Johnson was born in Ashland, Kansas on November 25, 1935 and attended University of Kansas and Columbia University, where he got his B.A. He then hiked the Appalachian Trail and Europe and there was inspired by what he saw to become a poet.
At the beginning of his career Johnson was allied with the Black Mountain School's second generation, but then began to experiment with the poetics of the concrete poetry movement. Johnson's book-length poem RADI OS is an early and influential example of erasure poetry. He wrote it by blacking out words in a copy of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Johnson rewrote the first four books of Milton's poem in this way, producing a new text in which the few remaining words float in the white page space left by the absent words. Although Johnson apparently considered RADI OS to be a section of his long poem ARK, it was not included in any edition of that poem. Flood Editions reprinted it in 2005. Johnson's major book is the long poem ARK, begun in 1970 and taking him twenty years to write. The poem follows in the tradition of the "American epic", a heritage once described as "that strange, amorphous, anomalous, self-contradictory thing". This mythology of an ambitious and protean epic project--- grand in creation and design--- beginning with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was continued into the 20th century by Ezra Pound's The Cantos, Louis Zukofsky's "A", William Carlos Williams' Paterson, Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems, Robert Duncan's Passages, Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, and H.D.'s Helen in Egypt. Like these works, Johnson wrote ARK over long stretches of time. It became a lifetime "preoccupation" and "the poem of a life". Johnson was also a well-regarded author of cookbooks, including "The Aficionado's Southwestern Cooking" and "The American Table". 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." Soon after ARK returned to print in a new edition, Burt contributed an extended appreciation of Johnson's magnum opus to the pages of The New Yorker. Ronald Johnson, described by Guy Davenport as America's greatest living poet, died at his father's home in Topeka, Kansas on March 4, 1998.
