Ernest,
I must admire your bold introduction to the list. I confess to having been
lurking on the list for the last week quite unable to decide if or how I
should introduce myself. Yet now I have the gall to take you to task! I
hope you will forgive me.
You see, intrigued by your post, I took a moment to visit your web-page.
There (amongst some most interesting writing) I found the following, for
all to see:
Ernest Slyman was born in Appalachia--Elizabethton, Tennessee. Attended
East Tennessee State University.
Yet you had declared in your post:
>My name is Ernest Slyman. I was born in the UK. Grew up in the United States
>of America.
Not that it matters, of course, where you were born. But I'm curious now.
What is the truth?
You go on to say:
>I would state my distress over the death of
>language. I recognize the perpetual identity crisis of language and the
>literary arts. Regard much of the movement of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E idioms toward
>post-modern poetry as spirituality. The poem defined as Pentecostal revival,
>a place to sing and lift one's mood.
Could you explain this a little more? To my mind, postmodern poetry (and
perhaps you should define which poetry you refer to here) is the antithesis
of spiritual. Rather, postmodernism tends towards the cynical. It
challenges the idea of a canon of literature which can be built upon and
'handed down' and presents instead a fragmented and dispersed reality. At
least, this is how I understand it. I can't see how this connects with
spirituality, unless it is in terms of the recognition of 'desire' and
'pleasure' in the text (Barthes) (desire having a relationship to spiritual
longing).
Orlando
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|