What does this mean? Let’s take the very beginning of Johnson’s poem—its title, “‘When Men Will Lie Down as Gracefully & as Ripe,” comes from Thoreau’s essay “Autumnal Tints” and runs into the next three lines of the poem, which Johnson has put in quotation marks, lineated and italicized: “with such an Indian-summer serenity / will shed their bodies / as they do their hair & nails.” In the source essay, which Thoreau wrote on his deathbed, he’s telling us that the fluttering descent of deciduous leaves might “teach us how to die.” But the “When” that begins the quoted phrase is subjunctive—if we have always lived with this feature of seasonal transition, what might it take to finally learn its lesson? There seems to be little ground for hope, and because Thoreau will not live to see it come to pass, his “us” feels like an infelicitous first-person plural. But in Johnson’s poem, that “When” becomes a moment rather than a wish, occurring in the poem’s present:

How can I say the ‘tangled actual’,but that, as we sit here on the banks of the Potomacabove the wind in the leavesI still hear the cars on a distant bridge—as Thoreau had heard trainsat Walden

His words and world “still” remain with us, thus Thoreau is still alive. He has “shed his body,” but Johnson’s extended quotation suggests that we take Thoreau’s simile seriously, regrowing the body as we do our hair and nails, through poetry. And if a form of immortality is possible, then surely it is also possible that we could now learn the lesson that autumn has been offering.

There’s another shedding taking place—of subjectivity itself, of the boundary between self and other that happens at the skin. The borrowed title has an erotic charge only latent in the source, and the “Men” now seems like a more intimate group than the “us” of Thoreau’s humanity-spanning gesture. If they are not necessarily Johnson and Williams, they seem to be whoever Johnson is sitting with on the banks of the Potomac. Through this citational practice, Johnson is able to offer an intimate “us” while evading the kind of declarations that would give the impression of a single, coherent lyric speaker, and thus a controlling, centralized subjectivity. When Johnson’s “I” speaks, it is wondering whether or not he can say the words that we see in front of us. This is a queer “Waldeinsamkeit” bookended by the words of Emerson and Thoreau—drawing them into conversation—and finding itself more at home as it ventures deeper into the words and thought of American Romanticism as well as the woods.

Thoreau and Emerson are at the center of Johnson’s archival poetics, but they are not the only voices from the past, made stranger in Johnson’s hands. Elsewhere in Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, Johnson addresses the violence and devastation of early colonial history and the way it lurked in the shadows of his adolescence: “Quivira,” for instance, is named for the historical province of the Kitikiti’sh confederation that lay roughly between Ashland, Kansas, where Johnson was born in 1935 and grew up, and Lawrence, where he attended the University of Kansas. Built from and talking back to historical sources, “Quivira” follows the 16th-century exploration of the region by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and over a thousand armed men:

…who carriedtheir tails erect as they ran,

like any Europeanscorpion.

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O Coronado, all countryis round to

those who lose sight of the ground.

Here, Johnson puns on a colonial name and sense of entitlement—“Coronado” means “crowned,” and the vocative appeal suggests that it is the very system of inherited nobility as much as the specific expedition that has violently, stupidly intruded, effacing the territory’s affecting flatness:

if one looked at the buffalo

the sky could be seen between their legs,

so that at a distance they appearedto be smooth-trunked pines whose tops jointed—

& if there wasone bull, it seemed fourpines.

The poem ends by gathering the Indigenous linguistic sources for what eventually becomes the word “Kansas.” It’s a striking yet ambivalent gesture, as much an indication of lost diversity as an assertion of persistence.

Taken together, the poems of Valley give us a clearer sense of where Johnson started out from—autobiographically as well as intellectually—but are also plainly some of his best, across a variety of modalities. With “Assorted Jungles: Rousseau” and “Three Paintings by Arthur Dove,” Johnson offers unexpected equals to the 1960s ekphrastic poetry by Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and Melvin Tolson. I am especially taken with the second section of “Arthur Dove,” which follows a muddy abstract entitled “Cows in Pasture” by making the denial of clear figuration into an invitation to inhabit the canvas:

Form has nosize.The burnt-out logis not a whale,…And there are no cows.

We walk,careful not to step on snails.

Dove’s paintings were new to me and rewarded examination alongside the poem, in which we get some of the coy cleverness around mediums and their limits that are the premise of a poem like O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter.” But Johnson doesn’t stop with what the art does or does not depict or denote, finding an entry point for immersive, pastoral intimacy. And yet before we can take him too seriously, “Landscape With Bears, for Charles Olson” resolutely refuses to discuss the Breugel to which it alludes, instead describing Haida carving, Ursa Major in the night sky, a corny canvas by George Caleb Bingham, and “The sign posted / PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE BEARS.” One finds an easy sense of humor and an appreciation of the musicality of language as spoken and found, as well as a degree of comfort in occasional self-disclosure that is difficult to find in his better-known collections, where his experimental conceits reach book-length and are sustained across many years of writing.

