Ronald Johnson (1935–1998) Radi os, 1977.
The Kansas poet Ronald Johnson produced Radi os by stripping words and letters away from the photographic facsimile of an 1892 edition of Paradise Lost—a process which he compared to the acid in an etcher’s bath: ‘To etch is “to cut away”, and each page, as in Blake’s concept of a book, is a single picture’. The resulting free verse creates a strikingly visual field, making the reader newly conscious of the disjointed play of white space over the printed page. Aurally, it reads like an attenuated, static-filled echo of Milton’s voice, which sets the remaining words into startling new configurations.