Ronald Johnson’s “ARK”: A Poem in Three Dimensions
March 12, 2014NewYorker
Since then, “ARK” has been a cult book, not just in the sense that a small group loved it, but also in the stranger sense that the poem promises, and delivers, something like a devotional experience. Of all the ambitious, syncretic, idiosyncratic, American modernist long poems (and we have had more than a few), “ARK” is the most spiritual, the most celebratory, and maybe the most fun. This world, it insists, “is paradise, / odd words in legion / beating around the veritable bush” (that is, the burning bush). Divided into short lines as if by a “JIGSAW YAHWEH JESTER,” the sometimes puzzling “beams” and “ramparts” are also a compilation of praise poems, ways to admire reality. We know what advice “ARK” gives us (“delight! delight! delight! / doubt reduced to dust”) but cannot predict what evidence will come next.
Some of that evidence comes from space; scientific discovery was for Johnson a stimulus to new kinds of religious awe. “ARK” opens by describing orbital photographs: “Over the rim / body of earth … rays exist sun / rest to full velocity… Pocked moon kills half the sky. Stars comb out its lumen / horizon.” Johnson meant to unify the wonder of science and the pre-scientific postures of awe, listening for “A god in a cloud, / aloud,” and trying to teach us to see what he could see—“The front of the eye is a convex glass, alive.” And “ARK” is literally full of things to see, not only brief descriptions but diagrams, a handprint, and plenty of concrete poetry, deriving “form from form from form from form” through the shapes that letters make on a page. For example:
That is, “earth earth earth”; “ear, the art hearth”; “hear the art, hear the art.” Such pages reward a “plural rapt / appetite / optical as possible / apparent to all”; they are also easy to share with kids. Another page offers the pentagonal
Such letters’ rapt shapes might (P.S.) shush our inner apes.
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