Speaking of Ronald Johnson, I just picked up The Shrubberies. Last thing I need: more books! I notice it was edited by Peter O'Leary, who live in St. Louis. (I don't know him.)
Johnson isn't in any anthologies that I know of. He's certainly one of the best KANSAS poets of all time. If you like poetry of condensed, radiant power:
modal reflections
sutra round pool
on a summer's day
loft waterlily
--dragonfly skim
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A reissue of RADI OS is coming out this summer from Flood Editions.
I know Johnson is in the Messerli (Other Side of the Century) and Weinberger (Innovators & Outsiders) anthologies, and the Primary Trouble anthology from Talisman. Don't know of others.
We did an interesting interview w/ Peter O'Leary in Octopus 3, all about Johnson & O'Leary's work as editor and manager of Johnson's literary estate. I think O'Leary is maybe the most interesting younger poet around -- he has poems online at Octopus, Jacket, Titanic Operas. Watchfulness, his first book, is great.
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I guess I should have said "not in many anthologies." He is absent from the Hoover/Norton Postmodern American Poetry and from Poems for the Millennium, as well as from the more predictable mainstream anthologies. I'll be on the watch-out for O'Leary's poems now, a well as for the edition of radi os.
I'm surprised Rothenberg and Joris didn't include Johnson in their volumes. I sold off my copies to buy groceries in grad school; maybe that was my unknowing karmic retribution for their oversight.
Just to completely nerd out, and to also leave a paper trail for people curious about Ronald Johnson, he also shows up in Rasula & McCaffery's Imagining Language anthology (a selection from Radi Os), which isn't a traditional poetry anthology, but a hell of a book (it retails for a hundred bucks but Labyrinth Books was selling copies online for like 10 bucks just a month or two ago). Along those lines, Rasula includes a bunch of Ronald Johnson in his This Compost book, and has a really good piece on ARK in Sycopations.
And speaking of cool Kansans, This Compost also has a healthy selection of work from Ken Irby.
Not being anthologized is a fate that met many of the second generation projectivists (RJ's turns toward vispo & something post-Zukofskian come later in his career -- I'm still a fan of the earliest books most)
Ron
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