To begin, we might note that Johnson’s typography is conservative: I can re-
produce it with reasonable accuracy on the computer, using my default font
(Verdana), boldface, and centering cues. Perhaps Johnson wanted to avoid
expense: the original edition of Songs of the Earth, with its disappointingly
routine cover design (small green, orange, and yellow squares and circles on
a cream-colored background), is not an elegant artist’s book. Or perhaps
Johnson wanted to invent a form that could be reprinted as it is in the Selected
Poems. Composition, in any case, becomes, as Steve McCaffery notes, “largely
a syntactic and a spatial matter, of the re-arrangement of existing phrases
into new combinations, implying a synchronic sense of ‘literature’ as an ac-
cessible word-supply.”^9 In this paragrammatic mode, the Mahlerian tones are
also the stones beneath the earth, just as the clouds above ground demand an
increase in loudness and font size. As above, so below: the chaos of darkness
“underneath under.”
Poem #3 is more of a constellation:
spr in g
spr in g
spRING
spRING
spRING
SPRINGbe 11 to
11 be 11
to 11 be
11 to 11“Spring” is con¤gured as a square: the six-letter word repeated six times and
hence forming two diagonals as well as the horizontal. The gradual shift
from lower-case to capital letters, ¤rst in line three to form “ring” and t hen
in the ¤nal line, the whole word “spring” is evidently designed to present
the arrival of spring by visual means. But the refrain brings in a tonal com-
plication. The letters spell out “bell toll bell toll bell toll,” thus ful¤lling the
promise of the “ring” above. But the spacing, separating the coupled “l” pho-
nemes from the words that contained them, designates the number eleven,
and, more indirectly, parallel lines, and indeed the opening “be ll to” gener-
ates parallels both horizontally and diagonally, as in the diagonal “be be be”
of lines 1–3. The spring “ring” or rondo thus becomes a square, whose tolling
bell brings us full circle.
198 Chapter 10