Peter O'Leary has published a book of poetry, Watchfulness (Spuyten Duyvil), and a book of criticism, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness (Wesleyan). In addition to acting as literary executor for the Ronald Johnson Estate, he is one of the long-time editors of LVNG. While making his "permanent" home in Chicago, he has recently been a temporary resident of Vienna and Budapest. The following interview was conducted via email the spring of 2004.

Note on the format: Octopus asked its interview subject eight questions, with three options for each question. O'Leary choose which question from each set he wanted to answer (we have darkened the chosen questions, kept the unchosen ones a ghostly gray).

Do you have a favorite Ronald Johnson anecdote?

Describe, if there was one, your personal relationship with RJ. How did it develop? How did it leave off?

Do you have any working definition(s) as to what a literary executor is, of how she or he should approach the deceased writer's body of work? 

I'll pick this question, if only because it's the kind of thing I'm usually curious to read about when I pick up an interview. Ronald Johnson was my teacher. Not in the conventional or academic sense, but that's the role he took on for me. He was also my friend, but our relationship had an essential asymmetry that made friendship something more retrospective than active. I've realized since he died that Ron was much more certain of what he was doing being involved with me than I was with him: I was in such awe of him, I spent a lot of time in the beginning desperately trying to keep his attention. It turned out this was wasted - if necessary - effort; he had chosen me as the recipient of his attentions long before it dawned on me that I was his student.

Our contact started when I wrote him a letter in the summer of 1992. At the time, I was working for a correspondence high school in Chicago, teaching remedial English through the mail - pure Kafka. I had already undergone a religious conversion to poetry but still had no idea how to make a life in & with poetry. For reasons mysterious & chimerical, I decided I didn't want to go to an MFA program. But still wasn't sure. So, in a dumb blaze of inspiration, I decided to write to the poet whose work was most blowing me away at the time. I had been poring over ARK: The Foundations for over a year, so I wrote Ron out of the blue, basically laying my soul on the line, telling him all my hopes & fears. Less than a week later, I received a letter from him, full of kind, witty advice. Thus began my own Letters to a Young Poet, but I was "dear Kappus"!

Soon after we started corresponding, I went out to San Francisco & we met. His poetry is so vivid, electrical, plastic, I guess I wasn't expecting him to be so charming. But he was: a great raconteur, terrific host, really fine cook (you always got to eat something delicious when visiting him or when he visited). His apartment in San Francisco was filled with all sorts of interesting objects, artwork, books. I visited him there a few times before, penniless, he was forced to move to Kansas to live with his father in Topeka.

By that time, which was first in 1994 (I think) & then again in 1995 (He returned to the Bay Area to teach at Berkeley for a semester in 1994), our relationship had undergone a momentous transformation: late in 1992, I had sent him a poem I wrote, which I had letterpressed (I was taking a typesetting class at the time). His response to this little precious thing was as gentle as it was harsh. I remember him later telling my friend (& poet) Joel Felix about receiving this poem & saying to himself, "This will not do." He wrote back with word by word descriptions of why the poem was a failure. Then, in a follow-up letter sent the next day, he offered to collaborate with me in a poetic project, in which we would create an imaginary Japanese garden through a poetic exchange. This was my catechism in poetry: every three or four weeks, another letter would come, with a poem of his own & a comment on my last poem. Over the course of nearly three years, I learned how to write poetry, word by word, in constant examination of the letters & sensations involved. (Most of the poems are very short, verging on concrete poems, source of my love for that form).

Anyways, by 1995 we were closer but there was a sense that I had graduated from his curriculum. He had major health problems at the time - a brain tumor; then, a little more than a year later, he had the stroke that would debilitate him for good. Shortly before he died in 1998, he asked me to be his literary executor. Ron was gay, so he didn't have any children to take care of this task; & his family, whom he was close to, are decidedly un-literary. I kind of sensed he would ask me to do this for him; when he did, it was under arduous circumstances (he was close to death), & there was a gravity to the request I didn't reckon on. It's one thing to carry on the work of a writer you admire above all, but I was unprepared for addressing the emotions involved in such a trust, mostly love & sadness. So, it's sometimes hard to work through his papers, because I feel him so much there, most especially because our own relationship was one of letters & correspondence. So paper has always been the first presence of Ron for me.

