All words preserved. Radios uses every word and punctuation mark in Radi Os (1977) in the endeavor to recompose Paradise Lost (1674). Wherever he composed the holes, I filled them in. “Nothing is erased, everything is lost.” Facsimile Hanuman edition published by Make Now Press. : : Danny Snelson knows of man’s first attenuation, that erasure bears non-erasure, re-erasure, unerasure, the un-whitening by a half tone, and the refillable cartridge. Such cartridge mecanique is destined by providence for serial insertion in any mechanism, from radi os “syntactic static” to radios sweet saccharine transmission and the fruit of that first orbital taste. Turn down the dial OS muse, oh solar o, o attenuation. Danny Snelson continues to amaze me with his unprecedented ability to cut to the heart of a genre or practice — whether it’s “conceptual writing” or the epic catalogue or the archival impulse or (in this case) the ubiquitous “erasure poem.” In the process, Snelson makes major statements with his very first forays, and his interventions simultaneously critique, revitalize, and render obsolete the mode in question with a single stroke. He is a poet of apotheosis. Radios, moreover, is enticingly readable on its own terms — though those terms are themselves self-reflexively historical in their dialectic between Milton and Johnson, presence and absence, memory and speculation, parody and pastiche. Plus, if you miss the old Hanuman books that Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente used to issue from the Chelsea Hotel in the ’80s, you’ll be delighted with the format and design.
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