America's speech waterfalls forth in meltingpot tongues of Babel in

telegraphic ads, pop songs, street-corner rapping, bar room brag & bluster, bad-mouthing, put-ons, putdowns,

the home-made rhetorics of Whitman, Melville, Andrew Jackson Davis, L. Ron Hubbard; the streamclear prose of Thoreau or Hemingway; Gertrude Stein's devotions;

the sportcaster's spiel tracing a horse race over & thru the radio; the hawking, squawking, conning & jiving; preaching, teaching, wheeling & dealing; the jive-ass realms of speech; the hard-sell, the soft-soaping;

gossip columnists, breathless, telling-all; right-on; can you dig it? letting it all hang telling It like It is; out

anyway, it's all semantic;

hermetic trade lingo: jazz musicians, short-order cooks, truck-drivers, car mechanics, stereo buffs, doit-yourself, tool talk -- the technologic speech forms, machine-sprouted vocabularies whose sounds rebound in & out of USA livingrooms & bedrooms;

the self & tribe protective languages, shields against a rude deluge -- layer & layer -- worthless degrading words --

the black man's linguistic counter-attack on white America's word-gas clouds webbed with war-blood; the same cloud hanging over the American Indian (whose language was charged & precise as what a poet wants his to be), the Chicano, the Puerto Rican; curt New England speech brittle as icicles; the Southerner's smoothing-out of word sounds; the Midwesterner's flat speech of plains; the shtetl-to-ghetto Yiddishisms of the Eastern cities; the regional, community, tribal tongues;

shop-talk, cop-talk, bop-talk, TV's hypno-rant; the daily dose of phony baloney; the nightly hot air; animal invective clash of sounds as radical meets reactionary, as power crashes down on the powerless;

these sounds, the languages, these codes & messages, all meet in the ears & eyes of poets who have been Jacob-wrestling Europe since landing on Plymouth Rock.

America was claimed: a new place, a new space to build great cities on.

The poets began immediately to innocently & arrogantly fashion a language to meet & match America's impossible largeness.