I've written about our relationship at length in a memoir of my apprenticeship with Ron, which includes all the poems we wrote together, that will be included in the Ronald Johnson: Life & Work volume, edited by Joel Bettridge & Eric Murphy Selinger, that will be published by the National Poetry Foundation.

Does your responsibility for Ronald Johnson's literary legacy ever conflict with the desire to build your own?

Can you share an illuminating example of Ronald Johnson's critiques of your work, or else describe in what terms he would work with you, word for word?

Were you ever in a place (or are you now) to be RJ's harshest critic? Have you found work of his that fails?

Harshest critic? No. But literary executorship necessarily involves a critical distance from the author, I think. When you think about it, the carrying on of a poet's legacy after death is the most natural proposition, the perpetuation of the great work. But it's simultaneously a sort of grim actuarial undertaking, a kind of literary balancing of accounts. I'm in Vienna right now as I write this response. When I go in to bookstore to look at the poetry section, I've noticed there's quite a legacy of publication from Paul Celan's estate. In German, the word for literary estate is Nachla§ - which means something like "the left after" (rather than Left Behind!); the verb nachlassen means to wane, or die down. German is an uncompromisingly uneuphemistic language. Not "estate" but "leavings." A literary executor is a Nachlaß verweiter, which means "the extender of the left after." There's something precisely descriptive in this translation: yes, there's the honorable - even amazing - work of carrying on another poet's work; but there's also the unavoidable sense that you are doing the work of breathing a little life into a creative force already gone.

I felt this potent, left-after revenant of poetic life most frequently in preparing the manuscript for The Shrubberies. As I describe in the "Afterward" to that book, Ron left this as the first, most important task for me to accomplish. "Prune the Shrubs!" When I began the task of putting a book together out of this manuscript, I decided I would proceed initially with as little critical interference as possible: I simply decided to type up everything in the manuscript - which consisted of over 300 pages of poetry - that looked like it was a poem, rather than notes for a poem. Ron composed on the typewriter. He kept notebooks - actually 5 x 7 notepads - but used these mainly the jot down ideas & lists of words. So, when he typed, he was as often sketching as he was composing. There are lots of repetitions in The Shrubberies manuscript, ones that are obvious drafts for completed poems. Typically, when he was satisfied with a draft, he would draw a square around it in ballpoint pen or pencil. In this respect, much of this initial work was quite easy. But even so, was I leaving things out just because they didn't seem like poems to me? So, my worries started at an early stage.

Back in 2000, Devin Johnston & my brother Michael asked if they could publish The Shrubberies as one of the first titles they would offer with Flood Editions. From this point, I was obliged to be more decisively critical about the poems. I had three approaches into the book I wanted to keep in mind as I edited it: first, it had to live up to Ron's standards. He revised his work meticulously & tenaciously. He typically published less than 20 pages of poetry a year. Since The Shrubberies represented five years of work, I had a 100-page book as my target. But working against this position was my second approach, that of being a huge Ronald Johnson fan. I kept thinking, if I had heard about this book as a fan, what would I be anticipating? I would want as large & as good a book as possible. So, I worked with this inclination to let as much in as I could possibly allow. The third approach in some senses combined the other two: the valedictory feeling that this was to be Ron's last book of new poetry. That it should sum up his work. Blake modeled his poetic career on Milton's, creating parallels with Milton's works as ways of imagining his own. So, you know, "Jerusalem" is Blake's "Paradise Regain'd." You can draw useful parallels between Ron's work & Zukofsky's. Zukofsky was his primary poetic model. Ron's early work, assembled in The Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, has a parallel with All; ARK is his "A." I felt intuitively that in The Shrubberies, Ron was imagining his own 80 Flowers. This sense, then, tipped the scale in favor of concision & compression, rather than a book of outpourings. Both Devin & my brother were meticulous editors of the manuscript; both are big fans of Ron's writing themselves, but wanted this book to be the best possible book imaginable, & so encouraged a less-is-more aesthetic.

