This mythology of an ambitious and protean epic project – grand in creation and design – beginning (arguably) with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was continued into the 20th-century by Ezra Pound's The Cantos, Louis Zukofsky's "A", William Carlos Williams' Paterson, Charles Olson]]'s The Maximus Poems, Robert Duncan's Passages, Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, and H.D.'s Helen in Egypt. It is a poem following in the tradition of the "American epic", a heritage once described as "that strange, amorphous, anomalous, self-contradictory thing".
Johnson's major work is the long poem ARK, which he began in 1970 and which took him 20 years to write. Johnson, once described by Guy Davenport as America's greatest living poet, died at his father's home in Topeka on March 4, 1998.Īt the beginning of his career Johnson was allied with the Black Mountain poets' 2nd generation, but then began to experiment with the poetics of the concrete poetry movement. In 1993 Johnson returned to Topeka, where he worked part-time as a cookie baker.
He also worked as a chef and caterer, and authored 5 cookbooks on American regional cooking. He then settled in San Francisco, where he became poet in residence at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994. In the 1970s he was writer in residence at the University of Kentucky, and then held the Roethke Chair for Poetry at the University of Washington. Together Johnson and Williams hiked the Applachian Trail, and made a walking tour of England (which would inspire Johnson's pastoral poem, The Book of the Green Man (1967). Īt Columbia, he met and befriended poet Jonathan Williams, who introduced him to Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson. In the late 1950s he lived in New York City and attended Columbia University, from which he earned a B.A. His family moved to Topeka, Kansas, in the mid-1950s. Johnson, a carpenter who owned a lumber yard. Johnson was born in Ashland, Kansas, the son of Helen (Mayse), a trained dancer, and A.T.
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