Ronald Johnsons Modernist Collage Poetry [Hardcover]

Using?a critical examination of the collage poetics of Ronald Johnson, this book sets out to understand Johnson's poetry in the context of the New American collage tradition, stretching from Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky and beyond. Additionally, the book assesses Johnson's work in relation to wider questions concerning literary chronologies, especially the discontinuities commonly seen to exist between nineteenth-century Romantic and twentieth-century modernist literary forms.Introduction: Congeries of Word and Light * Luminous Juxtapositions: Ezra Pound, Philology, and the Ideogrammic Method * Orphic Visions, Orphic Voices: Johnson's New Transcendentalism * The Round Earth on Flat Paper : Visual Integrity in The Book of the Green Man * Johnson's Different Musics: Ives and NaIf Art * Orphic Apocrypha: Radi os and the Found Text * A mosaic of Cosmos : ARK 's Bricolage Poetics * Conclusion: Felix Culpa : Adamic Innocence and Renewal

Whitman's famous injunction - 'To have great poets, there must be great audiences' - can usefully be modified to say, 'Great poets require a great reader.' In this groundbreaking new book, Ross Hair proves himself to be the great reader Ronald Johnson's work has needed: someone to connect and synthesize the different traditions Johnson availed in creating his powerful poetry - from the Transcendentalists, to Pound and the Modernists, to concrete and visual poetries from mid-century - all the while alerting us to the central creative principle that drives Johnson's work. Namely, a recovery of an Edenic innocence enabled by unironic acts of assemblage and vision, where beauty and pleasure are the desired goals. Johnson was one of our finest visionary poets; Hair's illumination of Johnson's 'ocularcentric concerns' shows us why, especially in the ways 'ocular' is transformed into 'oracular' in Johnson's generative poetics. Hair's sense of Johnson's work is as keen as it is profound; his readings of Johnson's work - especially ol“õ