BEAM 2 (first part)

You don't have to learn very much about Ronald Johnson to discover that although he'dalready published several books of poetry his wish or dream was to write a big/long/important poem like William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukovsky had. By 1970 he'd decided to undertake this project even though he realized it would difficult and time-consuming. He'd figured out an approach and had moved to San Francisco.

"Beam 2" seems to me to be about what had already happened before he started writing ARK and what he expected would happen as he began writing it.

Beam 2 starts with a prose paragraph that is a scientific description of a lightning strike althoough Johnson wrote it in what I'd call a poetic style. (I'm embarrased to admit it took my reading through it more than once to realize what it is obviously about. I somehow got hung up on wondering about "ice electrons" and missed: "Cloud to ground ... negative to positive .. Positive to negative--the strike returns...."

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I think Johnaon put thw paragraph at the start of "Beam 2" to indicate it had happened before what followed. Moreover, he probably wanted to start includng as soon as possible the kind of scientific information he'd planned to be included in ARK.

I've been reading Ross Hair's excellent but difficult book. Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry which (as well as other things I've read) reminds me that my interpretations are much less sophisticated than those trained in poetics who've spent a long time studying Johnson's poems and the notes in his archive. However just because I don't have this backgrond doesn't mean what I think is wrong so much as it is incomplete. Here as illustation is what Hair wrote about part of "BEAM 2".

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For example, there are [in ARK] implicit allusions to the Adamic-Orphic descent of (JohnSon'a Radi os in “BEAM 2”... Thus, she [Eurydice] is implicit in “BEAM 2” in the form of the lightning cloud’s "ice electrons" ....

"BEAM 2" proposes additional instances of descent, as the homophonic pun of “dissent”/“descent” indicates. Implicit in this is Milton’s impious rebel-hero, Satan (and the light-bearing Lucifer) who, in Paradise Lost, falls into "bottomless perdition." "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"....

I undersood the the first two of the last thee louds as meaning: "Surrounded" and "Measured disagreement" I couldn't understand the third, partly because I hadn't noted the pun and hadn't taking the meaning of "bent" as "devoting one's attention to a task." I guess it means Johnson expects difficulties but like Orpheus will return from Hades..