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Thanks, Peter Quartermain You mention -- interpretation should be free enterprise. Not a monopoly of the author. Free enterprise? Monopoly? Could you please expound on the implications of this (I presume) metaphoric language? In what sense are we producers and consumers? this a capitalist model of poetry you propose, or what? The speaker of a poem often restricts interpretation of the poem by his/her reading of the poem. Personal choice decides what to emphasize. A selection process occurs that the reader does not participate in. (The poem is the middle ground. Not owned by the poet. A piece of real estate that is community property. And therefore, interpretation/meaning is not solely the sovereign of the author.) The voice's turn and tone, stressed syllables. The pauses that the reader of a poem inserts are not perhaps the choices the reader would apply. Subjectivity is suddenly a component. This is not to say that the poet who reads his/her work has not something to offer an audience. It just implies the outloud reader may interpret in an entirely monopolistic manner the various nuances of a poem. There is a vast difference to poems read aloud versus those read. The methodology of the inner self, (the secret self) which the reader is not fully aware of. This private self so deeply within each of us it would seem participates less when hearing a poem read aloud, than when the poem is encountered on the page. This a difficult point to make, Peter. But all of us are aware of the secret self. Some of us know something about it. The subconscious. That brief encounter perhaps only a brush with it. The poem itself perhaps more given to showing itself in that inner light which beams up when we read/hear a poem. (Because the poem may contain the secret inner self of the author, it is perhaps estranged the author. Not discernible. Can we see/hear ourselves as others see/hear us? What part of us shows when write/read a poem which we cannot/will not see?) For me, revelations of a literary nature are most intense when I read. Ernest Slyman HomePage www.geocities.com/soho/7514 email: [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%