Are you worried about "the linguistic semantic detritus of our particular phase of oligarchical consumerism"? Because you probably should be.
Are you worried about "the linguistic semantic detritus of our particular phase of oligarchical consumerism"? Because you probably should be.
Word are meaningless.
And forgettable.
Yeah, sure, the democratization of writing is totally a sort of "oligarchy." Also, wikipedia is elitist.
@deepomega "Oligarchical consumerism"? Consumerism perpetrated by a only small faction of persons sounds like the type of thing that would be right up Geoffery Hill's alley!
@deepomega I'm really glad I never had Professor Hill for anything. He sounds like a real pain in the ass.
"A spanking too good to be true"
I <3 Geoffrey Hill.
While I don't think that texting and facebook are any different than the journals or telegrams we used to write and are not leading to the demise of language, Duffy's comparison between poetry and texting is just wrong and insulting to the students who are suppose to enter in the competition and to the form she's talking about.
Now what I think Hill fears is that the casualness of the written word will result in a few people at the top redefining what poetry is by over-emphasizing superficial similarities between the two forms. Perhaps in our particular point in time the detritus will be what is elevated, but that doesn't mean that deserving writers or poets are destined to always be overlooked nor the popular writers of today will always be lauded as such.
Somewhere in Cambridge, though, there's a cabal of poets that feels the same way about Geoffrey Hill.
Aw, hell. It's that kind of jargon that made me lose interest in the Modern Language Association.