Two things. 1. Charles' poetry isn't difficult, with or without the quotation marks.

2. foreign language education was never very good in the US, outside a few areas and social classes. Now largely for budgetary reasons its relevance has been questioned and it's been cut entirely by most elementary and high schools. It's purest fantasy that langpo had anything to do with this. As to those readers in the romantic period, even most of the middle class never had a secondary education.

-----Original Message-----
From: Luke <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Jun 18, 2018 12:52 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: on verbs in poetry

I just agree with Mark. Would tear off an arm to be fluent in those languages, but it's not easy.

> in e.g. Language poetry

Bernstein says his poetry is "difficult" because of its vernacular and cultural references, not then his use of foreign languages. He opposes it to a complex "structure", even-though whats trickiest for me is making the different social contexts cohere as they should.

Luke

On 18 June 2018 at 15:16, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Decline in knowledge of multiple languages, especially among those educated folks who like mdoern poetry....

I wonder if that has something to do with the reworking of English in e.g. Language poetry?

I mean, does this kinetic splintering testify to some sense of frustration with the constraints of communicative English, now that it's the only language most of us know? I am sure it sharpens the political feeling of being controlled by language, when we are monoglots.

Whereas, poetry readers of the Romantic period might have been mediating Byron or Wordsworth through their own everyday acquaintance with Latin, Gk, French, German, Spanish, Italian..?

(And if some of us do know other languages, they often come from a wider, less Eurocentric pool, so they are less shared with other readers, so there's less possibility of a poet drawing on common cultural capital. )

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the BRITISH-IRISH-POETS list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=BRITISH-IRISH-POETS&A=1

To unsubscribe from the BRITISH-IRISH-POETS list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=BRITISH-IRISH-POETS&A=1
<[log in to unmask]>