls, 15.
79. 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.
80. Schwartz, Tree of Souls, 15.
81. Ibid., 15.
82. Ibid., 16.
83. 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.
84. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, 96.
85. 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.
86. Jacob Boehme, The Signature of All Things and Other Writings, trans. John
Ellinstone (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 1981), 31.
87. Ibid., 22.
88. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 4.
89. Ibid., 4.
90. Ibid., 4.
91. Selinger, “ ‘I Composed the Holes,’ ” 56.
92. Ronald Johnson, “Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid” notebook, c. 1994.
Reprinted by permission of the Ronald Johnson Literary Estate.
93. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 347.
94. Ibid., 348.
95. Ibid., 348.
97. Henry David Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, ed. H. Daniel Peck
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995, 45.
98. Ibid., 45.
99. Christine Downing, “Looking Back at Orpheus,” Spring 71 Orpheus. A Journal
of Archetype and Culture (Fall, 2004), 27.
100. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes,” in New Poems, trans.
Stephen Cohn (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), 125.
101. Downing, “Looking Back at Orpheus,” 31.
102. Ronald Johnson, “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron” Northern Lights Studies

226 ● Notes
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
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.
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.
117. Ibid., 109.
119. Scholem, Major Trends, 265.
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.
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.
129. Scholem, Major Trends, 278.
130. Ibid., 279.
131. Duncan, Roots and Branches, 68.

Notes ● 227
6 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
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.

228 ● Notes
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.

Notes ● 229
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
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.

230 ● Notes
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
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.
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.
94. Stacy Carson Hubbard, “The Many Armed-Embrace: Collection, Quotation
and Mediation in Marianne Moore’s Poetry,” Sagetrieb 12.2 (Fall, 1993), 15.
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
100. Ronald Johnson, Arches Notebook c. 1990. Reprinted by permission of the
101. Hubbard, “The Many-Armed Embrace,” 19.

Notes ● 231
102. Ronald Johnson, Notebook c. 1975. Reprinted by permission of the Ronald

103. Ronald Johnson, Arches Notebook c.1986. Reprinted by permission of the
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
107. Ronald Johnson, “Thoreau & Van Gogh” Arches Notebook c.1989. Reprinted
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
110. Ronald Johnson, Arches Notebook c. 1986. Reprinted by permission of the
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 imag-
ery 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
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.

232 ● Notes
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 More-
Than-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
11. Ibid., 1.
(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.
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.

Notes ● 233
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



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Index

Adam, 2, 25, 29, 40, 69, 70, 71, 139, 140, 144, 145–6, 187, 188, 214n9,
140, 141, 142, 150–5, 190, 195–7, 215n34, 224n58, 225n79, 227n10
200 “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” 188
see also Adam Ha-Rishon; “Auguries of Innocence,” 160
Adam Kadmon; anthropos Jerusalem, 110
Adam Ha-Rishon, 154–5 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
Adam Kadmon, 140–2, 151–4, 193 40, 67, 127
alchemy, 43, 152, 191 Milton, 126, 127, 129
Andrews, Bruce, 11, 15, 201 Blaisdell, Gus, 158, 178, 179
Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Blanchot, Maurice, 149
144–5 Bloom, Harold, 65, 77, 175
anthropos, 140, 141, 142, 145, 151, Boehme, Jacob, 43, 144, 145, 191
152, 153 Bogan, Louise, 181
Antin, David, 24, 52 Bowen, Elizabeth, 181, 197
apocrypha, 131, 139, 140, 155 Brakhage, Stan, 18, 37, 40, 195, 199,
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 45, 131 200, 202
Arber, Agnes, 31, 37, 78 Breton, André, 108
assemblage, 3, 17, 20, 57, 107, 108, 131, bricolage, 13, 20, 21, 92, 105, 110, 113,
180, 185, 198 115, 124, 127, 130, 133, 154, 155,
see also collage; naïve art 157, 158, 162, 164, 165, 168, 175,
Aver, Philip Van, 1, 203 178, 179, 180, 190, 219n62
see also collage; naïve art
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 37, 133, 160, Brown, Bob, 131
162, 178 Bunting, Basil, 9, 51, 53, 168, 211n3
Bacon, Sir Francis, 31, 32, 33, 125 Briggflatts, 180
Baum, L. Frank, 7, 111, 166 Burroughs, William, 132
see also Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the
Bernstein, Charles, 11, 12 Cage, John, 133–4
Black Mountain, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 52 Calvino, Italo, 138
Blake, William, 1, 43, 64, 72, 77, 84, Cavell, Stanley, 54, 119, 120, 121
110, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 137, cento, 127, 130, 221n12