You know, critical reassessments of Ron's work will make good or bad of my editing of this book, & my involvement in the estate generally. But with The Shrubberies, I feel as satisfied & proud of the work accomplished as anything that I've done as a poet or as a member of the corpus poeticus.

I've never found any work of Ron's that fails. But your question brings up an interesting aspect of his work: he wrote a lot of occasional poetry - not joke-poetry, but poems largely for the fun of them. In the archives, there are a lot of poems he wrote for his cat, Tom Eliot (some of these were published as "Zzzs: Naps & Purrs for my cat Tom"), as well as a series of poems for his dad's cockapoo, Lucky. He was a really good rhymer, & wrote lots of funny little couplets & doggerel. It's refreshing to read these poems because you realize at one level, he couldn't help but play in the field of language; & that he didn't always take himself too seriously.

You mention Ronald Johnson modeling his career on Zukofsky's; do you have any literary executors whom you've used as guides?

Will there be a critical look at Ronald Johnson's body of work (or a biography), perhaps one that would include the excess un-squared typewritten material or handwritten ideas and lists that were left out of The Shrubberies?

Could you provide fans an overview of Ronald Johnson-related projects you've undertaken, as well as planned and/or forthcoming projects?

Since all three of these questions interrelate, I thought this time to take them all on.

Literary estates are defined by one simple term: access. The question: how much of it is there? Prurience inspires us to want it all. But is this always good? Zukofsky's estate, for instance, is famously guarded by Paul Zukofsky. I get the feeling that PZ is not so much protecting his father's reputation as insuring that his legacy is perpetuated in terms most agreeable to him. But even so, I understand it can be difficult to work with that estate, which, presumably, is one of the reasons there isn't as much written about LZ as, say, there is about Olson.

My own idea of Ron's estate is twofold: first, I imagine responsibly-available access. By this, I mean: I know what it's like to do research, & I know as a scholar that research-interest is what keeps a poet's legacy alive in the Academy, which is, generally speaking, a good thing, because it means greater likelihood that work will stay in print.

Second, & more importantly, I want the work to be available, which means a vigilant effort to keep things in print. So far, The Shrubberies has been the main such effort, along with the Selected Poems I edited for Talisman House, To Do As Adam Did. (I toured through the SPD warehouse in Berkeley this past fall & saw a nice stack of the books, so don't be shy boys & girls!) Flood Editions plans in the near future (the next two years, hopefully) to publish The Outworks, a book Ron prepared shortly before he died. This book includes a number of later poems, each conceived not so much as a part of ARK but as works existing on the grounds of that imaginary cathedral, in the shadows of the Spires, so to speak. Among these poems is what I take to be one of his most important compositions, "Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid," which you're publishing in a widely-available magazine version for the very first time. (It was previously published in 1996 as the first LVNG Supplemental, in a beautiful broadside designed by poet John Tipton; contact LVNG through Flood Editions if you are interested in getting a copy). To this & the other, smaller poems, Ron added RADI OS, which is one of his most appealing works, I think.

But there's still other work to be published. Again, shortly before his death, Ron assembled a Collected Prose of sorts. He didn't really write a great deal of prose, which means that what he did write has an increased value. He was a marvelous prose stylist, interested in WCW-like piths & gists. Take a look at his wonderful poetics essay, "Hurrah for Euphony!", for instance. So, the Collected Prose assembles his few essays with some occasional reviews. It's a thin book, to be sure, one that I'd like to amplify a bit, if only to include some of the occasional notes he included over the years with parts of ARK he published in various journals.

