Overview

White Ghost Dance began during the America's 1976 Bicentennial, in a Burger King on the Philadelphia Promenade. Beside a six-foot-five Mickey Mouse when a cashier began vigorously chanting the name of a ham sandwich, I watched a Ben Franklin impersonator scooping change from the floor. As I tried to comprehend an America where these contradictory images could simultaneously exist, I recalled hearing of a Conestoga wagon travelling back toward us from California, White Ghost Dance transforms that wagon into the bus Amnesia, crossing America's history of comedy amid slaughter, reversing the path of European usurpers across geographical, historical, and mythological boundaries, to the place of America's inception. Along the way, the Amnesia encounters visions of the Paiute Ghost Dancers, human sacrifice in ancient Cahokia, the Lone Ranger, the Burr-Hamilton duel, and the incoherent festival in Philadelphia. Ron Johnson first heard poetry on the radio, voiced by baseball announcers and evangelists. During Cincinnati's summer afternoon rainstorms, Red's announcer Waite Hoyt recounted exploits of his 1920s Yankee teammates, featuring the legendary Babe Ruth. Hoyt employed a musical, lilting Southern accent, reflecting the slow rise and fall of play, shattered periodically by dramatic eruptions. This music enraptured the young poet. At night the tone shifted radically. Garner Ted Armstrong attacked listeners of The World Tomorrow at ear-splitting volume, threatening, with fertile imagery, assorted terrors for our vague but indisputable transgressions. Inevitably, the poet's education progressed to more conventional venues. At Bowling Green State University, he encountered the redoubtable teacher Frederick Eckman, along with a rich group of aspiring poets, and there received his Masters of Fine Arts in poetry. In addition to White Ghost Dance, he has authored Once Upon a Time in Babylon and DNA Poems.

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