Contemporary American poetry has a crush on the crumpled tissues and loose change of the vernacular—idiom, platitude, cliché. Consider some recent book titles: Quick Question (John Ashbery); Nice Weather (Frederick Seidel); Just Saying (Rae Armantrout). These are examples of what the linguist Roman Jakobson called the phatic function of language—interjections, small talk—designed to check if the channel of communication is working. The Romantic-modernist revolution that opened poetry to "the language of real men" (Wordsworth) and words that people "actually say" (Pound) culminates in poems with lines like "Thanks, Ray, this is just what the doctor ordered" and "Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed."
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