Poets reading their poems...

The Forward prize tried to add glamour or celebrity by bringing in actors to read the poems. As if the poets, lacking in a Rada training course, could not inject the right meaning or excitement to their own words. Don't get me wrong, I love listening to actors read, or rather act, out lines that other people have written.

But there is something very interesting and intimate hearing the inflection the poet chooses to put into their own words, the pauses, the emphasis on certain words I might have skimmed when reading it on a page. Plus, the pleasure of their personal accent, tone, personality that then becomes attached to the poem when I read it in the future and still hear the poet's voice in my head.