In 2001 Joel Bettridge and Eric Selinger asked me to write an essay for their
collection on Ronald Johnson in the National Poetry Foundation’s “Life and
Poetry” series. I decided to explore Johnson’s early Concrete poetry, which
has interesting analogues to the work of Haroldo de Campos discussed in
chapter 9. But the difference is also telling: Johnson’s Concrete has a stronger
sound component, deriving from particular musical compositions rather than
from the Pound-Fenollosa ideogram, as was the case with Brazilian Concrete.
10
Songs of the Earth
Ronald Johnson’s Verbivocovisuals
Words which sound alike belong together.
Oy vind FahlströmSongs of the Earth (1970) was Ronald Johnson’s favorite among his own books
of poetry. Johnson’s editor, Peter O’Leary, tells us that “he thought of it
as nearly perfect,”^1 and accordingly O’Leary reproduces all twelve of these
minimalist Concrete poems in his Selected Poems. In his preface Johnson ex-
plains that these “squarings of the circle” or “strains” were based on the “mu-
sics of silence” as recorded by Thoreau on his night walks in the Concord
woods as well as on “a progression of hearings of Mahler’s Song of the Earth
[Das Lied von der Erde] on records, in concert, and in my head.”^2
The reference to Thoreau, a key ¤gure for many poets of the sixties and
seventies, especially John Cage, is not surprising. But the homage to Mahler,
who would seem to be too musically complex and melodic to suit Johnson’s
minimalist bent, seems anomalous until one recalls that Mahler’s Song of the
Earth (1908) had its own minimalist/imagist base in the Chinese poems
translated (quite freely) in Hans Bethge’s collection Die Chinesische Flöte
(The Chinese Flute)—poems by Li Po, Ts’ien Ts’i, and Wang Wei. Indeed,
notes Henry-Louis de La Grange, “the discovery of Chinese music stimulated
Mahler to adopt certain features, such as the pentatonic scale, and to use in-
struments suggesting those of China, such as the mandolin harp, winds and
tambourine.” And La Grange cites two key innovations in the composition
of the song cycle: (1) “the use of the same motifs in both the principal and