Remember how in one of my previous posts I discussed the French-developed writing style of Oulipo, which is basically a form of constrained writing or writing that implies a specific set of restraining factors on whatever it is their working on? Or has all that browser-history-nonsense got your short-term memory all jacked up? You know you want to laugh, maybe chuckle a bit? Anyway. 
I wanted to bring a specific work and author to the table of discussion, and I feel that the Oulipo style has great resonance with it. Here it is: Ronald Johnson”s Radi Os. He utilizes a technique refered to as Erasure Poetry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasure_poetry) and discovered his own poem within John Milton’s Paradise Lost (books 1-4). He spent many years, marking through transcript after transcript, using the scribbles of his dark ink to cover up and simultaneously rediscover something new within Milton’s epic work. The outcome of such a tedious and time-consuming process is strikingly Postmodern, with fragmentation written all in the blank spaces. I think it ties in nicely with the Oulipo-ean works, because he placed extreme thematic constraints on what he physically omitted from the original work. It wasn’t randomized or meaningless, he marks away God and Satan, leaving behind a very different view of the human, the Adam and the Fall of Man in itself.
From the afterword of the 1977 Flood Edition, Guy Davenport writes:
“Radi os is a meditation, first of all, on grace. It finds in Milton’s poems those clusters of words which were originally a molecular intuition of the complex harmony of nature whereby eyesight loops back to its source in the sun, the earth, the tree, our cousin animals, the spiralling galaxies, and mysteriously to the inhuman black of empty space.”
From http://culturalsociety.org/RADIOS, Jon Curley states:
“This cycle, as original as it emulative, risks parody in its invocation of the original while willing itself to another kind of passage. Johnson did not merely extrapolate at whim. He surveyed the Miltonic pattern and culled from its treasure trove a parcel of incandescent meaning. Man is a creation of folly, but so too the circumstances that wrought his appearance.”
Another blog that mentions Radi Os:
http://kulturindustrie.blogspot.com/2005/07/ronald-johnson-radi-os.html
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Another random interesting thought I had was centered around the way in which Johnson entitled his work. Paradise Lost. He turned a “paradise” into a physical piece of technology. Granted actual radios themselves are going extinct these days with satellite radio and live feeds via web browsers, I still think it’s interesting that even back in the 70s, whether Johnson consciously meant to make this comparison or not, he transformed the Garden of Eden into a piece of junk with wires in it. This is what McCluhen was trying to warn us about! Plato would be rolling over in his grave! Turning the truthful and beautiful into such ridiculous physical matters. The blasphemy of it all! (But it’s still some wholesome, calorie-ridden food for thought).
This is really interesting stuff. You should definitely look for Katherine Hayles’s book Writing Machines. Part of it is devoted to what sounds like a very similar artistic/poetic project: Tom Phillips’s “Humument.” Look up both of them: could be a final project in it for you!