blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu.”), his rendition of “On... ” uncannily
captures the spirit of Das Lied von der Erde. The main leitmotif of the se-
quence is recapitulated, and the dissonance of the ¤nal foreshortened line
produces the “near-silence” of the tonic chord.
In his 1995 interview with Peter O’Leary, Johnson explains that his major
long poem ARK owes its major debt to the Concrete poetry he was practicing
in the sixties. “I learned all the visual things I did,” he remarks, “from con-
crete poetry. I wanted to take it further, like Ian Finlay who now makes gar-
dens.” And he adds:
I think the thing I’m proudest of in concrete poetry is a late work after
the movement was nearly over. I’d looked at and admired Jonathan
Williams’s Mahler where for each movement of the symphonies he
wrote a poem, and I thought, “Ah, but he didn’t do Das Lied!” So I did
Songs of the Earth and made them each a concrete poem.... It’s a se-
quence of squares with different statements in a different orientation.
It’s a very romantic poem. And I think it can stand beside Das Lied.^11In the “Beams” of the ARK, of course, these Concretist experiments are car-
ried much further. But Songs of the Earth marks a key transition between
the more programmatic visual Concretism of the 1950s and 1960s and the
visual/sound poetries of the last two decades, especially those of Susan Howe
and Johanna Drucker, Christian Bök and Brian Kim Stefans. Indeed, John-
son’s central insight that the semantic is only one element in poetry, that
poetry is to be seen and heard rather than seen through, heard through, and
primarily to be paraphrased and interpreted, is only now coming fully into
its own.
204 Chapter 10