Before a biography is undertaken (anyone interested?), I think there's the more immediately pressing & interesting task of publishing a Selected Letters of some sort. Joel Bettridge & I have begun to map out what such a collection might look like in the interest of trying to assemble it. But such a thing will take time & money neither of us has right now. Even though Ron didn't write a lot of prose, he was a generous & terrific letter-writer. In such a collection, we'd want to include his correspondence with me, which is vivid & tutelary, as well as including as much of his correspondence with his peers as we are permitted to (ideally, people like Jonathan Williams, Guy Davenport, & Ian Hamilton Finlay). Anyways, we imagine this book to be somewhere between Charles Olson's Selected Letters, edited by Ralph Maud & recently published by California, a book that acts almost as a biography, & George Oppen's Selected Letters, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, which functions as a primer on poetics.

Beyond this is my desire to republish ARK. The publication of that book by Living Batch in 1996 was a tremendous thing, as Ron was having a great deal of trouble finding a publisher for the whole poem. But because of his failing health at the time, Ron was not up to the task of proofreading the book properly, which means that numerous errors exist in the book, most of them typos, but some of them more problematic (such as dropped sections of text). This is something I hope for down the line, in the future; it would be nice if a university publisher would pick up Ron's work, publishing at least four books in a uniform edition: ARK, a Collected Early & Shorter Poems (which would reprint all of his early work as well as his concrete poems), a Selected Letters, and the Collected Prose. Republishing ARK would also allow for some reconsiderations of its appearance: I feel like that poem is one of the most visually satisfying poems around, one deserving critical care as far as page layout, book size, and typeface are concerned. Anyways, something to hope for.

As for my own, non-editorial work on Ron's poetry, I've definitely got a critical book in mind, but nothing I'm in a rush to write; better that it take shape over time. I'm planning to call it All is Oz. Writing such a book was one of Guy Davenport's injunctions to me shortly after I'd sent him a copy of Watchfulness. He told me that now it was my duty to write a work which would explain to people how to read Ron. (I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing Guy himself would write that book!). Well, you ignore such advice at grave peril, methinks.

How much of a departure is The Outworks from the rest of RJ's body of work? How much of an influence do you have on it? Are any of your words in it?

"Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid" has a completely different layout as a broadside; it actually is a pyramid.  How much is lost presenting the poem in a conventional manner (as Octopus does, as one presumes a printed version would)?  Side note: do you have any inside information on how Ronald Johnson composed/conceptualized the poem? 

How important is the community of RJ scholars/enthusiasts to your work as his literary executor? Who is in the community and what roles are played?

This question gives me a chance to elaborate on one of the framing issues of our conversation, namely that of literary legacy. You know, even as poets make their way in the poetry world, publishing poems in magazines, hustling for grants & prizes, securing decent jobs, as well as finding devoted readerships for their work, the question of legacy looms large in the background throughout the career of any poet. And legacy is the one thing that continues after the poet is dead. My feeling is that poets create their legacies in two sometimes intertwined ways: on the one hand, they secure a legacy by direct influence. I think these days this happens most often through teaching, through poets teaching in universities & colleges & influencing students. You know, the enormous influence of Charles Olson seems characteristic of the legacy of a teaching poet. You probably could say the same thing about someone like Jorie Graham, to cite a living poet. The other way is through example. This happens, I think, when readers discover something virtuous, impressive, or necessary in the life & work of a poet. A kind of almost worshipful admiration. Probably George Oppen is the poet right now whose legacy is being strengthened & enhanced most by virtue of admirers of his poetic example. There's the sense of Oppen as a poetic saint, more or less. Exemplary. Lorine Niedecker's work has a similar affect on readers. Attention to their examples has meant that their work has been recently revived in the form of excellent collected editions, as well as academic conferences celebrating their lives & poetic achievements. (This happened last fall in Milwaukee for Niedecker) When a poet isn't explicitly a teacher, which was Ron's case (He taught, but never for more than a year in one place, & not very frequently in his career; the most consistent way he earned money in his life was by writing cookbooks), I think the legacy by example is commoner. And since not much is generally known yet about his life, it's the work itself that attracts devotion.

