>.
>Admittedly, though, I often detest hearing poems that I have met on
>the
>page, performed or trotted out on audio collections. Often the poets
>themselves bring nothing to their own work in performance, and in fact
>kill
it. I couldn't agree more - listening to tapes of Eliot and Auden left
>me unable to go near their work for years.
>Sometimes text is best left alone to allow
it to sing. One of the best readings I've heard was by Robert Creeley,
whose soft, understated delivery focussed the listener's attention
entirely on the sounds and meanings of the words themselves, rather than
the histrionics of the performance. There's an excellent documentary by
the Canadian film-maker Ron Mann, called Poetry in Motion, which
features Creeley, along with a lot of other excellent poets (Allen
Ginsberg, Christopher Dewdney, John Giorno, for example). If you can get
hold of a copy it's well worth watching. When I was living in Canada it
was easily found in local video stores, though I'm not sure what the
situation is in the UK and elsewhere. My favourite performance in that
film is by Kenward Elmslie, who sings his poem to a taped backing, and
has a quite beautiful voice. I've always thought Elmslie's work quite
astonishingly neglected, by the way - anyone interested can find find
Alice Notley's review of his long-overdue selected poems in issue 7 of
Jacket (http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket07/index.html). (An
enthusiastic aside to John Tranter: this is a really great magazine, my
>favourite in any format. I look forward to seeing many future issues.)
>
>St Paul was renowned (allegedly) for being a disappointing speaker, but
>his
letters made quite an impact. I should probably resist the temptation to
make a facetious and unsubstantiated comment about his profoundly
>detrimental influence on the history of Western civilisation.
>
>Nigel
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