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The Shrubberies
Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) died at the age of 62 in his home state of Kansas (after an extended stay in San Francisco), leaving behind a notable legacy of verse that has influenced a number of young writers experimenting with language and form. Besides eight poetry books (many of them shamefully out of print) he also produced five cookbooks on American regional cooking since he maintained a second career as a chef and caterer. The Shrubberies was published posthumously in 2001 with Flood Editions, “pruned” from a 229-page, 300-poem manuscript by Johnson’s literary executor, Peter O’Leary.
O’Leary explains his editing process in the afterword, and I’ll let readers quibble with some of his editing decisions (like the fact that he added the last poem in the book from another of Johnson’s texts “for its sense of completion”). I’d like to focus on the writing itself.
I stumbled upon this book in my never-ending quest for gay poet role models. And although Johnson was out of the closet, and he did pen “Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid,” a long poem in memory of AIDS victims—he had witnessed firsthand the devastating plague that claimed the lives of many while he was living in San Francisco in the eighties—The Shrubberies is a book concerned with rhythm and sound.
The poems are sometimes like a haiku, a compressed moment or vision, many gesturing toward the imagery of nature. An Edenic landscape is present here, but also the suggestion of fragility, precariousness and loss:
quick—a startled faun
unstill as a flame
*
on the screen
the primal scene
a scream of out
Johnson also exercises the zeugma, a type of X-ing through the pairing of elements such as vowel sounds:
a plummet depth
death plumed
*
tempi all exempt
except tempest
And always that playful and artful juggling of language, such as the anagram-inspired lines: “so ants & iridescent gnats/ minuet the diminutives”; the punning punch line: “astir the realm of elms/ the particolor of it all”; and echo verse: “immure by theft/ beast loft// & suckle star/ are & are & are.”
Indeed there is much to “invite the eye/ invade the ear” in this book and each time I leaf through The Shrubberries I come across another startling find:
silent, silent the deep
enough to see me sleep
As a new fan of Ronald Johnson, I also located a copy of radi os (also published by Flood Editions), a long poem exercising the process of erasure. In this case, when you blot out (or erase) certain letters on the title Paradise Lost, you arrive at radi os. A title within a title; a poem within the poem. You get the idea. Now go get his books!
Posted in Books, Criticism, Group Blog, Poems on Friday, December 7th, 2007 by Rigoberto González.
Comments (5)
Another great shout-out, Rigoberto!
I was recently amazed to find out what a great writer on cooking Johnson also was! Details in the interview about RJ with Peter O’Leary here.
Trainspotters might like to know that Johnson’s poems appeared in Poetry thusly:
Sweet Orange, Sour, Osage & Mock-Orange (October 1963)
Four Orphic Poems (July 1964)
From The Book of the Green Man (April 1965)
Letters to Walt Whitman (June 1966)
The Unfoldings (November 1968)
Poem (“Out from this floor…”) (June 1972)
The Core (June 1972)
… and that our colleagues at Chicago Review have published Book V of Radi os, “The Book of Adam,” with an accompanying piece by Peter O’Leary in their Autumn 2007 issue.
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Rigoberto!
Thanks for the mention. I love that this book, six+ years after its publication, continues to find new readers.
I wanted to mention that Flood Editions has two Ronald Johnson titles planned. The Outworks will be published shortly; it includes “Block to Be Arranged in a Pyramid,” as well as some additional later work falling in between the completion of in the early 1990s & the work included in The Shrubberies.
Speaking of ARK, Flood plans to republish Johnson’s masterpiece in a corrected edition in the next few years.
It’s likely clear that Flood is committed for the present to keeping Johnson’s work in print. Stay tuned!
The first poem that Don mentions in RJ’s Poetry bibliography was his first ever magazine publication in a terrific “long poem” double ish that also featured, if I remember correctly, Olson, Bishop, Berryman, Levertov, Roethke, Snyder, Duncan, & Zukofsky, among others. Auspicious beginning!
Cheers!
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Rigoberto!
Thanks for the mention. I love that this book, six+ years after its publication, continues to find new readers.
I wanted to mention that Flood Editions has two Ronald Johnson titles planned. The Outworks will be published shortly; it includes “Block to Be Arranged in a Pyramid,” as well as some additional later work falling in between the completion of in the early 1990s & the work included in The Shrubberies.
Speaking of ARK, Flood plans to republish Johnson’s masterpiece in a corrected edition in the next few years.
It’s likely clear that Flood is committed for the present to keeping Johnson’s work in print. Stay tuned!
The first poem that Don mentions in RJ’s Poetry bibliography was his first ever magazine publication in a terrific “long poem” double ish that also featured, if I remember correctly, Olson, Bishop, Berryman, Levertov, Roethke, Snyder, Duncan, & Zukofsky, among others. Auspicious beginning!
Cheers!
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Thank you, Peter. I’m excited that these books will become available once again. Johnson has much to teach us about the inventiveness of poetry. He’s already made his way into my college syllabus next year!
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Rigoberto,
Don’t forget one of his wonderful earlier books THE BOOK OF THE GREEN MAN, all of which can be found online here:
http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rjohnson/rj-gm-1.htm
A record of his year-long tromp through the Lake District, it also tours through the work Wordsworth, Smart, Thoreau, and other embodiments of the myth of the Green Man in literature.
Emily
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