Page "Ray Johnson" Paragraph 8

Johnson produced the 12 known unbound pages of his enigmatic BOOK ABOUT DEATH in 1963-5.

Consisting of cryptic texts and drawings ( mostly ) by Johnson, they were mailed a few at a time, randomly, and offered for sale via a classified ad in the Village Voice., thus very few people ever received all the pages.

Something Else Press published Johnson's The Paper Snake for a wider audience in 1965.

Remarking about himself and the book, Johnson said: I'm an artist and a, well, I shouldn't call myself a poet but other people have.

What I do is classify the words as poetry.

… The Paper Snake … is all my writings, rubbings, plays, things that I had given to the publisher, Dick Higgins, editor and publisher, which I mailed to him or brought to him in cardboard boxes or shoved under his door, or left in his sink, or whatever, over a period of years.

He saved all these things, designed and published a book, and I simply as an artist did what I did without classification.

So when the book appeared the book stated, ‘ Ray Johnson is a poet ,’ but I never said, ' this is a poem ,' I simply wrote what I wrote and it later became classified.