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Poetry and the Mystery of Performance
Anselm Berrigan has two Harriet posts (here and here) that present a letter from his late stepfather, the British poet and novelist Douglas Oliver. The letter nutshells Oliver’s analysis of the profound relationship between prosody and voicing in poetry and how that relationship affects each reader’s understanding of a given poem. I had attempted to get at something like this many years ago in a very rudimentary essay, but I had—and still have—neither the training nor the temperament, nor (needless to say) the insight, to do what Oliver does in his all too brief letter.Read More