Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

connection with the pulsation of breathing, the blood, ejaculation. It

is wrong that jazz bands have the monopoly of giving collective rhy th-

mic ecstasy. The drama and poetry can also give it. (76)

And Falhström goes on to formulate the axiom that I cite as my epigraph
above, “Words which sound alike belong together.” In tracking etymological
links—e.g., “Laxar [salmon] has to do with laxering [laxatives] and taxar
[dachshund] has to do with taxering [tax assessment]” (76). Chinese, the poet
argues, is especially suited to poetry because “its classless words and mean-
ing derived from word order.” Concrete, in this context, refers less to the vis-
ual poem as such than to the “squeez[ing]” of the “language material”:

Throw the letters around as in anagrams. Repeat the letters in words;

lard with foreign words... with foreign letters.... Of course also “let-

tered,” newly-discovered words. Abbreviations as new word building,

exactly as in everyday language.... Always it is a question of making

new form of the material. (78)

These statements look back to such Russian avant-gardists as Velimir Khleb-
nikov and Alexei Kruschenykh, whose etymological and phonemic wordplay
is legendary,^8 as well as forward to sound poets, lettristes, verbo-phonetic po-
ets, and so on. But Johnson avoided the complex iconoclastic exercises of
the latter, preferring the defamiliarization described by Fahlström when he
writes:

You can also... put well-known words in such realized strange

connections that you undermine the reader’s security in the holy con-

text between the word and its meaning and make him feel that con-

ventional meanings are quite as much or quite as little arbitrary as the

dictated new meanings. (77)

Consider the ¤rst of Johnson’s “twelve squarings”:

earthearthearth

earthearthearth

earthearthearth

earthearthearth

earthearthearth

earthearthearth

196 Chapter 10