![]() But you’re doing it in a way you never really think about while you’re alive – you yourself as a poet, trying while you live to serve the art. When a poet like Ronald Johnson, who was essentially obscure but with a core group of devoted readers, dies, you’re kind of fighting against time, which will one day rub away even the letters in Shakespeare’s name. As the years have drifted by – Ron has been dead for twelve years now – the work has gotten more ordinary – in the sense of just being something I do – but no less important, I hope. The work involved in this role is sometimes very interesting – especially at first, when I spent time going through all his papers, organizing them, and getting things prepared for publication. I’ve also talked in various places about some of the tasks involved in organizing the archive and in handling the work of being Ron’s literary executor, most extensively in an interview I did with October magazine a few years back. (I included a lot of the letters from Ron in that piece, including the full text of that first letter.) I wrote about this extensively in a memoir, “Gilding the Buddha: My Apprenticeship with Ronald Johnson,” which was published in Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, edited by Joel Bettridge and Eric Murphy Selinger (National Poetry Foundation, 2008), so I won’t rehearse what I’ve already covered in detail. ENTER THIS GATE (and you just might become a poet worth your salt.)” There is just you and the blank page, and there is no one to overcome but yourself. For instance, he told me, “But remember that writing is a solitary, even lonely thing, and is not done in workshops. I had read some interviews with him here and there, tracked down further installments of ARK in various journals, and intuited that if I wrote him and asked him how to go about solving this problem – the problem of making my way in the world as a poet – he would respond kindly and maybe give me an answer.Īfter sending my letter, I didn’t have to wait long: I received a neatly typed two-page letter that told me what to do, and more or less continues to do so, as if I’d somehow managed to summon the Cumaean oracle. I had admired Ron’s work for two or three years and that spring was deeply immersed in reading ARK: The Foundations, a book that almost completely informs my sense of the possibilities in poetry. I was working at the time for a correspondence high school on the South Side of Chicago, miserable in a way in no way unique to someone in his early twenties, wanting more than anything to make my way in the world as a poet. Peter O'Leary: I wrote to Ron out of the blue in 1992 when I was twenty-four years old, at a crossroads. Could you talk about the importance of Johnson’s work on your own writing practices? I’d love to hear about how you came into contact with Johnson, his work, and his archive. Joshua Marie Wilkinson: Peter, I’d like to start with a question about poet Ronald Johnson. Posthumously, Johnson's literary executor Peter O'Leary published To Do as Adam Did, Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson (2000), The Shrubberies (2001), and a new edition of Radi os (2005).EVENING WILL COME: A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF POETICS (ISSUE 8: AUGUST 2011) Peter O'Leary an interview Ronald Johnson died Main Topeka, Kansas at the age of 62. During his career he held several guest professorships at universities, including the University of Kentucky and the University of Washington. Johnson lived much of his adult life in San Francisco, employed at various occupations to support himself, including bartender, chef, and caterer. Johnson also published several cookbooks, including The Aficionado's Southwestern Cooking (1968), The American Table (1983), and Southwestern Cooking: New and Old (1985). The complete version of Johnson's long poem ARK was published in 1996 by Living Batch Press ARK is divided into three books, each containing 33 sections. ![]() He would go on to publish numerous poetry collections, including The Book of the Green Man (1967) and Radi os (1977), an erasure poem Johnson created by excising text from the first four books of John Milton's Paradise Lost. In 1964, Johnson published his first collection of poetry, A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees. He completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1960 at Columbia University. He spent some time at the University of Kansas, beginning his studies there in 1953 and completing his freshman year, before performing two years of national service in the Army in Georgia, Arizona, and California. Ronald Johnson was born in Ashland, Kansas on Novemto A.T.
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