Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry / Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (PDF)

Ross Hair is Lecturer in English at the University of Portsmouth.

"Whitman's famous injunction - 'To have great poets, there must be great audiences' - can usefully be modified to say, 'Great poets require a great reader.' In this groundbreaking new book, Ross Hair proves himself to be the great reader Ronald Johnson's work has needed: someone to connect and synthesize the different traditions Johnson availed in creating his powerful poetry - from the Transcendentalists, to Pound and the Modernists, to concrete and visual poetries from mid-century - all the while alerting us to the central creative principle that drives Johnson's work. Namely, a recovery of an Edenic innocence enabled by unironic acts of assemblage and vision, where beauty and pleasure are the desired goals. Johnson was one of our finest visionary poets; Hair's illumination of Johnson's 'ocularcentric concerns' shows us why, especially in the ways 'ocular' is transformed into 'oracular' in Johnson's generative poetics. Hair's sense of Johnson's work is as keen as it is profound; his readings of Johnson's work - especially of Johnson's major long works, including his masterpiece ARK - are invaluable for seasoned and uninitiated readers alike. Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry will take its place as the Thoreauvian cornerstone for all subsequent understandings of Johnson's poetry." - Peter O'Leary, executor for the literary estate of Ronald Johnson, author of Gilding the Buddha: My Apprenticeship with Ronald Johnson

"In Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry, the first book-length study of Johnson's work, Ross Hair ably demonstrates that Johnson's poetry 'proposes innocence as an epistemological condition, denoting a way of experiencing and responding to the world of events without prescription.' A visionary bricoleur and direct heir of the American Transcendentalists, Johnson brilliantly appropriated and revised the revolutionary principles of his modernist precursors (Pound, Williams, Moore, Zukofsky, Olson . . .), producing one generous