<snip>
In my country, USA, we have had successions and an increasing
proliferation of ethnic groups who've gone through a similar process, and I
think it has made us politically and poetically richer.  There will always
be extremes as well as accommodations in the poets' works as they confront
their connections to the colonisers, and this will always result in extremes
in response. [JP]
<snip>

Am I reading you here as saying that the US is, to put it another way, a
society of previously colonised groups, informed by the cultures of those
groups? This is obviously true to some extent. But I wonder whether that
*extent* might not, in fact, be somewhat limited.

David Riesman's *Lonely Crowd* is hardly a recent book, but I'm inclined to
feel his thesis is still valid and that US culture is profoundly
other-directed. At any rate, it seems to me hugely conformist.

I'd also argue that the US is the dominant power in a process of _virtual_
colonisation, the skin over other cultures' custard. Again this isn't
exactly a unique perception on my part. So when you speak of *lazy reading*,
of a sort of radical failure to move from the denotative to the
connotative -

<snip>
 Whenever a poet [Australian or not] writes about things [flora, fauna] and
places that I don't know and, more important, can't 'see' [ie have no
memories from experience or intense reading/viewing], I draw a blank.  [JP]
<snip>

- I read into this (not necessarily correctly) a sort of blanking out of
other people's subjectivity, their alterity, of the very things that make
people unknown, opaque, (in)different and unknowable.

And yet isn't that bubbling up of strangeness from below, the emergence out
of subalternity into speech which threatens all of us at times, precisely
what breaks apart this asymmetrical relationship between the *colonised* and
the chap who sits on his chest, defeating his hopes and/or expectations?

CW
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