Ron's legacy has been kept by readers - so many of them poets - whose admiration for his work has verged on the evangelical. Over the years that I've been involved with his work, I've watched the number of his admirers grow, just as I've made many a good friend through Ron's work. This current wave of interest in his work is especially gratifying as both a reader & as his literary executor, since it really seems like younger writers are catching on to the work. But, even so, it's still a small group. That Ron's work will enter The Canon (which I deliberately capitalize, rather than simply ironize with scare-quotes), I have no doubts. Thom Gunn, one of Ron's primary admirers & supporters, once said to a group of us at a reading of his in Chicago that one day, fifty years from now, we'll wake up & realize that Dante was living among us, ARK is that good. But ARK, & the rest of his work, has taken some time to catch interest. If you go to the MLA citations database & type in "Ronald Johnson" as a search subject, you'll get a dozen listings of articles about his work. If you do the same for John Ashbery, a poet of the same generation more or less, you'll come up with hundreds of citations. So, part of the work of managing the Estate is to facilitate more interest & more scholarly work focused on Ron's poetry, while at the same time continuing to feed the work into the stream of poetry.

Anyone piqued to find out more about Ron's work will soon have a treasure trove to sort through when Ronald Johnson: Life & Work, edited by Joel Bettridge & Eric Murphy Selinger, is published by the National Poetry Foundation. Joel recently forwarded me a list of the contributors - who have written nearly forty essays - that for the sake of advertisement & Homeric catalogue, I want to run off: Donald Revell, Barbara Cole, Mark Scroggins, Patrick Pritchett, Norman Finkelstein, Andre Furlani, Michael Basinski, Richard Deming, Susan Schultz, George Hart, Jonathan Brannen, Marjorie Perloff, Jena Osman, Logan Esdale, Nicholas Lawrence, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Joel Bettridge, Eric Murphy Selinger, Eric Keenagan, Jonathan Skinner, Burt Kimmelman, Gregg Biglieri, Paul Naylor, Graham Foust, Bradin Cormack, Barry Alpert, Devin Johnston, and myself. The essays cover the range of Ron's work, from earliest lyrics to the late, post-ARK work, from a variety of approaches. I think it's going to be an amazing collection.

I don't mean to suggest that this list comprises the RJ community. Far from it; rather, it's an indication of its variety. Among poets, Ron's most ardent supporters have been Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Thom Gunn, all of whom were friends of his. But the fulcrum of thinking about Ronald Johnson's work has been Guy Davenport's essays. I'd be remiss not to add to this list the work of Jed Rasula, especially his discussions of Ron's work in his amazing poetics of ecology, This Compost, published in 2002 by the University of Georgia. Rasula's book, which takes on a range of post-modern American poetry, is an amazing exploration of why works such as ARK are so consonant with & so valuable to the deepest strains in American literature. 

Do you have a suggested path, or entry point, into Ronald Johnson's body of work?  (i.e., what books should an interested reader turn to first?)

Are there writers other than Ronald Johnson with whom you feel a similar closeness?

How has your conception of your role altered?  Will there be a point when you feel the job is complete? 

ARK. Not necessarily because it's the summation of his work, though that's a part of it. More helpfully, ARK is a poem that opens itself to its readers, one that because of its essential plastic nature encourages readers to make something of it themselves. I don't really think the same thing can be said about the poems Ron modeled ARK after. Throwing a new reader headlong into The Cantos or Maximus or "A" would be require significant floatation devices to spare him or her from drowning. In all three cases - Pound, Olson, & Zukofsky - I'd recommend starting with earlier or non-serial work: Cathay & "Homage to Sextus Propertius"; the real early Olson poems, like "Kingfishers" & "In Cold Hell, In Thicket"; ALL. Ron's earlier work anticipates ARK in ways that seem inevitable looking down the telescope of his poetry in hindsight. The post-Objectivist experiments in collage & plain statement that make up some of his various early work, such as the poems in A Line of Poetry, a Row of Trees; the visual & formal innovations in a poem such as "The Unfoldings"; all of the concrete experimentation, culminating in Songs of the Earth; & then RADI OS, which suggests not so much a signature style as a signature theme: an unreconstructed Transcendentalism prophesied in Oz.

