The American language, like the American landscape, is a trash heap. On top of the hundreds of thousands of loan words from over three hundred languages handed down from its British forebear, American English is strewn with the numerous subcultural slangs and professional jargons of a diverse, technocratically administered society, as well as the acronyms and neologisms born to designate two industrial revolutions’ worth of concepts, companies and consumer products (the most phonetically bizarre are undoubtedly those coined by the brand consultants in today’s tech and pharmaceutical sectors). From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) to Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964), Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1973) and A.R. Ammons’ Garbage (1993), the sheer ontological profusion of a nation born and raised in capitalist modernity has fascinated its poets, many of whom have taken up the task of sifting through this detritus in their work, navigating the strange coagulations and dialectical reversals of ‘the natural’ and ‘the artificial’ that have ensued from the often violent, sometimes salutary contact between the cultures and economies of Europe and the dimensions of North American space.
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