252 ● Index
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 173 Ellis, Havelock, 134, 135

Cheval, Ferdinand “Le Facteur,” 107, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 23–6, 30,
108, 110, 119, 121, 167, 177, 31, 32, 34–41, 43–9, 64, 65, 69,
196, 198 80, 97, 114, 119, 121, 154, 167,
Clare, John, 66, 186 168
Clark, Laurie, 223n48 and self-reliance 101–4, 105–6, 120,

Clark, Thomas A, 135–7, 202, 223n48, 172, 188, 191, 200, 202
223n50 see also transcendentalism
collage, 3–5, 9, 17–24, 25, 35, 51, Eurydice, 13, 139, 145–9, 150–1, 160,
52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61–4, 66, 79, 166
83, 84, 91–4, 99, 101, 105, 106,
111, 124, 129–30, 132, 133, 139, Faivre, Antoine, 42
155, 157, 161, 164, 165, 179–86, Fenollosa, Ernest, 47, 53, 54, 56–8,
198–9, 203 211n52
and Charles Ives, 91–4 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 9, 45
and Ezra Pound, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61–4 Foss, Lukas, 132, 133
and Marianne Moore, 179–86 Foucault, Michel, 42
see also bricolage; ideogrammic found objects, see assemblage
method Frye, Northrop, 23, 25, 127, 145–6
Cornell, Joseph, 180 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 53–4, 104,
Creeley, Robert, 9, 52, 135, 157, 175, 116, 134, 149, 195, 212n11
218n22, 229n58 Furnival, John, 9
Crosby, Harry, 143
Genette, Gerard, 123, 130, 131, 133
Dahlberg, Edward, 9, 26, 47, 52 Gerard, John, 80
Dante, 159 gnosticism, 42, 140, 144, 152, 160,
Davenport, Guy, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 25, 52, 226n122
53, 57, 61, 68, 73, 76, 92, 93, 101, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 32, 46,
104, 107, 128, 130, 145, 165, 176, 189, 231n112
196, 200, 221n12 Gray, Asa, 146, 148
Delius, Frederick, 82, 83 Grigson, Geoffrey, 9–10, 31, 70–1, 73,
Dewey, John, 61–2 78, 84, 87
Dickinson, Emily, 30, 181, 193, 196, Grigson, Jane, 9
197, 201 Gunn, Thom, 11, 116, 207n47
Divine Anthropos, 140, 141
Duchamp, Marcel, 130–1, 134 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 13, 14,
Duncan, Robert, 6, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 53, 86
20, 24, 43, 52, 58, 83–6, 94, 96, Handel, George Frideric, 133
99–100, 116, 126, 155, 160, 161, Harrison, Lou, 134
175, 193, 201, 216n55, 218n22, Hazlitt, William, 221n12
218n24 Henry, Pierre, 17
Heseltine, Philip, see Warlock, Peter
Eiseley, Loren, 202, 232n24 Hermes, 24, 161–2, 169
Eliot, T.S., 14, 18, 53, 59, 93, 129, 165, 179, Herme Trismegistus, 169
181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 196, 200 Herrick, Robert, 81, 173

Index ● 253
Hillman, James, 41, 149, 165, 201, 203 and Orpheus, 13–14, 33, 106–7,
history, 9, 70, 73, 187, 189, 191–2 139, 148–9, 150, 166
and Emerson, 36–8, 167 romantic sensibilities, 4, 5, 8, 14,
and Johnson, 26, 62–3, 124, 127, 19, 23–4, 31, 34, 49, 70, 125–6,
128, 157, 165–7, 175–7, 191–2, 128–9
203 sexuality, 15

