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!