ABSTRACT
R onald johnson's poetry is visionary, architectonic, and play-fully polysemous. His poetic models are William Blake, Christopher Smart, and Walt Whitman. He learned poetry from Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Duncan, and he learned how to make things with words from such autodidactic builders as the Facteur Cheval, Raymond Isidore, and Simon Rodia. He was as devoted to Thoreau's Journals as to L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. He was born in western Kansas, in the midst of the American prairie; lived in New York; walked through England; and traced the Appalachian Trail with jonathan Williams, finally settling in San Francisco. He wrote several books of poetry, and his masterpiece, ARK (1980, 1984, 1996), is one of the most idiosyncratic, intelligent, and enjoyable poems ever written by an American. While he was alive, Guy Davenport called him "America's greatest living poet." Robert Duncan believed that johnson's ARK stirred "long-stored feelings of the radiant structural beauty and mystery of the universe."
