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A Few Don'ts

02/12/2012

BBC Radio 4 - A Few Don'ts

The poet Lavinia Greenlaw revels in Ezra Pound's manifesto, A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste.

Poet and teacher Lavinia Greenlaw reappraises Ezra Pound's youthful manifesto, A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste. A century on, what can his lively don'ts do for today's poets?

The poet Lavinia Greenlaw reappraises Ezra Pound's manifesto, A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste. 

A century on, what can his lively don'ts do for today's poets? His passion to make poetry as modern as, say, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (first performed in the same year, 1913) drives him to pronounce on adjectives, ornament, metronomes and abstraction and in praise of the Image. 

With fellow poets Frances Leviston, Andrea Brady and Richard Price, and with the visual artist Cornelia Parker, psychologist Sophie Scott and composer John Woolrich, Lavinia explores the dos and don'ts of good poetry and the ins and outs of writing manifestos about it. 


Producer: Frances Byrnes
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