Re: "Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect. . . . But
dialect
was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of
urban life, the impact of foreign immigration, the black presence in white
society, and the female influence on masculine authority."
 
I call members' attentions to my long (two part) article on Melbourne poet
Pi O, whose dialect poems owe so much to Pound.... there is a discussion of
Pi O's poetics vis a vis Pound as well as his use of dialect, and samples of
his work at  http://suite101.com/welcome.cfm/performance_poetry
 
Sincerely
 
Billy Marshall Stoneking
 
 
 
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Subject: EPOUND-L Digest - 30 Dec 1999 to 1 Jan 2000 (#2000-1)
 
 
> There is one message totalling 32 lines in this issue.
>
> Topics of the day:
>
>   1. Waal waal
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date:    Sat, 1 Jan 2000 10:40:56 -1000
> From:    Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Waal waal
>
> What was it about the sentimental James Whitcomb Riley that appealed to
> Pound? One obvious answer: Riley was a skillful technician (the analogy
> from another art would be Norman Rockwell), and Pound left the United
> States in 1908, when dialect poetry was taken more seriously than it's
been
> taken since. Fifty years later, when Pound included Riley in _From
> Confucius to Cummings_, the works of the Hoosier poet were a dead letter,
> but by then (as recordings demonstrate) Pound's own speech had become a
> dead language, completely cut off from the changing American idiom. The
> cringe-making Old Ez persona of the letters is a survival from the Riley
> era, a linguistic Piltdown Man.
>
> All this is by way of asking whether anyone has read Gavin Jones's
_Strange
> Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America_
(University
> of California Press, 1999). I haven't, yet, but a couple of sentences in
> the publisher's advertisement make me think I should, for Pound's sake.
The
> passage reads:
>
> "Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect. . . . But
dialect
> was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of
> urban life, the impact of foreign immigration, the black presence in white
> society, and the female influence on masculine authority."
>
> Jonathan Morse
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of EPOUND-L Digest - 30 Dec 1999 to 1 Jan 2000 (#2000-1)
> ************************************************************
>