Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson Talisman House, Publishers, Jersey City, New Jersey, 2000. Blues For Unemployed Secret Police by Doug Anderson Curbstone Press, Willimantic, Connecticut, 2000. Carl Phillips is a latter day projective versifier. Phillips is a master of cadence, so that breath fills the writing, both in the projectivist sense of a living phrase, measure, and in the Hindu sense of prana , breath of life and desire. And she was small.
Biology is obvious.
Ronald Johnson is one of those poets of 'inner fame', best known to the cognoscenti for his book ARK , a long poem in many sections that he wrote over twenty years, in the same genre as The Cantos or The Maximus Poems . Pound and Olson were among his influences, as were Williams, Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, as well as many older, 'traditional' poets, especially the visionaries, like Dante, Blake, Wordsworth, and Whitman. Born 1935 in a small town in western Kansas, he got a Bachelor's at Columbia, living in New York in the late fifties, moved for twenty-five years to San Francisco, then returned to Kansas where he died in 1998. O'Leary emphasizes the joyous quality of his work, its omission of the autobiographical, let alone confessional, his method of collaging quotations and observations, and his mastery of the page as a visual composition. No way, of course to give any substantial sense of that here, but let's look at two radiant small poems.