What happens when you take “Paradise Lost” and cross out all the boring parts?

Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (Get it? Paradise Lost.) I had never read a book like this when I had read it, and it encouraged me to experiment with erasures. I know many other poets have done this and done this well, but erasures, I think, are a great exercise for everyone. I talked about this with Jeremy Halinen, who interviewed me for Knockout this issue. When I was doing research for my Matthew Shepard poems–and I did a lot of research, for weeks on end, reading the most horrifying things you can imagine–I felt the sudden need to become surgical, the excise, the carve. I could no longer write new. It had been beaten from me.

So I took paragraphs from Vanity Fair, from Newsweek, from online reporting sources, and I cut into them. I tried to make the paragraphs go from devastating to something beautiful, something redemptive. Ultimately, I couldn’t support this in my own work, but that’s not what Johnson is doing with Radi Os, which is why it’s such an important work. He plies the language more interestingly, pulls out strange collisions and fractures from the source text, and doesn’t comment on it as much as he illuminates it.