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i dont know quite how to respond to the opening post, because the complaint could be levelled against experimental literature as easily as it could be against various ways in which spoken and written english blur into each other.
or it could be a complaint about the education system, but it is not one that is set up to be coherent on the matter, so it remains simply a complaint. to which one can say yes yes or no no, but no real discussion can ensure.
for myself, i do not usually pay any attention to arguments for accessibility.
i simply do and engage with forms of experimentation that interest me.
if others do not like it, they do not have to play along.
i do not take objections to the work of a poet like susan howe seriously that start off with "i don't understand what she is saying, why is this not in plain english, and why is it poetry it does not rhyme..."
i find that i assume the person making that objection to be an idiot.
this of course may not be the best way to react, but there we are.
as for interpenetrations of spoken and written english, trying to stop it is like king lear's project--except maybe a bit more vociferous.
you could argue that this interpenetration increases the precision of the language in a given social space, fits it more readily to a particular mode of experience, and, conversely, that "standard" english is about denying modes of experience and making the language less precise by making it less flexible.
language changes. it is constantly bent in and through the histories of the people who interact with it and with their world through it. the bending of language is a feature of its historicity. this makes some folk nervous, it seems.
so they stomp a foot and declare, in the name of some fictional standard of correctness, that this is the kind of thing up with which i shall not put.
have fun sitting in your lawn chair at the ocean's edge, railing against the waves.
i am sure you'll make a fine snapshot for someone.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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