sw00349o-langpo

Opinion

 6

Of Language Poetry (as I Presently Understand It) and My Self


A heavy haze inhabits the sky.  It is 8 am.  It may take me many days
to enter this.  Last night, getting eye-weary reading The New Sentence,
and seeing the weather was improving, I re-engaged my computer, &
spent the next 4+ hours learning about the political scientist langpo:
Bruce Andrews.  I read about Language Poetry and him.  I read a 
lengthy talk he gave.  I took peeks at some of his creations, two of
which were similar to two years-ago creations of mine.  I read an
interview.
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My major conclusions are:  Language Poets (if one is willing to view them
as a special breed of Homo sapiens) may be proof of Darwin's survival-of-
the-fittest theory.  They have definitety been aggressive in finding each
other, in promoting each other, and in proselytizing their social & linguistic
beliefs.  Had they not had their religious ardor in their difficult early years/
they would not have made it through those years, and would not have risen
to the cardinal pulpits they now enjoy.  This is not to say I find they are dis-
agreeable.  It is to say I have not (over the years) been aggressive enough,
but my salient differences from them are my eclecticism and my inveterate
inwardness.  The eloquence of their prose statements tells us they indeed
are knowledgeable, word-wise, and sincere.  Some feel they are the final
language avant-guard (my spelling).  That may be, especially since the  
robots in our computers are on track to become the progenitors of every 
thing.  But I digress.  Attention to the word as word with all its attendant
nuances is at the core of their poetics.  Such attention results in deeply
strange poems, but that is precisely what they want/ as they are trying to
unsettle the prevailing worldorder-tending / peon-controlling usages of
language.  Odd.  (I am going to let you figure out why.)  They are trying
to lead readers of their poems away from those industrial/governmental/
military usages of words by which they are being continually duped, and
toward/ seeing anew the words we use.  In this respect they are somewhat
succeeding, though it may be a futile effort.  The central problem, as I see
it, is this: The corporate culture has become so adept at subsuming 
whatever might threaten it/ there no longer seems to be any viable way
of escaping from that culture's control.  I once read a story (a story which/
may be/ just that) about a Japanese poet who climbed high into a mountain
and there committed suicide because/ he could no longer face/ the blank
page.  Are we as a race, an evermore enlightened and enlivened race, we
Homo sapiens (of genders known and unknown), facing such a blank page?
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Zahv-trah, wonderers/wanderers; or later today.
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So, the without-which-humanity-is-doomed need is this: to convince each
and every entity wherein power is the ruling tenet/ that only that which is
good for each and every human is good for it.  Only as a world community
will humanity survive and thrive on this planet, which does not mean a one-
world government is required.  If we cannot/ rise beyond/ greedy egos, we 
will not/ rise beyond.
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Brian A. J. Salchert