We think of a colloquial, direct style as easy to achieve, but if that were true then anybody could write as well as Eileen Myles. But this is obviously not the case. Not even Eileen Myles can write like this--all the time and at will. The directness of WCW and some modernist prose writers too is an achievement. It isn't even that easy to imitate.

I was thinking about this because Lorca's biographer commits this fallacy of tracing his poetic style to the speech of his native community. The fallacy can be seen in the fact that there is only one Lorca, and that his mature style is an achievement. He had to work through a stage of late 19th-century symbolist decadence, in his juvenilia, then a stage of elegant Andalusian preciosity, in a second stage of juvenilia. Never leaving behind this preciosity completely is also a key factor, since it creates a kind of tension. At times the preciosity occurs as a kind of camp excess, baroque flourish, Andalusian picturesqueness, or morbose pathos. A really bare-bones purity reminiscent of the medieval lyric appears too, but it is a real achievement when it does.

So to say Lorca writes the way he does because that's just the way they talk in the province of Granada is unbelievable stupid. The idea that his language just emanates from the earth.