Re: Mellifluousness (was: Fluency wish-list)

In a message dated 2000/04/22 04:49:41 AM:

>> English?  Musical?  I've always thought my native language to be kind of
>ugly-sounding.
>
Lao Kou wrote:

"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed..."
>Doesn't get much better than that in my book -- assonance, alliteration,
>rhythm...<swoon>
>(Okay, so I stack the deck with poetry)
>As a native speaker, I, too, find it hard to get whipped up over an aluminum
>siding brochure or a "Crazy Eddie" commercial, but the loose iambic quality
>of everyday speech, the wealth of vowels, and /D/ and /T/ are a delight for
>me on a regular basis.
YES I like poetry too. But as Adorno states there can be no real poetry after
the Holocaust. Poetry of the past - with it's lyricalism, so highly thought
in Victorian Times - is a now reducible to confessionalism (the overwhelming
subjective "I" in poetry) & the Imagism of poetry is appropriated into the
language of advertising, politico-cultural propaganda, & Pop Culture.
    Conventional historical EuroAmerican ideas of poetry do not question the
past nor language itself.
    When Robert Frost-like poetry is used to sell gasoline, or when political
propaganda uses striking poetic imagery in its slogans, it is important to
question language itself.

    Then again poetry is about having deadly serious FUN with language...
pushing language(s) to their delightful far fringes. Sometimes bending them
(creative circuit-bending the hardwired conventions of language), sometimes
mangling, sometimes breaking/wrecking bloody HaVoK, running AmOk.... & then
also appropriating language (for poet Paul Celan, _his_ intense version of
German was his "war-machine" against the very language that slaughtered his
family & left Germany in ruins for yrs.), rediscovering "suppressed"
languages (Pidgin language poetry!!!!), inventing...*ta-da* re-inventing...
etc.

enuff said, never enuff done,
Vestigia Nulla Retrorsum,
zHANg