But ARK has it all. I think you can reimagine the best parts of his visionary concrete work, his collage techniques, his formal innovations in that poem. My own experience of ARK is that the poem has a way of instructing you how to read it, but in my own terms. For instance, when I was in Divinity School, I took a class on the history of Western Christian mysticism. We studied the work of the Victorine mystics in that course: Hugo & Richard of St. Victor, who were 12^th century priests in a church outside of Paris at the time, who formulated rich, instructive treatises on the approach of & use of the Mystical Ark. In Hugo's case, his Ark was Noah's; in Richard's, it was the Ark of the Covenant. Both of their writings on this topic made ample use of what we might nowadays call "creative visualization." For them, it was a lexical visionary technique of describing the undescribable using analogies & amplifications from scripture. In letters to Ron at the time, I included lengthy quotations from their writings, you know, just to show him, because I found so many resonances with his ARK. He was delighted, but had never read either of these writers. His sense was that when you come upon an archetype, no matter your background, faith, or orientation, you are obliged to respond to it in a way consonant with the archetype itself & therefore with other similar discoveries of that archetype. Ron believed the imagination was the great human permission; but he also felt one must be obedient to it above all, in order to discover its permissions (In this respect, his opinion is pretty much the same as Robert Duncan's). A strange, freedom-slavery paradigm. Anyways, I went on to write a lengthy essay about the connection between ARK & Victorine mysticism (It was published a few years back in Sagetrieb), which went on to amplify "BEAM 16," which I discovered to have been developed (cribbed?!) in part from "Dream 16" in one of Jung's alchemical/mandala essays. When I showed Ron my essay, he claimed he had no memory of reading Jung's essay, but that he was sure he must have, & that it had sponsored his poem for a time. What I learned from this - about reading RJ but also about composing poetry - is that when the gateway into the imagination opens, you don't need to scribble carefully the password that allowed you ingress: it's more important that you pass through & get writing. My point about reading ARK, then, is to read it in such a way that you internalize it: so that you are walking around it in your imagination. As a cathedral of sorts, you're not expected to be able to see the whole thing from any one vantage. Rather, you'll accumulate its shape in your imagination, where you'll be able to perceive its wholeness, intuiting it like a hologram, even if you can't explicitly "see" all of its parts at once. At that point, it's a good idea to buckle yourself in, because, as a rocket ship, it's about to launch itself into space!

How did/would RJ feel about his place in The Canon? Would he have agreed with Gunn that he may have been Dante among us?

Do you feel you've made any mis-steps thus far in tending to Ronald Johnson's literary estate?

How seriously did RJ take his cooking and his cooking publications? How did he regard his cooking in comparison to his poetry?

I think they were a serious part of his life. Which is to say, they were his livelihood for a period of ten years or more. Cooking has been my main hobby (along with birdwatching) for the last fifteen years. I do all the cooking for my family, all the grocery shopping. I came to Ron's cookbooks, then, not just out of poetic interest. I really wanted to get some recipes from them! Anyways, I use them all the time. I probably use The American Table most often - there are at least four recipes from that one in heavy rotation, for feasts as well as everyday meals - but turn with great frequency to both Company Fare (try the roast chicken in sauce of red-wine vinegar for an epic meal made from a handful of ingredients) and to Simple Fare. Ron wanted to call this one When the Cupboard is Bare, which his publisher thought too grim. As a penny-pinching poet, he knew how to pull a meal together out of nothing at all. He stayed with me and my brother in 1996 when he came to Chicago to give a reading. On his last evening with us, he began nosing around our pantry - which, it turns out, was pretty bare - and soon enough was preparing a meal. He made a Southwest feast for us: a stew of pinto beans and chorizo, topped with cilantro and Chihuahua cheese; fresh fritos (fried tortilla chips); and a salad of iceberg lettuce and pomegranates. Meal of a lifetime.

