A Tribute to Ronald Johnson (1935-1998): Part One

Plant Forms - Arthur Dove, 1912.

Ronald Johnson has long been considered by The Compass Rose as being one of a handful of poets writing in English since the Second World War, whose work deserves to be included in anyone's list of gifted and innovative writers.  His earliest work, collected in A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees [Jonathan Williams, Highlands, North Carolina, 1964], was a refreshing departure from the majority of academic versifying on the one hand, and the self-conscious rhetorical gestures of the "avant garde" on the other, which characterized the competing camps of poetry-writing during the 1940's and 1950's.  Working directly from quotations, and relying on a specificity of source, place and time, Johnson's work was a wholly original approach to pastoral, one informed by a deep and reverent reading, and by a circumspect response to his ambient mental landscapes (Kansas, the English countryside, as well as to the graphic prophetic visions of Blake, Palmer, Dove, etc.).  It was modern, and brisk, and confident, but measured and unpretentious.

 

Our favorite Johnson poem is Three Paintings By Arthur Dove.  Here is the beginning of Part 1:

I. Plant Forms

Dove once pulled up a cyclamen

& tore it up

to show how the color went

down in the stem

& on into the root.

Color is a condition of the plant--

color of the flower

& pod,

embedded in the bud.

Notice how deftly he handles the repetitions of "pulled up" and "tore it up" which is then balanced against the "down" and "& on" which fall neatly from the pulling quality of the first two lines.  Those first two brief stanzas are filled with a controlled fury:  Deliberate, active, even violent, but held in perfect balance.  Moving beyond color, the poem expands outward--

At the perimeters of growth

the plant

has lines of force--

as the 'wind

has weight.'

With only 16 words, Johnson manages to summon up a symphonic landscape; you can feel (see) the currents of wind as they move in response to natural forces at work.

If we could look at an orange flower long enough

it would become blue.

What a miraculous transformation!  Color may be a condition of the structure of a given organism, but perception is a kind of magic, before which we stand in awe, as before nature itself.  Our experience can be transformed in time, and may indeed deceive us.  

spathe, sheath, 

petiole, blade,

stalk, and root--

'these moving circles in which we walk'.

We are caught up in universal motions, intersecting orbits of bodies and flows implied earlier in the flux of weighted wind.  Typically, with Johnson, the two active quotations in the poem imply a (quasi-scientific) antecedent observation, as if the voice of the speaker were verifying historical memory.  Science and alchemy come together.  Wonder is the super-awareness of kinetic interaction, mind sensing the distribution of matter and force as weighted measures, which the poem is set to evoke.  Even more typical, in Johnson, is the specific reference to event, as if all experience constituted a proof of the Imagination.  Feelings, sensations, intuitions are clues to universal form(s).  Science and imagination, inqury and play, are equal partners in the apprehension of life's meaning.  Words (names) echo (meanings) back through time to origins (coinages) out of sound (whorls), (felt) shape, and notation (writing).

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