What hand will reach out to see the world?
-"When Men Will Lie Down as Gracefully &
as Ripe-"
Small windows open and shut in a photograph of the earth from the moon hung on the walls of an imaginary Musée de l'Homme, where it plays its own elastic lace of shadows.
-"BEAM 20, Labyrinthus"
ARK, as Ronald Johnson conceived it, is both an imaginary architecture and a biological form: "O / Tree / into the World, / Man / the chosen / Rose out of Chaos: / Song". But where the poem takes off, literally, is as a vehicle: an ark more prolific than Noah's as well as the arc of a rainbow, a radiant image of light's fleetingness grounded in imaginary gold. The word PIVOT is translated through Johnson's abecadarian "BEAM 28, The Book of Orpheus" as "the-man-who-will-become-himself-centers-a-valley-through-which-circles-matter"; by the same rules, ARK might be translated as the-fulcrum-from-which-he-or-she-who-reaches-between-genders-leafs-out. The leaf as page and vegetable both is the bearer of words, a Johnsonian conceit dating back to The Book of the Green Man (1967): "As a leaf startles out // from an undifferentiated mass of foliage, / so the word did from a leaf- // A Mirage Of The Delicate Polyglot / inventing itself as cipher" ("What the Leaf Told Me"). From the delicate polyglot Nature whose beauty pleases without concepts, the leaf bearing a word toward Johnson becomes a vehicle without a tenor. Reaching between is a step beyond history: "If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning, to start all over again, attempting know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand" ("A Note"). A gay man in Kansas; a Dorothy caught between the Wizard of the West (Prospero) and the androgynous Witch of the East (Ariel); a poet-lover suspended between Orpheus and Eurydice. Although he foregrounded his debt to the tradition of Pound, Williams, Olson, and Zukofsky, Johnson wanted his "personal epic" to travel beyond the masculinist modernist conception of epic as an eater of events. The A (not "A") is the fulcrum that returns us to the PIVOT, a Heideggerian image of man not as the center but as that which centers, composing the immanent movements of matter.
If architecture is "music frozen / Mozart to the rafters" (ARK 73), ARK itself is a spaceship. In a 1996 interview with Peter O'Leary, Johnson said, "I thought ARK had as many [meanings as "A" had for Zukofsky], and it was a structure, which I wanted; it was to save mankind, and the animal and vegetable and mineral world; and so I set off on a kind of science fiction, like building a time-capsule of everything that I've heard and seen, to go out to the dark, to the stars." To see ARK as science fiction is to see it as evoking another world in all its Flaubertian excess of precise detail (think of the innumerable nubs and crevices wrinkling the skin of the Millenium Falcon); a world in which one might live ("let us call it Arden // & live in it!" ["Shake, Quoth the Dove House"]) but which gestures always and irrevocably to the inadequacies of the world in which we actually live. ARK captures the whole earth in its cumulative glance and reduces it to an impossibly detailed blue-and-green point of being. Its language—"legerdemain in the Elaboratory" (ARK 72)— is promiscuous enough to be, in Stephen Collis' phrase, "virtually non-referential—a mass of details [quoting Mark Scroggins] 'only as luminous as the overall form in which they appear.'" Space travel trumps time travel (that is, history). The image of the earth from space is crucial not only because ARK is the first modernist epic to be written after the accomplishment of that image, but because it makes beauty possible again. All of nature is contracted to a single luminous point resembling the free natural beauty of a flower—that which "presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be" (Kant). If Johnson is undergoing a renaissance among young poets, I believe it is because he makes the rediscovery of beauty possible—he recalls the numinous possibilities that can result from paying strict attention to the objects of the world (with the language of Blake, Thoreau, and Whitman treated as just another category of natural feature).
