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• 1 2018-09-15T23:18:51+00:00 earthearthearth 13 plain 2018-09-17T16:29:36+00:00 In 1970, Ronald Johnson walked the English countryside for months and composed Songs of the Earth, as a translation of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth). This work is the first of 12 in the book. 
  
  A bloc of language induces an instantaneous shock.
  Letter blocks locked in contiguous slots
  become links in a continuous chain:
  "earth-earth-earth" beats six times. 
  
  Dividing and conquering, the eye-brain
  parses and chunks characters into discrete words. 
  Familiarity breeds content:
  look closely and loosely cloaked
  merged words emerge
  from within [the] earth:
  ear, art, hear, heart, hearth, a, the.
  
  Visual poem as combinatoric algorithm: 
  just as the same letters yield many words,
  the same words produce myriad meanings. 
  Syntactically shifting ground
  opens new semantic horizons:
  as puzzled decoding yields to
  rapid-fire sense-making,
  absorption triggers associations:
  'Art is an ear to hear the earth's heart';
  'Art makes earth into hearth if we have the heart to hear it.' 
  Etc (i.e, try it yourself)
  
  This poem is an earth-work letter-matrix. 
  Sedimented letters sing sentiments in sign-strings.
  Semantic signals surface slowly, surely, and suddenly. 
  Embedded lines are graphic strata
  composing a stratigraphy
  to be studied strategically. 
  
  Johnson offers a democratic poetics: unearthing this site's layered significance does not require academic expertise.  All willing readers with patience possess the poetic license necessary to read it. 
  
  Italo Calvino concluded the last essay he wrote with this invitation: "Think what it would be like … to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic…" (Six Memos 124). 
  
  As if to let the earth sing its proper song, Johnson pushes language past propriety into a post-proprietary planetary poetics.
   
• 1 2018-07-16T20:24:25+00:00 earthearthearth 4 plain 2019-02-17T17:52:06+00:00

  20^th century American poet Ronald Johnson composed this concrete poem during a year spent walking the English countryside.  It was published in his 1970 collection Songs of the Earth and appears again in the "Foundations" section of his epic poem ARK. 
   
  Concrete poems confront readers with initial discomfort, then calm them into contemplation.  Frustrating ingrained habits of scanning text, concrete poetry submerges sense in merged words and forces a practice of slow reading. 
   
  Presented with Johnson's poem, most readers initially parse it as "earth-earth-earth" repeated six times.   Eventually though, familiarity breeds content. Look closely and loosely cloaked words emerge from within [the] earth: ear, art, hear, heart, hearth, a, and the.
   
  The work functions according to a combinatoric logic.  Just as the same letters can yield many words, the same words can produce myriad meanings.  Syntactically shifting ground opens new semantic horizons. Puzzled decoding transforms into rapid-fire sense-making: playing around with the words earth, ear, art, hear, heart, hearth sparks an array of associative lines of thought and thematic interpretations.  I prefer not to preempt your hermeneutic process by providing examples.  Suffice to say, this puny poem packs a plethora of purport!
   
  Johnson's concrete poem embodies a geo-poetry, an earth-work made of words where sedimented letters sing sentiments in sign-strings whose semantic signals surface slowly, surely, and suddenly.  Written lines become graphic strata composing a stratigraphy to be studied strategically.  Simultaneously, unearthing this site's layered significance requires no expert qualifications.  All willing readers possess the poetic license necessary to access this matrix of signifiers and set free the meanings suspended in its structure. 
   
  Johnson's poem, homely in its simplicity, reduces language to its basic elements, bringing it back to earth.  There is a kind of "voluntary regression"[1] in Johnson's craft—a breaking down and cracking up of his medium, to render it more proximate to inhuman materials.  Letters, reduced to matter, matter more; concrete poems inscribe the letter of their own laws.
   
  Italo Calvino concluded the last essay he wrote with this invitation: "Think what it would be like … to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic…" (Six Memos 124).  As if trying to let the earth sing its proper song, Johnson pushes language past propriety into a post-proprietary planetary poetics.

   

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  [1] See Dider Semin, "What is it like to be a Tree? What is it Like to be a River?" in Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Giuseppe Penone: The Hidden Life Within (London: black dog publishing, 2013:181-87).