Poet Jaswinder Bolina winding it up on the Poetry Foundations page: The academy changes us. It might significantly expand our thinking and knowledge, but it also asks us to adopt its culture. The trouble is that this kind of assimilation also tends to affect our language. I can’t imagine the wealthy often say WIC check or second shift. The poor probably don’t use terms like escrow or dividends. For the middle classes, there might be a dissertation in studying the diction of our Facebook posts as a function of income. Imagine a line graph where x is annual salary and y is occurrences of the words resort or reception—or dissertation, for that matter. One of the things that distinguishes the classes is that they speak and sound different from each other. The thousands of choices we make daily in our diction and syntax are almost entirely reflexive. We hardly notice them at all when we’re talking or writing to people who are like us. If we encounter only such people, if nobody comes along to challenge our language and its embedded frames of reference, the result is that ours becomes a private conversation continually reaffirming our existing perspectives. While this might be interesting to note in a general sense, for poets it becomes downright existential. Poetry as a practice should be completely antithetical to any kind of linguistic restriction. The entire premise of poetry, the thing that fuels and continually renews it, is that it demands the expansion of language. We can achieve such expansion without advanced degrees, with that well-worn library card alone, but that’s not what many of us do. We go to graduate school instead.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 22:38:14 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015