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.