Reading Ronald Johnson’s Ark on the Tarmac at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport

Wyndham Chicago, Room 1021, Chicago, Illinois

In one of the rarest of events in my traveling life, I took a direct, non-stop flight to my destination today, but it was O’Hare Airport, so my plane waited on the tarmac for twenty minutes or so. I took advantage of that time to start reading Ronald Johnson’s Ark, the beginning sections of which focus on the act, art, and senses of perception. A couple of the opening “Beams” of the poem—because an ark is made out of beams just as a long poem may be constructed of fitts—are prose almost-poems that go into encyclopedic detail about the parts and functions of the organs of sense.

I come to Johnson’s Ark today for a number of reasons, only one of which is that this long poem, especially about the first quarter of the book, is insistently visual. Images appear within the text, strategic bits of text are presented in dramatically large point sizes, and occasionally lines of text are fashioned into shapes. In mid-century (the twentieth), Johnson was a concrete poet of some dramatic skill. His masterpiece, “Io and the Ox-eye Daisy” exhibits a great amount of skill combining the printer’s fist and the painter’s palette into effective instances of the poet’s pen in action; this poem is fully visual and fully verbal, a delight for the eye, ear, and mind. Just by flipping through his Ark, however, I can watch him moving away from the visual.

After the virtuoso visual opening sections of the book, Johnson deliberately reduces the visual element. He begins to show each line of the poem centered, and by the last quarter of the book everything is centered tercets. He decides on a visual form and allows the poem to conform to that pre-determined shape. He almost totally drains the visual off the page.

As I sit here tonight, however, I’m not thinking so much about the visual elements of the poem; I’m considering how much the poem expects of the reader. In parts, the poem is an aural delight, so some might be drawn in by the sound, but this poem requires a hyperliterate readership. I think, sometimes, that is what ruins poetry for the rest of the world; they don’t want to take the time to learn enough about poetry (and the limitless interests of poetry) to be good readers. That would be too much work for them. They want to read a poem that stands on its own—being just literate enough to believe that is possible.

I find myself today in Chicago, a city I haven’t visited since the 1970s, and the place is quite foreign to me. I walked to Millennium Park to see the famous Bean and meet up with my college friend, Dees Stribling, but I discovered I was heading north instead of south. Somehow, I imagined the cardinal points and followed them—but my imagination was incorrect. What I’ve seen of this place is not much like New York City. The streets run too closely together, almost every street has a second “honorary” name, the banks sometimes go by the name “Fifth Third Bank.” But as I walked the streets, I learned these facts about Chicago; I began to understand its text. Partly, I was aided by the similarities it had to New York: Starbucks everywhere, signs in English, universities conflated with the rest of the cityscape. With my acquired knowledge of cities and with the new text before me, I was able to read Chicago. I just needed to work on it a little.

But I missed the Bean and had to turn around to find Dees. Even though this giant mirroring sculpture was brand-new last summer, it is now totally covered within a rectangular box, inside of which people work to repair it.

ecr. l’inf.