A Note on Ronald Johnson’s
“Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid”
Ronald Johnson wrote this poem in the early 1990s,
after completing ARK but before moving on to his final work
in The Shrubberies. As he first began to write them - referring
to them as his "dark quatrains" - he imagined that he would write
ninety-nine of them, one apiece as an adornment to the ninety-nine
parts of ARK. He thought of them as "gargoyles," even referring
to them as such for a while. As the series progressed, however,
he began to sense that he was making a different work, one less
ornamental than funereal and memorial. Once he perceived these poems
in this light, he recognized that he was commemorating the victims
of AIDS he watched fall firsthand during the 1980s and 1990s in
his adopted city of San Francisco. He considered the possibility
of carrying this project out to ninety-nine parts, thinking of the
blocks of the poems as the stones of a vast henge, to be a monument
for the dead. But after considerable pruning of these quatrains,
he found he had sixty-six and that if he imagined a bottom row of
eleven quatrains, and then a next row of ten, and one of nine, and
so on, he would have a pyramid.
In 1996, RJ sent me the manuscript for this poem, along with the
handful of other poems (including RADI OS) that make up The
Outworks, a book to be published by Flood Editions. The quatrains
in "Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid" are arranged three to a
page in the manuscript, each separated by a small square. Shortly
after receiving this manuscript, I suggested to RJ that I wanted
to print this poem as a broadside, in a pyramidal form. He agreed.
So, later in 1996, LVNG launched its Supplemental Series
with the printing of this broadside. Designed by poet John Tipton,
we decided to begin the broadside with the first block at the top,
proceeding down to the bottom. One can read the poem, then, in the
sequence RJ intended, but one is free to let the reading eye wander,
to read selected quatrains, or to follow any path up or down the
pyramid. RJ was quite pleased with this publication.
Even so, the poem as such, the poem RJ composed, was written as
a sequence intended for a book. Here, then, in Octopus Magazine,
"Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid" is presented in its intended
form for the first time.
Peter O'Leary
April 21, 2004
Budapest
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Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid
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