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.