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The whole business of reading verses aloud implies largely binding and self-inflicted limitations. A spoken poem affords a singular interpretation to the poem, intrudes unfairly on the ear. The performance defined by voice may earn the poet monies. But how does one go about reading a poem for an entire audience? The voice must decide for the ear the various possibilities of inflection, tone, syntax, and the whole jumbled lot of meanings which are entirely visual, not given to the ear. But the eye. The listener is one world, and the reader is another. (How does one indicated the visual symbols of the printed verse. Those parenthesis or scattered spaces between the letters of words. Line breaks seem to go by the board. What is for the visual poem is not for the poem read aloud.) The poem read aloud approaches the trick of the ventriloquist dummy, the talking horse. The actor and public relations spokesperson. Not to say the audience doesn't wish to hear the author's interpretation of a poem. But the silence of the visual poem has merits that far exceed the spoken verse. My fear is that poet when reading aloud risks comparison to a talking horse. And the rear end of one at that. Ernest Slyman HomePage www.geocities.com/soho/7514 email: [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%