Additionally, it'll make the reader look at language anew, and marvel at its beauty, its precision, and its enormous flexibility. His resignation statement is dipped in bitterness. The man who wants to be loved by everyone has also acquired a harder edge in recent years. This is the sort of work that invites the reader to pause & contemplate each page, and fill in the white space with his or her own thoughts & emotions. For Johnson, loyalty has always been a one-way deal. This would be difficult enough to do with just a single page, creating one new short poem but Johnson has in fact made a new epic, a continuing poem, one that startles & delights with its unexpected conjoinings of unrelated words, and yields dazzling new images. What's revealed in the suddenly open space is a new poem of Creation, one of Song, Art, and primal forces from the soul & psyche of humanity. First published in 1977, Ronald Johnsons RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem. Using William Blake's idea of etching, or cutting away, he's gone through the first four books of Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost," removing all but a few carefully chosen words & phrases from each page. but it takes a truly gifted poet to create such a work. ![]() What poet Ronald Johnson has done here seems so simple. Eric Selinger, I Composed the Holes: Reading Ronald Johnsons Radi Os, Contemporary Literature 33 (1): 46-73 -, Important Pleasures and Others: Michael.
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