Ronald Johnson

INTRODUCTION

----> Poetryfoundaion.org entry on Ronald Johnson <----
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----> Wikipedia entry on Ronald Johnson <----
Discussion points / questions / activities

----> Note written by Ronald Johnson in Mary Ellen Solt's Concrete Poetry: A World View:  "It is a maze mostly because one tends to read left to right at first & it makes no sense. Then one sees the vertical words: MAZE, MANE, WANE & thinks, trapped as I planned, to read it that way. But the way out of the maze is a visual one & one sees at last that it is simply three words MAZE (since the M's & W are made exactly alike, as are the Z & N's, so that the W is simply an upside down M, etc.) So it is actually the word maze making itself into one. And as an added delight, there are the handsome words MAZE, MANE, WANE.
(p. 311)
---> If you rotate the poem 90 degrees counterclockwise once, you arrive at the first change. Then, if you rotate it again, you arrive at the second change. It's in that way that you 'escape' from the maze.
​Solt, Mary Ellen, ed. Concrete Poetry: A World View. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970. Print.