To Do As Adam Did

After reading part of ARK and learning more about Ronald Johnson I decided I wanted to read some of his other poems so I bought a copy of "To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson" edited by Peter O'Leary. This book, published in 2000, contains O'Leary's choices of poems from each of Johnson's seven published books. (O'Leary is a poet and Johnson's literary executor.)

I found O'Leary's introduction to "To Do As Adam Did" very helpful and enjoyable.

What did Adam do? He named: naming built the Garden he dwelt in, allowing him to see it through words. Johnson recognizes the brain and the universe as mirror images: astrophysics is horticulture; scientific perception is gardening.

Johnson's poetry is nearly devoid of autobiography, confession, or the complaint that often accompanies these modes. Has there been a more blissful poet than Johnson? To read Johnson is to feel the pleasure of Adam naming things.

Needless to say we currently have a number of serious problems to worry about in addition to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic . O'Leary's question might point to why my reading Johnson's ARK and following up its references to interesting ideas has provided me with the perfect mental break.

[Image. Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail)]

Three of Pentacles

I just got one of my favorite Tarot cards using the Foolsdog's "Classic 1910 Tarot" app on my iPad. When using the app, which only supplies a single card, my question is usually "what should I focus on today?". The synchronicity in this case is obvious. An arch and an architect. Three penatacles and three a key organizational feature of ARK."My skill" currently seems to writing blog posts. The "card represents people who work in the mysteries." Ronald Johnson and/or P. D. Ouspensky?

I'd already been thinking about writing a blog post on this portion of Beam 3. [The curved lines in the upper part is a fortuitous artifact of my scanner app.]

I'd recognized the upper part as a description of drawing a Tarot card the first time I read it. I also knew hat "The Juggler" is an alternate name for the Magician, which is major arcana card number I. This card is also associated with Mercury (quicksilver).

I had to Google the quote in the lower part which turns out to be from P.D. Ouspensky's "A New Model of the Universe which includes his reaction to each of the 21 major arcana. This is, of course, his reaction to "The Juggler." I;d never heard of him before. He believed in the importance of esoteric knowledge and is a fascintating person to read about. It's easy to find free online translations of "a New Model" if that's the kind of thing you are interested in.\knowledge. .

Obliquity to the Ecliptic

One of the debates about reading ARK is whether one should look up the source of references one is not familiar wih. I think it can be interesting and enjoyable and Google usually makes it possible. I also look up words when I'm not sure of their definition of. I found the title phrase in "BEAM 5" and thought Johnson had invented because he liked the sound so I'm glad I looked it up.

Obliquity of the ecliptic is the term used by astronomers for the inclination of Earth's equator with respect to the ecliptic, or of Earth's rotation axis to a perpendicular to the ecliptic. It is about 23.4° and is currently decreasing 0.013 degrees (47 arcseconds) per hundred years because of planetary perturbations.

Image By I, Dennis Nilsson, CC BY 3.0

Reading ARK

ARK is comprised of 99 poems or cantos divided into three sections of 33 poems each. So far I've only tried to read the poems in the first section: "The Foundations". The title of each poem in this section starts with the word "Beam." Some are written as poetry, some as ordinary prose, and some as a mix of poetry and prose. The poems also differ from each other in various other ways including length and difficulty.

Here is what Johnson's friend Jonathan Williams wrote about the poem in a memoriam reprinted in the Ronald Johnson Issue of Angle magazine.

For over twenty years Ronald Johnson composed and fitted together an architectonic poem in 99 sections called Ark [sic]. It is in the traditions of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Duncan. It is a formidable achievement and it will require readers not easily daunted, who have untrammeled imaginations. Thorn Gunn and Robert Creeley are two of Ark's champions. They both point out that this itis an aesthetic work, not a didactic one, and there is much pleasure to be gained. William Blake is there; the Land of Oz is there; the Bible is there; Simon Redia's Watts Towers are there.

I realized on rereading some of the poems that I'd forgotten what I'd already figured out so I decided it would be a good idea to write up some of my ideas. My current goal is simply to write something about at least some of the individual poems. I'm not interested in nor capable of writing an academic treatise like the four or five I've already skimmed. These discuss larger issues such as whether ARK is a pastoral poem or whether Johnson's writing is something more complex.

More importantly, Johnson’s work suggests that the mindbody, particularly the human nervous system, as an object-that-knows, confounds Western metaphysics in the same ["plays within the genre tradition of nature writing"] way. Johnson’s “nervetree” figure, I argue, moves us closer to visualizing where the human object, as embodied, ecologically-embedded subjecthood, fits in a post-metaphysical, object oriented ecological thought.

Enjoyment

Discovering something new, especially something aligned with previous interests, is almost always a source of joy for me. In that regard I've been especially lucky encountering Ronald Johnson. In the first place, I've for a number of years been interested in tryng to make sense of certain types of modern poetry such as that of Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and John Cage. Moreover, I've been interested in concrete poetry for at least ten years and have two excellent books on the subject including one that turned out to have a few samples of Johnson's early concrete poetry. And, as a bonus alignment, Johnson supported himself by writing wonderful cookbooks about which I'll write more later.

There's lots of excellent and easy-to-find online information about Johnson himself and about his poetry. Most days lately I've spent many enjoyable hours searching and reading!. If you are interested in learning more a good place to start is the blog of the company that published the new edition of ARK.

ARK

ARK is a wonderful long concrete poem by Ronald Johnson (1935-1998). Although Johnson wrote a number of books of poetry and had finished ARK New Year's Eve 1990 (after working on it for some 20 years) I only discovered him a few weeks ago. I was reading the personal blog of a writer whose Finnegans Wake's blog I've followed for a number of years and he'd included ARK in his listing of what he'd taken with him on his recent travels:

I mainly carried around only the books with the highest ratio of insight and lexical originality-per-page, which I had decided are these two: Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and the epic poem ARK by Ronald Johnson. Those came with me everywhere.

Luckily the excellent new edition of ARK is readily available and I received the paperback copy I'd paid $16.75 for on July 7.