I’ll be chairing, “‘Tempi All Exempt Except Tempest’: Ronald Johnson’s Restless Ecologies,” at the American Literature Association Conference May 27th-30th 2021. We have a great lineup of scholars and papers. Hope to see you at the panel!

Organizer and Chair: James Belflower, Siena College

1.     “‘To Do As Adam Did’: Gardening and the Shape of Ronald Johnson’s Ecopoetic Career,” Mark Scroggins, Florida Atlantic University

2.     “‘Father rafter // ever after / after every rafter’: Ronald Johnson’s Early Years,” Devin King, Independent Scholar

3.     “Saturnalia Under Saturn: Historical Ronald Johnson,” Stephen Williams, Benedictine University

Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) was an exceptionally wide-ranging and restlessly experimental writer across a variety of genres, forms, and media. In part, what steered his restlessness and experimentation was a career-long attempt to manifest a visionary-scientific cosmic vision of humanity at the dawn of the Anthropocene. Although his epic ARK (1996), which critic Stephanie Burt has called “the most spiritual, the most celebratory, and maybe the most fun” of American modernist long poems, explicitly situates human creativity as one of many ambiguous processes ordered by natural forces, Johnson’s late poetry, in addition to his diverse career choices, reconceptualizes his ecological concerns, articulating human creativity through processes not only naturally ordered, but intertwined in social and personal reconfigurations. The influence of these overlapping ecologies on his work is nowhere more apparent than in his late projects, such as his concrete elegy for victims of the AIDS epidemic, Blocks to be Arranged in a Pyramid (In Memoriam AIDS) (1996), and the shadows these losses cast over his posthumous collection The Shrubberies (2001). Likewise, his experiences as a child of the Midwest transplanted to the Bay Area, where energetic cityscapes, and newfound social and sexual formations and freedoms, reveal Johnson to be conflicted by a need to respond to current events critically, by adapting genres, forms, media, and career choices previously rendered moot by their reliance on discourses of natural creation and ahistorical spiritualism. The papers in this panel aim to spotlight how Johnson’s works consistently recreate the boundaries of the personal, political, and material to challenge readers to consider the potential in forming and living more restless relationships between ecologies: social, subjective, and environmental.