IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung–for one reason alone–because it works.A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing–measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era–we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas.
