Ronald Johnson (poet)

Ronald Johnson (November 25, 1935 – March 4, 1998) was an American poet. Born in Ashland, Kansas, he graduated from Columbia University, lived in New York in the late 1950s, wandered around Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for the next twenty-five years before returning to Kansas, where he died.

Johnson was born in Ashland, Kansas on November 25, 1935 and attended University of Kansas and Columbia University, where he got his B.A. He then hiked the Appalachian Trail and Europe and there was inspired by what he saw to become a poet.

Ron Johnson moved from Kansas to San Francisco, spending 25 years of his life there. He was active in the San Francisco gay community in Bear culture and was a co-founder of the Rainbow Motorcycle Club.

At the beginning of his career Johnson was allied with the Black Mountain School's second generation, but then began to experiment with the poetics of the concrete poetry movement.

Johnson’s book-length poem RADI OS (Sand Dollar Press, 1977) is an early and influential example of erasure poetry. He wrote it by blacking out words in a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Johnson rewrote the first four books of Milton’s poem in this way, producing a new text in which the few remaining words float in the white page space left by the absent words. Although Johnson apparently considered RADI OS to be a section of his long poem ARK, it was not included in any edition of that poem. Flood Editions reprinted it in 2005.

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