Lit Fest 2008
Squeezing the life out of poetry
SORRY, but what a crashing disappointment. Tom Paulin - academic and pundit on The Late Show and Newsnight Review - managed to squeeze the very colour and life out of five wonderful poems in the space of an hour.
In a monotone voice he performed a joyless dissection of the poems of Edward Thomas, Emily Dickinson and Seamus Heaney, one after another - leaving a lifeless husk of each in his wake.
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In his close reading he identified stressed words, iambic pentameters and the rhythm of the language - as if this would bring the reader closer to the soul of the poem.
This academic approach, to my mind, was as tedious and pointless an exercise as picking apart a painting with a pair of tweezers to find out what makes it work.
9:27am Friday 9th May 2008
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