Wallflowers
Michael Donaghy was the Poetry Society's Creative Reader in Residence in 1998. The fruits of some of his thinking in relation to this have just been published. Wallflowers is a lecture on poetry with misplaced notes and additional heckling.
Any act of communication begins with imagining oneself in the place of potential readers or listeners in order to anticipate one's effect. Agreed? It could be said, then, that the poet equals the reader, because poets are themselves readers in the tradition of poetry, because poetry is in itself a way of reading in that tradition, and because poets are the first (and sometimes, sadly, the only) readers and critics of what they've written. Conversely, reading is a form of ventriloquism: sensitive readers give themselves up to the poet for the duration of the poem.
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