Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses

Who was Ronald Johnson (1935–1998)? A Kansan in San Francisco, a caterer, a gift-shop clerk, a founder of the Rainbow Motorcycle Club, and a cookbook author specializing in American regional cuisine. For a modest, ardent readership, he was foremost a midcentury modernist who compacted cosmic ambition into small-press masterworks, including Radi os (1977), an erasure of Paradise Lost, and the 99-part space-age epic ARK (1996), which ends with a “countdown for Lift Off.” Johnson’s oeuvre has been rediscovered in reverse order, starting with Flood Editions’s posthumous publication of The Shrubberies (2001) and reprintings of Radi os and ARK. Now The Song Cave has reissued Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses (1969), a summation of early work in two acts: “A Line of Poetry, a Row of Trees (1960–1963)” (a reworking of Johnson’s first book) and “The Different Musics (1966–1967).”

Valley begins with an introduction by Guy Davenport, mingling wonder and warning: “Things wholly new are perhaps impossible and a bit frightening; like all things fresh and bright, Mr. Johnson’s newness is a re-seeing of things immemorially old.” Davenport’s assessment suits many poems—those transplanting classical pastoral to Kansan landscapes, or re-seeing “Whitman’s lilacs” with a child’s-eye view of “the lilacs we played inside, they were so large— / great prairie castles, of hidden doors / & windows only outward—.” But the most memorable poems plunge into the “wholly new,” frightening yet thrilling their uncertain author: “What words // must I corner like / hedge-hogs // to put them on a page?” In “The Different Musics,” Johnson found assured tones for queer longing and natural rapture, plus formal devices to last a career—onrushing syntax, typographical tomfoolery, and a centered line, swelling and contracting:

From here I hear the king-fisher’s rattle,
a cardinal’s
whoitwhoitwhotiwhopitwhoitwhoit,
the reiteration of a red-eyed vireo,
wren & thrasher, thrush—

Valley ends with galactic motions, “Centripetal, / Centrifugal,” from which Johnson plucks the buried words “fugue, & petal.” It’s a vertiginous shift of scale, and the right encapsulation for this early book: a universe shrunk to personal proportions.