Thanks for the review. Sounds like a good book. I'm with you on "cognitive." Especially when coupled with "dissonance" to make today's euphemism for people who act in complete opposition to the facts, implying that they are either liars or idiots.

I suggest the difference between Homer Simpson and W is that Homer is being creative, and Bush mangles discourse he has no sympathy with. Homer is inventing, filling in, jazzing. Bush is a man who despises accurate and truthful language, and it shows. When he uses slang it feels forced and fake. He does not jazz up words for fun, he ruins syntax from lack of understanding.

Slang is the irrepressible vitality of language, which is, I have come to believe as a poet, a living thing (literally), which uses us symbiotically. We feel that we make language, and it is true enough, but language also makes us. Think of it. In order to join the larger society outside the family, we must internalize the very words that our dead ancestors spoke. The system must become so innate we do not notice it.

There is always far more to language than the analysts can keep up with, which ought to be, but never is, a bar to the presumption of the merely academic. Language changes unpredictably and faster than we can ever comprehend, because it IS the tool with which we try to comprehend. Observer and observed?

As for slang and poetry: The observation, which you rightly praised, that the brain, on coming across an unusual usage in Shakespeare, reacts not with confusion, but as if being awakened from a bored trance--that says a great deal about poetry, as much as it says about slang.

I know it is fashionable to mock poetry nowadays, and to mock poets as idealistic fools. We aren't. We are as varied as any other group of humans. The difference is we have given our lives over to a love of our native language.

When the conditions that have allowed their counterintuitive survival change, as they will, and the muttering incompetent hacks who dominate public discourse nowadays disappear (don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out, fools), slang will still remain, and so will the poets.

Quite funny. I see one reader took you seriously, and fussed at you for describing civilization as men's attempt to impress women. There IS that, and I have written a joking poem or two in that vein myself.

You of course care about the poems you make fun of, or would not be able to allude to them so specifically and with such humor. T. S. Eliot as a "small dark cloud." Nice. He's one of my favorites, but quite apt.

I have learned this self-deprecating behavior about poetry, too. Have declared that the two things that most frighten Americans are math and poetry, both of which I love.

Only thing is, I AM a poet, and not the peut-etre type either (modern cognate, wannabe). A novelist, too, thank God, or I would get no respect at all. Poets get envy, but not respect, surely an unusual situation.

And while I am as ready as anyone to make fun of poetry, and have done a lot of that, I do get tired of tugging on the forelock. Yassuh, yassuh, all you peoples who hates poetry, yall sho does have it right, suh.

The fact is I have loved poetry with all my heart since I was sixteen. The real stuff is the finest thinking humans are capable of, the finest responses, the finest words. I grew up in Mississippi in the 60s, and one of the reasons I love poetry is that it spoke truth although the state lied.

I cannot imagine life without it, and I am proud of knowing it. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marvell, Dickinson, Donne, Yeats, Wilbur, Frost, St. Vincent Millay, Robinson, and on and on.

People don't apologize for going to monster truck hauls. Why should a poet apologize?

You of course know exactly what you are doing. Thanks.

The hidden costs of the war, indeed. A terrible injustice is being done to our soldiers, just as it was during the Viet Nam war. But as hideous as that injustice is, there is another hidden cost, one that the whole country bears.

When the grunts realize that the government is using them, and has no intention of helping them with the injuries they suffer, what will happen to their motivation? Will anyone be willing to die for a country that treats its soldiers so shamefully?

And what will happen to our great army then?

Glitch83 (and probably others): Poplawski and his like are scary indeed. But they can only do damage in isolated outbreaks because their craziness has not been acted on. That's horrible enough, but it is the worst of it. Can you imagine these nutballs trying to form an army? Any group of sane people could easily outthink their broken brains. We would destroy them in combat. Then put our guns down again.

We may have to fear rightwing demagogues swaying the popular vote. But we don't have to fear armies of these creeps.

Porn is boring. Those guys think sex is "pounding."

As for shaving the pubes: It may be fashionable in the last ten years, but believe me, there are plenty of us males over a certain age who think it's silly. We prefer grown women, not somebody pretending to be a child.

And your real body is infinitely sexier than a surgically constructed fantasy. The pleasures of sexuality are personal, not social. It doesn't work to spend energy trying to impress others if you are depriving yourself.

Dear TorontoTuna--I was about to indite a long fit of praise for Bang the Drum Slowly, which is a wonderful movie and by far the best baseball movie I have ever seen, believable, realistic, and incredibly moving. Then I saw your comment. Thank you!