White Ghost Dance was begun in Philadelphia in summer 1976 & expanded & revised intermittently during the intervening 42 years. It hangs upon the spine of a journey begun by a Conestoga wagon train in July 1975, from San Diego to Philadelphia, reversing the path of European imperialists: across the continent, across time, across boundaries between myth, history, and the astounding physical beauty of our vast, misshapen political fantasy. Memories, various & contradictory, seep from the landscape, & lead backward & inward to the moment of America's inception. At the periphery, cartoon figures from popular culture share the bardo with human relics scattered along the route. Along the return to origin, historical shades bubble up into the present. These spectral presences resonate against the original Ghost Dancers of the Nineteenth Century, whose ecstatic exertions asked the gods to reverse the catastrophe befallen them, against a high commercial civilization at Cahokia, based on astronomical design and ritual human sacrifice, & against a carnival of chaos at the 1976 Philadelphia BuyCentennial Sellabration.

Author Biography

Ron Johnson holds an MFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University (1972), & lives in San Francisco. His previous books include DNA Poems (Black Book Press, 1979) and Once Upon a Time in Babylon (Wasteland Press, 2012).