It is possible to feel overwhelmed by the attempt to read ARK, to succumb to its mathematical sublime, a product of the sheer accumulation of specimens, flora, and texts; of the punning and polysemy; of the book's lack of page numbers or the helpful notes that so often accompanied the publication of individual sections in magazines. We cannot hold the whole of it in our minds. But the sublime is probably not Johnson's first interest, given his de-emphasis of those factors that might create an effect of the dynamic sublime—the awe we feel in the presence of poetic power ("Marlowe's mighty line," etc.). Like his mentor the "derivative poet" Robert Duncan, Johnson steps lightly away from, or perhaps lightly into, the Freudian grasp of the anxiety of influence. He is not his own man, but the delighted child of many fathers, including not just poets but the "naíve" artists Simon Rodia and le Facteur Cheval; the composer Charles Ives; and the innumerable naturalists, astronomers, and other observers of the empirical world who helped him to, in William Blake's phrase, "work the thing up to Vision!" For Blake, the clarity of the physical eye founded the further vision of the homemade cosmology that Johnson's ARK is a version of, with the emphasis on homemade: made at and from and for the home, the earth. If the sublime is to be found, it will be found only in the mind responding to the plenitude of earthly phenomena. Also mitigating against the reading of ARK as sublime text is its playfulness, its musical and visual pleasures, keenly demonstrated in the visually concrete poetry of "earthearthearth" ("BEAM 24") and "ARK 55: The ABC Spire," and the aurally concrete "invisible Spire" of birdsong that is "ARK 38, Ariel's Songs to Prospero." No other "difficult" poet that I'm aware of offers so much immediate pleasure through the free play of the imagination. Johnson presents us with poetry whose poly-referential complexity shimmers like a forcefield around the naive "foundness" of its verbal objects. His text becomes the image and demonstration of purposiveness without purpose, resembling as closely as possible what Kant calls "a free natural beauty."
The perennial crisis of the utopian poem is its failure to realize utopia; more often, the poet is left groping among the unrealizable ruins. Furthermore, when Pound says "I cannot make it cohere," we are glad he couldn't, for the god in the cool of the garden of Pound's utopia was named Mussolini. Johnson's impulse is not utopian, but pastoral: he subtracts the god's totalitarianism and leaves us with the garden of earthly delights, of language at leisure to discover a private vision:
The radiant image
the only
Garden
On the bare outside of this World,
no bars of Hell, nor
far off Heaven,
And Man there placed,
the sole command,
create
or love
(RADI OS O III)
Originally intended to be the conclusion of ARK, RADI OS undoes the tyrannical dialectic of a God and a Satan (not to mention a lordly Adam and an imperfectly submissive Eve), turning the first four books of Paradise Lost from Biblical epic to a pastoral lyric in which imaginative creation and love—on a human scale—are the highest values. In high orbit, ARK provides what an early draft of the poem (WOR(L)DS Section 31, "Days") called "the curious perspective of the Garden." Johnson's poetry squares the circle suggested by the phrase "immanent transcendence." The vertical axis stretches not from Hell through Earth to Heaven, but from the human eye to the sun, from desert Kansas to an Oz of the imaginary. Eden is earth and we are in it: "only winged imagination / cement horsesense / no fall of an apple unforseen" ("ARK 91, Arches XXV"). This figure unites Plato's image of the two winged horses of the soul and underwrites its necessity: the ideal aspired to by imagination is grounded, "cemented" by "horsesense"—the earthly life. The stanza's last line similarly unites the binary of knowledge represented by the apple: it is a figure of man's fall and also the beginning of Newtonian physics and the mastery of nature through precise observation. If there is a fault here, it is in Johnson's stars; his exclusion of history from his poetry makes its pastoral space possible, but also abandons the consequences of the legends of the Fall that comprise history: dominion, hierarchy, unfreedom.
Guy Davenport, who remains the best and most incandescent commentator on Johnson, describes the approach to poetry that Johnson sidestepped: "A poem as it is generally understood is a metrical composition either lyric, dramatic, or pensive made by a poet whose spiritual dominion flows through his words like the wind or the leaves or the lark's song through twilight." Johnson abdicates that dominion and lets his method of bricolage (ARK 90: "scrapture"), with its trust in the contingency of the materials made available by nature, stand in its place. Poetry is for Johnson quite literally what Robert Duncan called it, "a natural thing." As a result, his work lacks the critical power I've come to associate with the most energized avant-garde poets—their struggle against social and literary norms, against the forces of reification that serve the status quo. Still, it is the radical openness of Johnson's poetry of accumulation that makes it such an inviting vehicle, especially for young poets seeking to carry the lessons of modernism forward into their own 21st century work. His poetry shows that lyricism remains possible in the absence of a Romantic self; at the same time, he offers a direct point of connection between the present day and the generation of modernists centering on Zukofsky and Olson. The egolessness of ARK, its zero gravity, in my mind connects with the figure of Johnson as poetic grandfather, in some ways easier to connect with than the fraught relationship offered by one's parents (I am thinking here of the Language poets). And if ARK lacks the engaged critical perspective that characterizes their experiments, it does ultimately serve the critical function of pastoral as an image of life abounding, of linguistic and imaginative freedom, that stands implicitly opposed to a world of commodified languages and the ideologies of institutions. Johnson's flying monument, spaceship ARK, modeled on the human body, brings heaven back to where it was created—the earth—and makes heaven visible from here.