Peter O’Leary adds some
light – and layers of complexity – to my comments about Ronald
Johnson’s Radi Os and has a few questions of his own.
Dear
Ron Silliman,
I'm
writing to you as Ronald Johnson's literary executor. Very interested to read
your description of seeing the "original" of RADI OS in
The
crossing-out that you witnessed was only the first step of the composition. RJ
kept several copies of that 1892 edition of Paradise Lost, each of which he would use to "compose" or
"recompose" his first draft. He once told me that after he had
initially conceived the idea, he raced through half of
The
next step, after crossing-out, was to type the poems into a draft. I think of
RJ's poetic process as visionary or optidelic (to
coin a word: vision-manifesting). Lest that sound too grand, I really think the
focus in much of the poetry is on the eye. I don't think RJ could
"see" his poem until he typed it out in draft form. What he would do
is type the lines from a crossed-out page, with a 1-1/2 carriage return,
flush-left on the page, typing a five-line underscore after each page. This
way, he would accumulate his poem. When he had enough typed up, he would reread
& revise. If a "page" (taking up maybe a tenth of a typescript
page) didn't work, he would go back into
As an
example of what I mean, the famous (to RJ readers, at
least) opening of RADI OS reads in typescript:
O
tree
into
the World,
Man
the
chosen
Rose
out of Chaos:
song,*
The final
step in drafting the poem was for RJ to retype the poem but this time
"aerated," duplicating in typescript the look of the poem on the page
of
Interestingly,
RJ drafted up to book 9 of Paradise Lost,
with the original intention that the "completed" text would serve as
ARK 100, the "dymaxion dome" to cover the
entire work of ARK. This, in the end, he decided against, feeling that the
additional work he'd done was repeating RADI OS rather than adding to it.
My
own theory about why he stopped with RADI OS is that he perfected this
technique in "BEAM 21, 22, 23, The Song of Orpheus" in ARK: The
Foundations. That poem, which begins with a quotation – center justified –
of the introit to RADI OS, is comprised of a reading-through the Psalms
(beginning at the word "PALMS"), in which he took at least one word
from each Psalm, in sequence, as the vocabulary for the poem. The writing of
this BEAM involved similar revisionary activity to
that of RADI OS. It's the highpoint (great horizontal?) of The Foundations & one of the most amazing sequences in the
whole poem. I suspect, then, that RJ began to feel a whole 12-book RADI OS
would be redundant.
In
the end, he settled on including RADI OS in a series of "Outworks"
surrounding the edifice of ARK. The
Outworks, which includes RADI OS & some later poems, including his incredible
monument to the victims of AIDS, "Blocks to Be Arranged in a
Pyramid," is in the works with Flood Editions. This book will include the
republication of RADI OS (which, regrettably?, before
he passed away, RJ retitled, "Poem Excised Paradise Lost").
One
of the problems we've been facing in imagining this book ("we" being
myself & the directors of Flood, Devin Johnston & my brother Michael), is how to reproduce RADI OS. As you probably know from
your Sand Dollar edition of the book, the text consists of a razored copy of the 1892 edition RJ used for his initial
crossing-out. You can even see razor marks on some of the pages. The text is
also somewhat uneven page by page. One option for reproduction would be to
destroy an edition of the Sand Dollar book in order to create pristine scans,
& then adjust them accordingly (an expensive proposition: in Jed Rasula &
OK.
This has become a small essay. I imagine you get a lot of email for your Blog,
which I quite enjoy; I check in every day or so. Thanks, as a reader, for the
work you're doing.
All
the best,
Peter
O'Leary
* Which is not at all how
this text ends up looking on the printed page:
O tree
into the World,
Man
the chosen
Rose out of chaos:
song,