The times we were together, when we weren't talking about poetry, we were talking about food. Like I said, the cookbooks sustained him for a good while. He told me once that he would propose a cookbook to a publisher, get an advance, and then live off that money for a year or two. He always had a roommate to split housing costs, and he lived frugally. Among his correspondence are letters from M.K.F. Fisher and Marion Cunningham. I think he took quite a lot of pride that great cooks (and cooking writers) recognized his talent in the kitchen (and at the typewriter). There was a while I kept The American Table ("the diet of the tribe" as he calls it) by my bedside. It's a really great read! There's some excellent poetry gossip in there, too, about what poets like to eat.

I don't know how much (or little) to make connecting the cookbooks to his poetry. I mean, he was a poet who put his life into a poem, ARK, and then retrospectively ordered his life around that construction. The cookbooks allowed him to work on his poem (He wrote most of them during the 1980s, while he worked continuously on ARK). If the work merits the investigation, I imagine someone will start to compare the cookbooks to the poetry, or look to the cookbooks for some hermeneutical clues. For me, the cookbooks seem most interesting from a practical standpoint. Ron never thrived financially. I think toward the end, he really would have liked to have been hired as a creative writing instructor at a college somewhere; it would have solved some unfortunate fiduciary dilemmas. But it's interesting to think that an American poet made his living for a sustained period by writing cookbooks. More interesting than if he wrote advertising, or plumbing manuals, or drew military cartoons say. The academy has been the mainstay for poets - as professors or creative writing teachers - for a while now (though maybe this is changing?). It's useful to think of alternatives to this system. Ron's cookbook writing didn't support him as long as he had hoped it would, but it kept him going while he was writing ARK. For that alone, we should all have copies of each of the cookbooks.

Has there been a conscious effort to make Ronald Johnson's work so readily available on-line?  If so, what are the motivations?  Any drawbacks?

You too are a cook and a poet. Is this where the similarities begin or end?

Where is the Tree of Life?

This seems like a question about discipleship, very gently asked. Am I a disciple of Ronald Johnson's? I think, yes. Very much yes. If you had asked Ron of whom he thought of himself a disciple, he would have said Olson & Zukofsky - the Maximalist & the Minimalist (or OZ as RonJonians sometimes call this beast), & then quickly added that Jonathan Williams had been his mentor, who taught him how to write poetry and who introduced him to his masters. I feel - I was going to say "lucky," keeping it colloquial here but the right word is blessed. It was a blessing to know Ron in the way I did and I have no illusions or qualms about the apostleship to which I submitted myself. I have learned more about poetry from him than any other person; I feel indebted to that instruction. I don't know whether it's unusual for a poet's literary executor to be one of his "followers," so to speak. Time will tell, I suppose, whether this was a good decision on Ron's part. But it seems to me lurking in your question is a shadow question about influence, about what it's like to be making my own way as a poet and to be all the time beholden, by a covenant basically, to another poet's work & legacy. And that shadow question is significant but something whose answer I formulate only inarticulately. I don't want to press it into the light. I feel like my work, especially in Watchfulness, is derived (in the Robert Duncan sense) from Ron's poetry. But since then, I've gone in what I hope is my own direction. If Ron is my Zukofsky, then Duncan is my Olson. Which is to say, the maximal voice I hear (obey?) when I'm writing. I sometimes feel both of their influences streaming into me. And they're the poets whose work I turn to most often. In an early letter, after reading a lousy poem I'd sent him in which I tried to pare my language down to its barest bone, Ron chided me gently, saying that he'd come to his own minimal stance after years of learning how to get rid of words. He was telling me to give myself time, above all, but he was also telling me to test myself in my poetry, using words as I needed to. He finished that letter with an Orphic command, one I've taken prophetically to heart: "You are permitted anything." In the Elysian Fields, Ron & Duncan are likely winking to each other (in the crowd around Dante) over that one.

