44:2 Spring 1998

RONALD JOHNSON

Last Poem

The Spring 1998 issue featured Ronald Johnson’s “Last Poem.” Poetry editor Devin Johnston recently explained how the poem came to CR:

Ronald Johnson died on March 3, 1998. A few days prior, I traveled from Chicago to Topeka with Michael O’Leary and Joel Felix in order to retrieve his manuscripts and papers for the archives (as Peter O’Leary was to be his literary executor but lived in Vienna at the time). We drove through the night and crossed the Kansas River in the early morning hours with the sense that winter had just receded. A wrack-line of leaves and trash still stretched across the yards. Ron was living in his father’s old clapboard house, propped up in a hospital bed in the living room. He looked gaunt, with a scraggly white beard, his voice hardly above a whisper. He held a Marlboro Light in his hand, struggling with a faulty lighter. His father’s collection of antique levels and planes hung on the walls. Only a small stack of books sat on the side table, as the bulk of his library had been sold to help with hospital bills. What remained were mostly by Paul Metcalf. Though Metcalf had been a friend, “I never got a chance to read them,” he said simply.

His father served us brisket, potato salad, and Miller Lite in cans at the kitchen table, talking of the Sand Hill plums that could be found in the fields around Ashland—where Ron had been born.

Early in our visit, without a word, Ron had handed us a single sheet of typescript. It was titled “Last Poem.”

Johnson’s literary executor, Peter O’Leary reports that Johnson’s “Last Poem” was revised when it appeared in book form:

We didn't realize that that typescript Devin, my brother, & Joel fetched from the jaws of death in Topeka had a crucial typo: lightning'd = lightning's. I only discovered this a year after publishing the poem in the Talisman Selected to correct it in The Shrubs.

The Shrubberies was published in 2001 by Flood Editions, a small press that Devin Johnston founded with Michael O’Leary that year.

[ES, 2006]

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