Poetry Is Communication

Poetry Is Communication

People who love poetry all have special poems in their lives to which they feel gratitude or indebtedness and one of the most common reasons for that special feeling seems to be that they had felt at the time, and have since, that a poem had communicated with them as though face to face. In Poetry Is Communication, Graham invites his audience to live and re-live their own personal relationship with all the poetry they have ever read and listened to since they were old enough to find pleasure and meaning in it, so that they go away at the end not only remembering what has always communicated and meant so much to them but cherishing its depths afresh, even as though for the first time. This evening was originally commissioned as the lead lecture for a conference on Poetry and Communication held at the University of Milan’s campus at Feltre in the pre-Alps and given there in Italian in 2000. This new lecture-performance, illustrated throughout from a wide range of poetry, tells a story - in voices as personal and engaging as good eye-contact between people - of discovering poems which talk straight to us, including by John Donne, D H Lawrence and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.