> But when the language gets newspeaked, it may be unuseable, at least in
the
> kind of form that you were using.
That, I suspect, or fear, is the nub of the question poetry is struggling to
answer now, and a question posed again with an ugly insistence by recent
events. The horror of it is, for me at least, that langauge is being
newspeaked with a relentlessness that grows ever more terrifying, my recent
experiences of the corporate world quite literally frightened me in what was
happening to language there, it felt like a kind of soul-murder, now that
the forces-that-be have been mobilised into a new, undeclared but official
war, the langauge that supports this mind-death is rushing into the
peripheries, even into something as marginal to power as that of debate on
poetry. One of the very discomforting things I have found myself is that in
trying to encounter that onrush of 'either/or' one falls unwittingly into
the very same rhetorical simplicitas one opposes. While to take on, as in
employ, the 'ugly words' of inertia's speech is to risk a deadening of the
verbal nerves. I don't know the answer to it, Lawrence, I freely confess,
but do feel that one has to try to find a way through what seems an
overpowering problem.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
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