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Ronald Johnson (1935 – 1998) was an American poet. He was born in Kansas, graduated from Columbia University and lived in New York in the late fifties, 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.

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

His major book is the long poem ARK, which he began in 1970 and took him twenty years to write. The poem follows in the tradition of American epic that starts with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and continues in Ezra Pound's Cantos, Louis Zukofsky's "A", Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, Robert Duncan's Passages, Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, and H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, among others.

Johnson was also a well-regarded author of cookbooks, including "The Aficionado's Southwestern Cooking" (1985) and "The American Table" (1984).

Johnson's last book, The Shrubberies, was published in 2001 and, according to the critic Stephen Burt, "showed a poet no less spiritual than the author of ARK but also one given to extreme concision."

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ronald Johnson", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0