>
> I find that working people usually have, at least until you direct their
> attention to the fact, a very polymorphous appreciation of the emotive
> properties of language and often as a direct result of their not
encumbering
> themselves with the inhibitions of too much refined education. I've
always
> felt, as well, that unless poetry has a basic relevance to the world of
the
> physical workplace, like poems about ditch digging being comprehensible
to
> ditch diggers, that it becomes too much of a vacuous dilletante sport.
Not
> that it has not always somewhat resembled a vacuous sport of the tongue.
There
> is a crisis of spirit in the American poetry scene, despite some mature
poets
> doing their best to beat drums

OK, you beat the drum and I have to respond.

Where is it written, except above by implication, that all expression must
be relevant to the less well educated among us. Poetry, or any other form
of expression, that is created with a referential range or syntactical
density that requires some work of preparation or sophistication in
reading, may not be for "everyman, but that does not make its author or
his/her audience dilettantish.

It is not necessary, or necessarily desirable, that all of us have the same
cultural configuration in order for our society to be egalitarian or just.
My life would be far less interesting right now if I weren't reading a lot
of Wallace Stevens. Most of my pals around here would feel equally bereft
if there were to be a blackout of the remainder of the NFL season. I no
more understand their ability to read worlds into a backfield in motion
than they do my peculiar reading habits, "to see a world in a grain of
sand", or my interest in reading anything, come to that.

Much of modern poetry is about work, but it is work of the mind, written
for others who have developed the tools to decipher it by also working with
their minds, though not necessarily exclusively.

My idea of  a "vacuous dilettante sport" is a bunch of guys standing around
the back of a pick-up truck talking about who has the best snowmobile. But
I don't put them down for it, I just go hang around the truck where the
guys are talking about Eliot.

The brand of poetry currently being popularized at poetry "slams", and at
joints like The Newyorican Cafe has its uses, but I'm a complex guy living
in an even more complex world and the tools I need to decode that world are
only sold in the bigger kit.

 and dance around with a scary mask or play the
> concertina and chant Hari Hari. In part Wittgenstien slammed the poet's
head
> against the wall by stating the obvious, that 'true' discourse occurs in
the
> transcendence of silence...

Parallel to that, but more frightening and awesome is Adorno's reaction to
the Holocaust, that there can't be any more poetry. I can't live with that
either.
Without poetry, in the broad sense of the term, how can one survive that
knowledge?

it is scince
> fiction to believe that we ever communicate, a twist of topographic
inversion,
> a technical conundrum soon to be addressed by a dependence on electron
>binary- coding, but we could be talking a dead-end as actually being a
slow->bump in  the road,

Again, I think that you make too much of this. Connectedness is the
prescription to stave off the darkness. The ambiguity of meaning, as it
hangs in the air between us, just makes the game more interesting... But I
don't think that its always so unclear... You go into a butcher shop and
ask the butcher for a pound of lamb chops and a four line poem using the
word meat in the first line. He'll know exactly what you mean, won't he?
What's interesting is the sub-text, whatever is his unspoken reaction to
your request. And what you'll be thinking about is trying to guess from his
body language and voiced reaction what he is really thinking in reaction to
your request. Do it in fifteen butcher shops. Your meaning will be equally
clear to all fifteen butchers, but you'll probably get fifteen different
reactions.

 Blake's 'single vision thing here, and neglecting miracle myths. The
> problem is that we do not have a convenient cosmology in common and
therefore  we lack a shared context.

But we do have a shared cosmology- nobody trusts anybody else (Sorry, I
just rewatched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre).

Bruce