Thanks
to Douglas Glover of Numéro Cinq for
posting online my essay “Optical Structures in the Shrubberies: Ronald Johnson’s
Cascades” His introduction begins:
"In the spirit of our Undersung series on the
great-but-somewhat-unnoticed poets,Denise Low, former poet
laureate of Kansas, pens here a passionate, erudite essay on the late Kansas
poet Ronald Johnson, as she says, a second-generation Black Mountain poet, who
invented a brilliant “cascade” structure for his poems. I love this essay for
its close reading of the text, its technical expertise and for its
consciousness of tradition and influence. "
Read
the full essay about this Bay Area and Kansas poet who contributed so much to
poetics, and also see the great photo of RJ contributed to the article by Robert
Glenn Webb. http://wp.me/p1WuqK-dYl
