I sympathize with Rhina, Tim. I, too, have a lot of trouble understanding you, in English, though there is a slight Kentucky twang (obviously acquired through long practice) in your accent that is occasionally recognizable.
As for Mike Juster, I had to stop Gone Baby Gone the other night and pull up the subtitles: "If youse stat believing she's gan in youse hat, what'll cumma youse?" Say what?
There were a couple of Americans who headed for Paris and became minor symboliste poets. One was named Viele-Griffin; I forget the other one, who wasn't much good either. Eliot wrote a couple of French poems, but I'm incapable of judging them on their merits. Pound wrote in several languages (including, I am told, English), none of them very well and none of them having contemporary speakers (so who could tell?). I am still not sure what language Geoffrey Hill writes in. West Midlands?
I think that the struggles of non-native English poets to attain some kind of fluency is poignant but ultimately depressing. Brodsky has been mentioned. Consider poor Philip Levine, who has been trying without much success to write in English for many years; Yvor Winters tried to help him but the case was too far gone. John Ashbery, of course, is a French poet who has as yet been untranslated into our tongue. Perhaps he is untranslatable. I am still not sure of the great poet of Canada, Anne Carson, who writes, I am told, in Canadian, a language with which I am, alas, unfamiliar. John Whitworth, noted English poet, writes in English, thank god, but uses a lot of words that aren't even in the OED. But I suspect that most of them are nasty anyway. So I just guess at what they mean. It's better that way.
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