poets' corner

While travelling courtesy of the Guardian's Picks to the London News Review Diary, I found some comments and links to Don Paterson's T.S. Eliot Lecture of 2004. Not terribly easy to find the whole text, but I managed with the help of the Google fairy.
Notice how it is buried deep in the Poetry Library site , just in case you were looking for it or something?? Talk about the invisible Web. As it qualifies as “news” it might not stay there for long.

Paterson says some interesting, if occasionally conservative things; dismisses Pinter’s attempts at a poem on Iraq with aplomb; gets very hippy and dreamy in the middle, with a quite peculiar parenthetical remark about marsupials, and is occasionally blistering;

'Of course we should meet poets at least half-way – the poem, in fact, demands the complicity of the reader in its own creation; however the amount of running certain readers are making in the relationship should be a matter of mortal embarrassment to them.'

And is sometimes quite pellucid, not unlike his Indian friend who said to him, ‘in this country you spend a lot of time trying to connect things that are already connected.’
Unfortunately the whole thing is very light on examples and therefore confined to generalisations. That’s just what I think...And I'm going to add poet Michael Donaghy to the TBR list, and keep an eye on the London News Diary, which the Guardian suggests is akin to ' taking a peek inside the mind of your oddest, funniest friend'. We shall see...