What are some upcoming Ronald Johnson related projects that you may be (or may not be) somehow involved in. Describe some of the projects that may be only brewing in your mind.

Do you have your literary executor picked out?

What would RJ be working on today if he were still alive?

This is really hard to say. In an early letter, he told me something like, "When you look back, all will seem inevitable." (I was asking him what I should do with my life. He told me - how could I ever forget this? - "But remember that writing is a solitary, even lonely thing, and is not done in work-shops. There is just you and the blank page, and there is no one to overcome but yourself.") When you talk about a poet, when you talk about a poet's life, there's all the matter of that actual life, its everyday, lived quality, that gets lost, because what you're really interested in is the poetry. And for good reason. Poetry lives on, not poets. From the time I first met Ron in 1992, until the last time I saw him in the fall 1996, he had aged considerably. In San Francisco, when he greeted me at the door of his apartment on Elgin Place, I felt him to be so jolly. He was all smiles & had a potbelly his Polo golf shirt fit very snugly across. By the time he came to visit me in Chicago four years later, he had moved away from San Francisco - a place he dearly loved - back to a somewhat arduous existence in Topeka, in which he was working as a manual laborer, at the age of sixty! He also had suffered through the experience of the removal of a brain tumor, which is a severe operation, leaving him frail for a period. When I picked him up at Midway Airport that fall, he was thin, a little weak, & a little dazed-looking. He was in town to read from ARK at the University of Illinois-Chicago, a reading set up by Joel Felix, who was a student in the English department at the time. Even though he wasn't yet sixty-one, he was an old man. And in his letters from this time, he speaks of his desire to "enter into his old age." His last year or so of life was a difficult one: the stroke he had left him bedridden. I never saw him before he passed away, something I've regretted (I was living in Vienna at the time & couldn't afford to come back to the US to see him). My brother Michael acted as my proxy, driving down to Topeka from Chicago with Joel Felix & Devin Johnston, mostly to retrieve his papers - the contents of his fabled archive - but also to say farewell, for themselves & for me. My brother has told me how incredibly thin he was by this time, almost a skeleton, with a long wispy white beard. Like some kind of biblical prophet. Bedridden.

Morbid as his all sounds - I mean, he was dying - I bring it up to make a case that he died because his work was done. He contacted me in February of 1998 to ask me to be his executor. He died on March 3, less than a day after my brother, Joel & Devin visited him, taking his papers - what remained of his life's work - with them. What does a poet do without his work? He dies.

I think ARK is so tremendous a poem, in part, because it is the American poem that most ingeniously & tenaciously exhibits its wroughtness - this is what I've meant in calling the poem "plastic" a couple of times. I'd demonstrate its made quality on a three-dimensional graph: first, the X-axis is one that goes from naïve to sophisticated. Ron's model here was Charles Ives, who pretended as if he didn't know anything about music in order to write the most amazing stuff. Pretend you're Adam, & now name everything for the first time. The Y-axis goes from playfulness to seriousness. ARK is full of jokes, some of them hilarious - I like the figure with the erection in BEAM 16 - some of them cosmic, like ending the poem with the phrase ad astra per asperum, "from hard work to the stars," which also happens to be the state motto of Kansas. And finally the Z-axis that moves from modern to post-modern, so that Ron seems always to be showing how facile he is with the collage applications of modernism, just as he is nimble with the projective forms of the Open Field, while feeling himself compelled to demonstrate a structural, vehicular vision of the universe itself - indebted to science & science fiction - a vision visible & invisible in each atom, each word, each poem, each galaxy. He sunk his whole self into this poem, enough that he was actually able to complete it! Isn't it fitting, then, that one of the very few completed long poems of the 20^th century concludes with the words "Countdown for liftoff!"

Even though I'm always wishing he were still around, I really can't imagine him writing any more poetry than he did. "There is no one to overcome but yourself." Which he did. He finished that bit of advice to me with a classic RJ oracle: "ENTER THIS GATE (and you just might become a poet worth your salt)." Words for us to live by.