>I don't have the impression that the Language poets were necessarily monoglots. Hejinian, for example, had an interest in Russian.
That's true, and in fact a multilingual background often sparks off experimental poetry, as well documented in the recent Women: Poetry: Migration anthology.
My speculation is about a loss of shared multilingual culture, e.g. a common grounding in French and Latin. For the modern English-writing poet whose other language is e.g. Filipino, (to use the example of Amanda Ngoho Reavey in the aforementioned anthology), this multi-lingualism doesn't give a common linguistic heritage shared with other English-poetry readers, but instead is experienced as an alienation from the language of the poem.
For both the monoglot reader and the multilinguagl reader, the poetic text in English becomes ever more palpably a Procrustean bed, a constraint, an insufficiency. I'm suggesting... :)
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