To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems

Poetry. Ronald Johnson's early poems owe much to Charles Olson's notions of projective verse, but he then began to experiment with the poetics of the international concrete poetry movement. Edited by Peter O'Leary, TO DO AS ADAM DID includes works from the full range of Johnson's career, including The Shrubberies, the long poetic sequence he was writing at the time of his death. What did Adam do? He named: naming built the Garden he dwelt in, allowing him to see it through words. Johnson recognizes the brain and the universe as mirror images: astrophysics is horticulture; scientific perception is gardening -- from the introduction by Peter O'Leary.