and Moore, 179, 185 and transcendentalism, 23–49
and Pound, 9, 54, 59–63, 165 translations of Raymond Isidore and
and Zukofsky, 164, 167, 168–72, Ferdinand Cheval, 107, 109–10
179 visit to the Watts Towers, 110,
Homer, 130, 159, 162, 221n12 219n62
Odyssey, the, 158, 159, 160, 162, Xero-Ox editions, 6, 158, 164, 206n
166 Johnson, Ronald, work of
Howe, Susan, 201 A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees,
Hoyem, Andrew, 112, 113 1, 3, 8, 26, 28, 31, 34, 35, 38,
41, 51, 64, 66, 80, 85, 92, 186,
ideogrammic method, 52, 55–62, 64, 191, 194, 198; “Emerson, On
69, 71, 72, 79–89, 91, 159, 164, Goethe,” 45–9, 114, 191; “Four
169, 178 Orphic Poems,” 31, 33, 37, 41,
in The Book of the Green Man, 42, 44, 45, 47, 85; “Landscape
79–89 with Bears, for Charles Olson,”
see also Pound, Ezra 41; “Lilacs, Portals, Evocations,”
Isidore, Raymond, 91, 107, 108, 26, 28, 31, 92; “Of Circumstance,
109–10, 119, 121, 198 The Circum Stances,” 12, 26,
Ives, Charles, 4, 10, 18, 19, 20, 51, 91, 27–8, 98; “Quivara,” 26; “Samuel
92–104, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, Palmer: The Characters of Fire,”
116–17, 118, 121, 124, 134, 178, 25, 28, 66, 213n2; “Shake, Quoth
198, 199, 217n12 the Dove House,” 28, 66; “Still
Life,” 26, 31, 39, 200; “When
John of Patmos, St., 86 Men Will Lie Down as Gracefully
Johnson, Ronald & as Ripe,” 45
Adamic sensibilities, 21, 69, 71, 72, The American Table, 6, 121
73, 92, 105, 115, 116, 142, 154, ARK, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21,
165, 166, 168, 174, 190, 192, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 34, 35, 37,
193, 203 63–4, 71, 92, 110, 111, 113, 115,
assemblage sculptures, 17, 20 116, 117, 118, 124, 134, 137, 144,
bricolage poetics, 13, 21, 92, 105, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 157, 158,
110, 113, 115, 124, 127, 130, 133, 162–6, 167, 168, 169, 174, 175,
154, 155, 157–62, 164, 165, 168, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 186,
175, 178, 179, 180, 190, 219n62, 188, 189, 190, 191–2, 194, 195–8,
see also bricolage; collage; history 199, 211n51, 231n112; ARK: “The
cookery, 5, 6, 9, 18, 121 Foundations,” 2, 30, 38–41, 42,
and Jonathan Williams, 8, 10, 66, 47, 112, 115–19, 123, 143, 149,
74, 195 150, 154–5, 157, 158, 159, 162–3,
notebooks, 74–6, 186–9 164, 187; “BEAM 1,” 115, 159;

254 ● Index
Johnson, Ronald, work of—Continued Arches XXVI,” 187–8; “ARK

“BEAM 2,” 150–1, 196, 227n11; 93, Arches XXVII,” 186; “ARK
“BEAM 4,” 37, 38, 39, 40, 118, 96, Arches XXX,” 177; “ARK
143, 144; “BEAM 5, The Voices,” 98, Arches XXXII,” 158, 177,
13, 37, 151, 158–62, 173, 227n9; 191;”ARK 99, Arches XXXIII,”
“BEAM 7,” 37, 115; “BEAM 155, 158, 165, 177, 192, 193, 198

