Ronald Johnson (1935鈥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鈥攁 process which he compared to the acid in an etcher鈥檚 bath: 鈥楾o etch is 鈥渢o cut away鈥, and each page, as in Blake鈥檚 concept of a book, is a single picture鈥. 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鈥檚 voice, which sets the remaining words into startling new configurations.