"The poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) grew up in Kansas but moved to New York as a young man before settling in San Francisco. At the beginning of his career, he was allied primarily with the Black Mountain School, but his work as also rooted in the poetry of Whitman, Blake, and Dante. His early poems owe much to Charles Olson's notions of projective verse, but he then began to experiment with the poetics of the international concrete poetry movement. His major book is the long poem ARK, begun in 1970. To Do As Adam Did includes works from the full range of Johnson's career, including "The Shrubberies," the long poetic sequence he was writing at the time of his death."--BOOK JACKET.