8,” 120, 169, 198, 201; “BEAM The Book of the Green Man, 10, 51,
10,” 151–4, 160, 193; “BEAM 62, 64, 65–89, 92, 97, 105, 108,
11, Finial,” 39, 115, 118, 153, 129, 136, 164, 165, 173, 180, 186,
192; “BEAM 12,” 33, 40, 118; 213n2, 223n50
“BEAM 14,” 4, 151, 227n11; The Different Musics, 80, 91–4, 105,
“BEAM 16, The Voices,” 4, 24, 106, 110, 113, 123, 124; “Assorted
119, 150, 169; “BEAM 17,” 25, Jungles: Rousseau,” 106; “The
40, 71; “BEAM 18,” 39–40, 43; Different Musics,” 94–9, see also
“BEAM 20, Labyrinthus,” 41, 191; Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses
“BEAMS 21, 22, 23, The Book of “Hurrah for Euphony,” 13, 23, 26,
Orpheus,” 30, 150, 151; “BEAM 30, 31, 53, 181
25, A Bicentennial Hymn,” 117–18, “If I Die Before I Awake,” 219n50
193; “BEAM 26,” 119; “BEAM Io and the Ox-Eyed Daisy, 9
27,” 119; “BEAM 28, The Book of “The Planting of the Rod of Aaron,”
Orpheus,” 19, 144, 160; “BEAM 3, 53, 149, 181, 232n24
29,” 2, 160, 193; “BEAM 33,” 115, Radi os, 35, 44–5, 123–55, 157, 195,
155; ARK: “The Spires,” 2, 6, 9, 223n47, 226n11, 227n3
13, 18, 137, 149, 157, 158, 162, The Round Earth on Flat Paper, 171
163, 164, 168, 174, 177, 182, 186, The Shrubberies, 1, 5
211n51; ARK 50: Spires 34–50, 6, “Six, Alas!,” 181, 197
157; “ARK 34, Spire on the Death Songs of the Earth, 112–15, 151, 161,
of L.Z.”, 166, 199; “ARK 35, Spire 227n11
Called Arm of the Moon,” 2, 25, The Spirit Walks, The Rocks Will
118, 151, 190; “ARK 38, Ariel’s Talk, 106–10
Song to Prospero,” 17, 164, 208n55; “Up Till Now,” 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 18,
“ARK 50, Adamspire,” 182; “ARK 20, 41, 51, 69, 93, 107, 108, 110,
53, Starspire,” 177, 182; “ARK 112, 117, 123, 128, 139, 150–1, 154,
55, The ABC Spire,” 182; ARK: 163, 168, 180, 198, 207n47, 219n62
“The Ramparts,” 2, 6, 9, 18, 137, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses,
149, 157, 158, 162–4, 165, 168, 92, 176
169, 174, 177, 178, 182, 186, 188, Wor(l)ds, 12–13, 110–12, 113, 115,
193, 194; “ARK 60, Fireworks I,” 124, 126, 149, 150, 158, 220n65
189–90; “ARK 61, Fireworks II,” Jones, Barbara, 107
190; “ARK 83, Arches XVII,” 182; Jung, Carl Gustav, 119, 126, 140–1,
“ARK 85, Arches XIX,”197, 198– 152, 153, 186
200; “ARK 86, Arches XX, The Jungian psychology, 29, 37, 148, 155
Wreath,” 182; “ARK 88, Arches
XXII, The Cave,” 182; “ARK kabbalah, 42, 140, 141, 224n74
91, Arches XXV,” 182; “ARK 92, Kansas, 5, 7, 27, 52, 63, 110–11, 115, 192

Index ● 255
Kenner, Hugh, 10, 14, 53–4, 55, 56, Pagels, Elaine, 140
57, 58, 116, 178, 179, 180, 199, Palmer, Samuel, 25, 26, 28, 66, 68,
212n11 69, 70, 72, 74, 84, 85, 86–9,
Kilvert, Francis, 67–8, 74, 75, 82, 83 135, 136–7, 202, 214n9, 215n34,
Kristeva, Julia, 164 216n58
Partch, Harry, 117, 198–9, 220n80

Language Poetry, 10–11, 12–16, 19 Pater, Walter, 46, 55, 174
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 152 Phanes, 143
Levertov, Denise, 65, 71–2, 83, 84 Phillips, Tom, 132, 133, 223n33
Lincoln, Abraham, 118, 189–91, 193 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 43,
Loy, Mina, 8, 19, 24, 131 210n41
Lucretius, 31, 175 Pound, Ezra, 2, 4, 5, 8–9, 10, 11–12,
13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24,
Mahler, Gustav, 112, 113, 114, 115, 35, 51–64, 66, 69, 71, 79, 83, 84,
178 91, 93, 94, 96, 124, 143, 157, 161,
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 128, 157, 169–71, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 171, 172,
172, 174 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181,
Mead, G. R. S., 140 182, 183, 184, 185, 191, 198, 200,
memory jugs, 106, 219n50 202–3
Milton, John, 64, 84, 123–9, 130, 133, The Cantos, 2, 4, 9, 51, 54, 56,
137, 138–9, 143, 146, 150, 151, 57–63, 83, 84, 93, 96, 129,
180, 221n12, 223n47, 227n3 158–60, 198, 199, 202–3
Moore, Marianne, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, and Fenollosa, Ernest, 56–8
51, 157, 164, 165, 177, 178–86, and ideogrammic method, 55–8
187, 188, 200
“The Mind is An Enchanting Raine, Kathleen, 140, 227n10
Thing,” 182 Rexroth, Kenneth, 11, 43
“An Octopus,” 182, 183–5, 187, 188 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 13, 32, 149
see also collage Robin Goodfellow, 79–82
Muir, John, 183, 184, 185 Rodia, Sabato (Sam), 6, 7, 19, 20, 105,
107, 108, 119, 120, 121, 158, 176,
Nag Hammadi Library, The, 140 177, 196, 198, 199, 219n62
naïve art, see bricolage Rothenberg, Jerome, 24, 62
neoplatonism, 60, 143, 152, 153, Rousseau, Henri, 106–7
224n74 Ruggles, Carl, 92, 134
Niedecker, Lorine, 24, 181, 202 Ruskin, John, 67–8, 70, 111, 183,
184–5, 186
Olson, Charles, 8, 9, 10, 13, 18, 19, Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 4
21, 24, 26–8, 31, 41, 47, 51, 52,
53, 63, 92, 94, 96, 100, 121, 134, Schaeffer, Piere, 17
152, 166, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, Sewell, Elizabeth, 30–41, 42, 43, 46,
218n22 49, 76, 125, 144, 148, 210n41
Orpheus, 13, 14, 31–3, 107, 139, Shakespeare, William, 32, 80, 81, 117,
147–9, 150, 166 177
see also Eurydice; Phanes Sharpless, Jack, 17, 208n54

