How we read and listen

This is a really fascinating and excellent response by Sue Ibrahim to some of the questions raised by that article about Larkin I posted about, and it's something that I've been thinking about a lot for a couple of days, mainly because I'm planning for my first readings in a long, long time.

I generally say a few words in introduction to each poem, but it is very hard to hit the right balance, I think. I'm very wary of leading the listener to approach a poem in a particular way, or giving them too much background information, but there are some where I think you need to give the listener/reader a way in.

I once saw a relatively well-known UK poet read (a writer whose work I like a lot), and their introductions started to become explicit instructions for understanding the poems, which rather ruined them for me. It was down, I think, to nervousness as much as anything else, but it's something to be avoided. Similarly, I haven't read a great deal about the lives of poets, or at least not until long after I've read their work.

Larkin about

I'm not in the habit of reading The Spectator, but Twitter drew my attention to this article by Nicola Shulman, which certainly throws some interesting new light on the poetry of old Laughing Boy himself, Philip Larkin.

I'm a bit of an agnostic where Larkin's concerned. I did The Whitsun Weddings as part of A Level English Literature (I can only imagine what we'd have made of this piece of lit criticism at the time), and didn't enjoy it much, then warmed to it a little later on. I suppose, as with the vast majority of poets, there are poems of his that I like, and others that I don't like, and others again that I really don't have a strong opinion of.