earthearthearth
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.
