[Mark Blaeuer]

In the 1980s I bought a copy of the first in this series, ARK: The Foundations, which came out in ’80 from North Point. I still have that volume, along with an older book by him, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses. I thought he was interesting, but I lost track of his progress afterward. I don’t recall ever guessing the book had to do with a spaceship, metaphorical or otherwise, but it contains lots of architecture, Nature, myth, science, and more than a dollop of the spiritual. Johnson himself, at the time, wrote: “Inside these covers is a model for a monument, to be dedicated Bison bison bison (imagine it so carved) at its base. Located, if place could be put, on those shelving prairies between Ashland and Dodge City, Kansas, as a span between Big and Little Basins, centering over St. Jacob’s Well. This near legendary ‘bottomless’ pool can be looked up in National Geographic, but as I knew it in my childhood it was a real magic place tales were told of as exciting as those from the Brothers Grimm.”

To give you some flavor of this thing, the jacket blurbs are by Guy Davenport, Robert Duncan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Thom Gunn, and Hugh Kenner. The comparison to Pound’s Cantos has merit. Johnson complemented his generous quotations with the pictorial—not Chinese ideogram, but, for example, several Beams include musical notation; Beam 18 consists entirely of a single handprint; Beam 25 contains a number of drawings, mostly inspired by those famous images from Biology 101, the phases of a cell dividing; several of the Beams contain bits akin to EP’s ROMA/AMOR construction.

None of the poems are formal in the sense many of us would choose. Yet, the Beams are often centered, some with uniform stanza shapes and lengths. He clearly considered the visual aspects important. If any of the poems are syllabic, the patterns didn’t jump out at me. Not to imply the sound is clunky, by the way! It’s actually very playful. Rhyme is employed in at least one Beam, but mostly not.

Obviously, I like his work. I won’t pretend to have fully understood everything, but it holds my attention and feels true on some basic level—more so than Pound or Olson, for what my opinion is worth.