![]() ![]() I enjoyed reading it, and I have thought a lot about it in the days after I read it, so it has done its job as a poem for me. There are no characters, no narrative, no subject-verb action that we normally rely on, even in most lyric poems. Otherwise, I find it difficult to draw meaning from the fragments. ![]() ![]() The words in Radi Os are particularly striking because for all that they seem cut up and disjointed, there is a musicality and flow to them too, and reading them along with the white space makes the poem sound like a radio station fading in and out of static.Ī significant amount of meaning here hangs on the reader's knowledge of the original text, which is Milton's Paradise Lost. Both revisions are interesting in that they take away from the original work, leaving a slender selection highlighted for the reader. First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising. Read this one because I heard it mentioned with Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer, which in turn is taken from the collection of stories The Street of Crocodiles. Flood Editions, 2005 - Poetry - 107 pages. Mr Johnson is simply more forward about it, he does not try to embellish (or worse, to hide) the local debt-it is all owed, yet it is something powerfully new, the poem is powerfully new, it is radically different precisely in the way that it is similar to its foretexts, as witness the way-the same way-by which Milton found his "Lycidas" in Virgil, Blake his "Milton" in Milton, Ruskin his "Sesame and Lilies" in "Lycidas," and Davenport his "Flowers and Leaves" in the Milton of "Lycidas," the Blake of "Milton," and the Ruskin of "Sesame and Lilies." We have justification indeed, to do away with this business of "debt" when that word is too often charged with an understanding of Satanic interest rates-we have that justification because literature (all art, really) thrives on this free exchange of idea and feeling for the written character and its concernful arrangement, as of the component parts of a still life, on a page contiguous with the tattered ones we continue to find in caves, which if not literally then figuratively are as old as the species. In "Radi os" Mr Johnson is doing what all our great poets have done-the inhabiting of a master and the finding in that master's work a work of one's own. So, while I salute the good folks at Flood press, I lament the loss of the original type, which is as much a part of the art of the poem as the text itself. ![]() It would be a shame to lose Johnson's introductory remarks and nods to Blake I'd argue that this is a more fundamental loss-we've lost the poem itself. The fact that it is facsimile, and not a transcription, is crucial to a reader's interaction with the poem-the original positioning of the text on the erased page refers us more forcefully, more directly, to Milton's original (as well as Milton's own erasures and recoveries). The original 1976 Sand Dollar edition is a facsimile reproduction of Johnson's erasure of a 1892 edition of the poem. RADI OS, as an erasure of Milton's Paradise Lost, is deeply invested in the material of Milton's text. Ronald Johnson’s most popular book is Radi Os. Ronald Johnson has 131 books on Goodreads with 2518 ratings. While I'm ecstatic that anyone would be doing their part to get Johnson's name back onto bookshelves, I'm disappointed, in this case, that the words haven't made it back onto the shelves as well. previous 1 2 3 4 5 next sort by previous 1 2 3 4 5 next Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.I'm assuming that this is referring to the recent Flood edition. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. ![]()
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