Ronald Johnson - A Poetry of the Imaginal

Ronald Johnson's (1935-1998) poetry is "thoroughly devoted to the imaginal; his work is an elaboration of mesocosmic realities." - Peter O'Leary

Of Johnson's major long poem Ross Hair writes,

"Johnson's sense of cosmos in ARK pertinently echoes the ideas expressed by the depth-psychologist James Hillman in his essay "Alchemical Blue." According to Hillman: "The world is as we see it in our dreams and poems, visions and paintings, a world that is truly a cosmos, cosmetically adorned, an aesthetic event for the senses because they have become instruments of imagining." Like Hillman, ARK posits the world as "an aesthetic event for the senses" whose multifarious phenomena provide the eclectic "instruments of imagining" which offer insight and revelation about the nature and mysteries of the universe." See Hair's essay and his book-length study of Johnson.

 Johnson's books include:
The Book of the Green Man, WW Norton, 1967 (available online here)
ARK, Living Batch Press, 1996 - to be reissued in 2011 by Flood Editions.
To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson, Talisman House, 2000
The Shrubberies - Flood Editions, 2001. Reviewed here in Jacket2
Radi Os, Flood Editions, 2005

Also indispensible is
Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, Edited by Joel Bettridge and Eric Murphy Selinger, National Poetry Foundation, 2008


A wide variety of links to poetry, interviews & resources from Peter O'Leary here.
O'Leary's recent interview discusses Johnson and is well worth attention for many reasons.