Typically, Johnson’s career is narrated through three epics. The Book of the Green Man (1967), written after another walking trip with Williams, was Johnson’s “attempt, as a brash American, to make new the traditional British long seasonal poem.” In its skinny, conversational lines, he often turns to William and Dorothy Wordsworth, at whose graves in the Lake District their trip began. Shortly after Green Man, Johnson broke up with Williams and moved to San Francisco, where he wrote Radi Os (1977), a book-length poem created by erasing words and lines—sometimes even individual letters—from Milton’s Paradise Lost. For a sense of how this works, Johnson’s title is crafted by eliminating the “Pa” and “se” of “Paradise” and the “L” and “t” of “Lost.” Doing so extends and expands the lineation practice while also raising new questions about faith, morality, and fate, which emerge from the source text but are cross-applied to the material out of which we make language printable and distributable.

Johnson started Radi Os in 1973 while serving as “poet in residence” at the University of Washington, and only after hitting a wall with ARK, the 99-section life-poem he began when he turned 35 (like Dante and his Commedia). As well as the Pride rainbow, ARK indicates the Biblical ark and its tripartite construction, with Johnson dividing the collection into 33 “Foundations/Beams,” as many “Spires,” and as many “Ramparts/Arches,” with a complex network of allusion and correspondence between them. Johnson worked on ARK for over 20 years, completing it shortly before returning to Kansas to care for his elderly father in 1993, and it is an astonishing accomplishment. But it rarely seems like fun or readerly pleasure are its goals. Robert von Hallberg, in a scrupulous and admiring treatment, puts it plainly: “Johnson wants only to name, not to explain…he needs little syntax for worship or adoration.”

Maybe this is why, when I first came to Johnson, I didn’t get him. His work felt very institutional, from the scholarly bibliography to the lineations and erasures, which are hard to separate from their recent fate as stock MFA workshop prompts. This is unfair to Johnson, who hardly arrived in San Francisco in 1968 as an academic transplant, instead cofounding the Rainbow Motorcycle Club and managing Folsom Street’s “notoriously sleazy” leather bar The No Name. But more than that, the books felt lonely, the relentless intertextuality seeming more like a retreat into the past than a celebration of it.

Valley helps us see how much that past was shared, alive for his friends and lovers as well as for Johnson. Individual poems capture much of what he does well, and exuberantly so—I can think of few collections that make better arguments for the “hard optimism of the avant-garde” that Kimberly Quiogue Andrews identifies in her recent monograph, The Academic Avant-Garde. Andrews’s argument is perverse and compelling, breaking down the assumed antagonism between mundane university work and poetic experimentation, and demonstrating how poets like John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and Claudia Rankine drew on their experience in the classroom or on scholarly methodologies for their most formally ambitious writing. Johnson’s Radi Os has its own para-academic origin story, insofar as a college campus is just about the only place where a “party” might involve listening to Lukas Foss’s Baroque Variations—a musical erasure of Handel’s Concerto Grosso Op. 6, No. 12. But perhaps because this younger Johnson is still working out his art in a world of older, more established artists, we get more of that intimate “we,” too. His range of references is the widest but also the least reverent—its title, Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses, is another head fake, coming from a bizarre Edgar Allen Poe short story, “Eleanora,” which is bizarre precisely because the horrible fate to which the narrator has been cursed does not come to pass.

But reading Johnson’s prose helps, too. Alongside his poetry career, Johnson became an admired caterer and cookbook author, and his archival collection The American Table (1984) is justly lauded, though it remains out of print. It gathers historical recipes from across the United States under headnotes that provide the autobiographical detail that the poetry often withholds. This is from the headnote to his recipe for Country Ham with Red Eye Gravy: “I had it at its best while hiking the Appalachian Trail. A farmer found us in sleeping bags near dusk in his orchard, and after asking us if we’d seen any snakes (a formal conversational gambit in the Southern mountains), politely asked us for breakfast next morning.” “Us,” of course, means Johnson and Jonathan Williams, and given the time of day, we suddenly realize that there may have been a time and a place where “seen any snakes” was a gay shibboleth. Naturally, The American Table is also saturated with quotations from and references to Thoreau.

Part of what makes Valley an excellent introduction to Johnson’s work is an openness that can feel like incompleteness. It contains the exciting beginnings of several strains of thought, research, and craft that developed through the rest of his life, in a variety of genres and careers—and into contemporary poetry, with a posthumous vitality of the kind that he found in Emerson and Thoreau (in excellent recent work by Kelly Rose Hoffer and Michael D. Snediker, for instance). A collection of poems means more edges—more titles, more endings, more conceits—behind which we can glimpse Johnson, explicit subjectivity not yet totally abolished but eroded and exploded.

And the best poetry is always partial. As Thoreau had it: “You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought. The best book is only an advertisement of it, such as is sometimes sewed in with its cover.”