Seems like I've some very thorough & very earthy, deep shit (sorry for my
naive profanities, dear listmembers!), nitty-gritty & oh so much so
& such very serious catching up to do!
Henry's 'ISLAND ROAD'
is actually available ONLINE
through a 1997 Mudlark issue!
I mean, that's 5 years it's been there!
And I never even knew!
(Very sorry, Henry, this is by NO means personal at all).
Anyway, thank you, Henry!
May the Internet
live & thrive & drive &
connive for as long a time as an
eternity takes to
lick its wounds!
May it, whatever follows, 'may it', dare I say it ...
blossom ...
with the energy of
Chairman Mao's thousand (by
now (sorry to say)
withered) blossoms!
Must admit, islander
of the very very DEEP & such dark north
that I am, that I never even
heard of the
sequence in question.
What does that make me?
Where does that leave me?
Clueless re everything of note in the world?
I feel ashamed.
But, then, why should I?
Why indeed?
There's LIFE outside the English language.
Methinks these people know (absolutely ... ) (at
least) very LITTLE about
other languages ...
Let alone minority languages like mine ...
As well as the realities therein ...
French, yes, even some
German, Italian or (Wodan
forbid) Spanish!
But outside of all that ... nil ... NIL!
Absolutely ... niiiiiil ...
But there's
honestly honestly a
WORLD out there ...
And it really
does exist without
any ENGLISH at all!
I, for one, still
breathe. I still
love life. I still see
English as a
substitude WINDOW, of
sorts (for lack of a
better word) ... As well as a
HOBBY (what a lame and
insignificant word!).
In TOO many OTHERRRR
words, I don't take English
very seriously although I
love it to
cartoonish bits and
love just love to HATE it ... for it's
brute power ...
I have a very slim notion of ... [skip that]
Replace by: I've been a
dedicated teacher of
the language ...
For several years ...
ENGLISH has, without the
slightest EFFORT, become the
LINGUA FRANCA of an
entire world that doesn't even speak
that or any sort of ENGLISH! Which is limiting and
unfair to poetry, as
such. Not to mention other, oh
so many other things ... in
other languages ...
Now, will you all please
('Please,
please, please' - James Brown)
prove me wrong on
whatever point I've been
making! I beseech you! (I
do love that apathetic &
ah such a Shakespearian verb!)
The whole and entire point to all this preamble relates to my very keen
awareness, as a foreign speaker of your language, that it's oh so easy to
slip into guerrious / belligrent lingo in the conext of it. Which only sends
me thinking.
In my own mother's tongue, I do not have access to the definitions available
to English speaking people.
Why, in plain terms, are the English (American) more readily available to
VIOLENCE than speakers of other languages?
And why are there (basically) only ENGLISH SPEAKING people who are now
occupying Iraq?
Could the world possibly be SAVED by shifting the world's lingo from English
to some other language? Does the world need a new lingua franca in order to
be saved? And not least freed from whichever bloodbath the English lingo so
readily & historically acknowledges.
For after Iraq, the English speaking Americans, backed by the English and
Australians, seem set on taking the rest of the world.
Cohen said: 'First we take ... etc.'
Best to all you English speaking poets out there!
Keep creating, the world needs it ...
Árni
--
Árni Ibsen
Stekkjarkinn 19,
220 Hafnarfjördur,
Iceland
tel.: +354-555-3991
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/
on 4/11/03 7:05 PM, Robin Hamilton at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> That is excellent news. I'm a major fan of Island Road. (The entire
> sequence
>> is available at
>> http://www.etext.org/Poetry/Mudlark/mudlark06/contents.html#1 thanks to
>> Mudlark.)
>>
>> I've been hoping that it would be possible to hear you read it for ages.
>>
>> best
>>
>> Randolph
>
> CONCUR!!!!
>
> Robin
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