The poet they probably shouldn’t have sent. I watch anime and am sometimes accused of reading books. I'm writing a long gay giant robot story in verse—probably this millennium's best yuri mecha epic poem, through lack of competition.


'Now praise those names on tombs of steel engraved | And toll this rotting country’s countless bells.'


Across the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the divide or separation between reader and writer. I thought about it again a few months ago, after taking a friend to a poetry reading—a friend who reads a great deal of literature, of which poetry is only a small proportion. ‘Those introductions and explanations between the poems—why don't they put them in the book?’ he wanted to know. On behalf of the Poets’ Union, I trotted out the standard justifications: that the book is a more considered environment than the recital, allowing readers to encounter poems at their own pace; that in supplying context, which in any event can only be partial, a poet is operating in an autocratic rather than a democratic manner by restricting the interpretative liberties of the reader; and that anecdotal asides are not really offered as elucidatory insights, but as a relief from the effort of attending to intense and unfamiliar formulations of language. ‘Yeah, I think they should put them in the book,’ he said, unconvinced. ‘Or, better still, in the poems.’

Simon Armitage, A Vertical Art, p. 249; shared not because I take a particular view on this, but because it's funny.


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