(Written on my iPhone in the Houston airport. As Ronald Johnsons literary executor, he has edited several volumes of Johnsons poetry, including The Shrubberies, Radi os, and new editions of ARK and. The same is true when you make art: you must embrace your limitations and keep moving. Johnson’s erasure offers a radical example of Emerson’s point: the work of writing is here an act indecipherable from the act of reading. For instance, if you read the canon straight through, from Homer to McCarthy (or whoever), how original would the connections in your mind be? Better to start with one author you love, who speaks to you, and move in every direction, backwards, forwards, sideways…the juxtapositions you see and the connections you make in your brain will be more unique. Emerson, in his speech The American Scholar, claims that if creative writing exists, then so does creative reading. When it comes to education, it’s not just the holes, but the order you fill them in. What makes them interesting isn’t just what they’ve experienced, but what they haven’t experienced.ĭevoting yourself to something means shutting out other things. It’s often the holes in pieces of art that make them interesting. That’s what we do when we craft a piece of art, whether it’s drawing or making a blackout poem. It reminded me of Ronald Johnson, in his introduction to radi os, a long poem made by erasing words from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “I composed the holes.” (Johnson was quoting a composer whose name I forget at the moment.)Ĭomposing the holes. As the author explains, 'To etch is 'to cut away, ' and each page, as in Blake's concept of a book, is a single picture. The above snippet came from a Texas Monthly article on Texas songwriters I read on the plane this morning. First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem within the seventeenth-century text.
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