1/23/2024 0 Comments Ronald johnson radi os![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() That Olson would be a point of reference in the mid-1960s for two young poets interested in what we now call “The New American Poetry” is no surprise. The juxtaposition of the present and the past, the autobiographical and the historical, in a more-or-less representational manner, characterizes Johnson’s first book, A Line of Poetry, a Row of Trees (1964) in The Book of the Green Man (1967), written during a trip to England in 1962, Johnson likewise blends contemporary observation and English (and European) history. The passage ends with an expression of a desire for poems that likewise might be “built by hand / – that we might determine our own // intervals between / objects” (69). Sense of form, that ‘rough skin bundle’ poems The poem goes on to include a paragraph from Quill and Beadwork of the Western Sioux, and then interweaves that book with the poet’s own desire to connect with the native soil: It is thus I break these furrows, for my grandfather, Henry Clay (38)Īs Patrick Prichett points out: “The poem’s appeal to an overlooked historical detail that contains, seed-like, a parable about the advent of European perception on American shores the pun on ‘panic’ the scholarly aside, couched in analytic language and overladen with commas … these are hallmarks of Olson’s allusive style that Johnson mimes with perfect fidelity.” Likewise, in the early “Kansas” poem, “Of Circumstance, The Circum Stances,” Johnson begins with local, family history, combined with personal recollection: Panic grass - Maize, of a ‘quaking’ ancestry, i.e., theĪttempt, always, at classification. “Indian Corn” begins:Ĭolumbus, as the first Western eyes, called it Likewise, Johnson’s early poems strike an Olsonian chord in both style and material. Malin’s The Grasslands of North America, a canonical source text for Irby, which begins: “No line on a map can be drawn to represent in any realistic manner the actual conditions found in nature.” The scientific attention to detail, to naming, to change over time, and to sources all bespeak an Olson-influenced poetics - as does the open form, combining justified and indented stanzas, long lines, short lines, prose, lists, Latin and English - not to mention a certain concern for the relation of written lines to the actually-existing world. ![]() These lines are followed by a paragraph from former University of Kansas history professor James C. The Latin translated into English and fleshed out: the bluestem and grama grasses feed the bison and pronghorns, who in turn feed the wolves. Take, for instance, this litany of flora and fauna from Irby’s early “Roadrunner Poem” (1964):Īndropogon - Bouteloua - Bison - AntilocapraĪndropogon - Bulibilis - Bison - Antilocapra (12–13) Both Johnson and his critics have noted the influence of Charles Olson on early poems such as “Quivera” and “Circumstances, Of Circum Stances,” in their combination of local history and autobiography, as well as in the style of composition and the same could be said of some of Irby’s work from the mid-60s, such as “The Roadrunner Poem” and “Kansas–New Mexico.” “Kansas,” has a certain mythology, or at least aura, surrounding it, and one suspects that neither poet could forbear from delving into it.Īnd clearly, the influence of Olson (and before and behind him, Ezra Pound) is obvious in the early work of both men. Those publications bear certain interesting resemblances, not least of all for the presence of “Kansas” (both idea and place) in them. The biographical and stylistic similarities are most apparent early in their careers: upbringing in Kansas, stint in the army, stint at the University of Kansas, followed by several years of travel, and first major publications in the mid-60s. Neither Irby nor Johnson achieved the notoriety of some of their contemporaries, but both have been “rediscovered” and admired by a new generation of readers. Both spent formative years in the “Oz” of the Bay Area, and both took the modernist legacy in self-consciously neo-Romantic directions. Although Irby and Johnson had little direct contact, they were born within a year of one another and grew up on opposite sides of the state of Kansas (Irby in the southeast, in Fort Scott Johnson in the southwest, in Ashland). It is not surprising that readers of American poetry sometimes pair the names Kenneth Irby and Ronald Johnson. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.” “Life is an affair of people not of places. “It would not necessarily be the case that the poems of a native of another land would be composed of that land. ![]()
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