Quoting Joanna Boulter <[log in to unmask]>:
> I must admit that when I heard Ted Hughes had died my immediate reaction
> was - "Now I shall never hear him read."
>
> There is an unarguable extra dimension given by the voice and personality of
> the poet. But I haven't yet sussed out if there's any permanent effect on
> the poetry in those sad cases where the poet happens to be a bad reader of
> his/her own work.
>
> Do you think a really bad reader would cause anything to seep into the work
> from the earliest stages of writing? It seems quite likely that a good
> reader would get his/her own voice into the language on the page, almost in
> spite of him/herself. I mean physical voice here, not 'voice' -- breathing,
> word-handling, sentence construction, etc -- so the converse might well be
> the case.
>
> As Allen Ginsberg put it - " To read Shelley's poem ['Ode to the West Wind']
> aloud is to breathe his breath."
>
James Berry wrote a book on this - what was it called? have i even got his name
right?
Les Murray has slept on my floor and once
> >> drove me to
> >> Melbourne from Canberra.
Les Murray slept in my Warrandyte house, had a touching conversation with my
then wife about his autistic son, and while he and I stood waiting for Chinese
takeaways, he explained more about the Chinese language and orthography than I
could take in...He said the NSW police excused him from doing up his car safety
belt.
Max
AC:> >> The only person who ever reduced me to total
> >> tongue-tied awkwardness
> >> was Graeme Chapman from Monty Python
> >> Alison
Poets who on meeting looked briefly at me being tongue-tied before looking away:
A.D.Hope
Fleur Adcock
Geoffrey Hill
M
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