In a message dated 97-12-16 07:41:50 EST, [log in to unmask] writes:

> So many working people don't have time for such foolishness as touchy-feely
>  poetry.  They do have time for television and other diversions, though.
>  All too often the need for constructive, creative expression is denied.

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 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... as good as sucking on a worm-hole. 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, 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.

Prattles on BP help us to build context in the imaginary/virtual  world of
Bullamanka.

I'm really happy when I input complex sets of jabberwock into my computer and
suddenly it starts feeding me back some really heavy philisophical clarity and
revitalizing my interest in philosophy and poetry.

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