256 ● Index
Sidney, Sir Philip, 201 Whitman, Walt, 2, 4, 24, 25, 30, 35–6,
Sitwell, Edith, 79, 81, 181 70, 72, 80, 84–5, 97, 104, 111,
Stein, Gertrude, 19, 108, 137 167, 211n51, 215n23
Stevens, Wallace, 23–4, 180 Williams, Jonathan, 8, 10, 52, 53, 66,
74, 77, 82, 112, 114, 134–5, 137,
Thomson, James, 66 195, 202

Thoreau, Henry David, 1, 4, 10, 23–4, Williams, William Carlos, 4, 9, 19, 24,
25, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 52, 157, 176, 181, 185, 188
40–1, 42, 48, 54, 70, 72, 77, 80, Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The, 7, 111,
97, 100, 101, 104, 111, 113, 114, 199
119, 120, 121, 134, 146–7, 148, see also Baum, L. Frank
173, 186, 202, 209n23, 215n23 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 77–9
Todd, Glenn, 112 Wordsworth, William, 32, 66, 67, 68,
Todd, Ruthven, 84 70, 74, 77–9, 125, 129, 130
Toklas, Alice B., 108
Traherne, Thomas, 195 Yeats, W. B., 43, 46, 52, 153
transcendentalism, 3, 4, 8, 12, 14,
23–49, 69, 70, 92, 101–4, 106, Zukofsky, Louis, 2, 6, 7, 10, 11–13,
116, 119, 165, 176, 199, 210n32 14, 16–17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 37, 51,
52, 53, 92, 137, 157, 163, 164–5,
Vendler, Helen, 6, 158 166, 167, 168–75, 176, 177,
Virgil, 130, 150, 159, 221n12 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 188,
190, 200
Warlock, Peter, 80, 83 “A,” 164, 168, 169, 170, 172–4, 175,
Watts Towers, the, see Rodia, Sabato 178, 180, 188, 190
White, Gilbert, 68, 74, 80, 82, 83, 129, 135 Poem Beginning “The,”173, 181, 182

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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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 to Philip Van Aver1

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

Johnson’s poetry repeatedly aspires to discover and disclose revelatory

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

poets, microscopists, mathematicians, physicists.”9 All these different eyes

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I have always been interested in changes of focus and the multidimen-

Thus, collage is an integral part of what Johnson describes to August Derleth

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

However, modernism and Transcendentalism are not antithetical tradi-

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

Republic.”20 This is a perceptive way to read Johnson, with his modernist

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green archetypal ages

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

Despite his buoyant resilience, it is difficult not to feel the melancholy of

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

Despite the endorsement of a successful poet such as Simic, by the late

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

He joked with me once about Guy Davenport’s pronouncement that he

Johnson’s high expectations were never realized. By December of 1993, as

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

Why does Johnson’s poetry now merit attention and reassessment?

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

We moved to New York and I worked at the 8th Street Bookshop in

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

A crucial influence on Johnson’s work, Pound’s Cantos provides the basic