from Keston's pen flowed with lucid murkiness....
"I cannot understand this negative grounding of a nominally inessential
'American' condition in the 'essentiality' of the supposedly determined,
though in fact still diversifying, European conditions which appear in a
manner quite prop-like to arrest the desirability of 'possessing' a
specifiable culture; the orders of possession distinguished by this remark
seem to me only nominally distinct, failing to take account of the bathos
incurred by such an act of distinguishing that fails wholly to recognize
actual material possession as the principal category of that relation.
There may very well be a virtual America, and this may very well be what
certain critics of our actual America should like to choose to fail to
possess, if only to arbitrate further in favour of popular theories of a
'simulacrum'; poetry, as the term might sometimes be taken, could be
confined polemically to the province of this 'virtual' condition..."
The province is of course as you suggest not so easily identifiable as
Americans would like. Perhaps possessing a culture or embodiment of a people
is ethnocentrically an American pastime. And comes from traces of rebellion
of the colonies against the British. The swaggering independence of the
victorious revolutionaries. Those attitudes not altogether vanquished. But
still on the prowl.
Though American-english it would seem has always wished itself as separate
language unto itself.
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn proof that American-english was the stuff of
great literature. That it perhaps crept into other forms of writing, such as
poetry, would suggest tendencies of both jingoistic and original in nature.
Ernest Slyman
http://www.geocities.com/soho/7514/
email: [log in to unmask]
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