Thinking Verse: Denise Riley Reads Milton and Fashion Exerts a Pressure

This is amazing:

Denise Riley reads Milton.

Also check out the other contents of Thinking Verse. The Henri Meschonnic essay, in particular:

There have always been fashions. But this fashion exerts a pressure, the pressure of many accumulated academicisms. An atmospheric pressure: the air of the times.

Opposed to this suffocation of the poem by poetry, there is a necessity to demonstrate [manifester], to demonstrate the poem, a need that some of us sense from time to time, in order to escape a speech suffocated by the power of literary conformisms that do nothing except to aestheticise schemas of thought which are in fact schemas of society.

An idolatry of poetry produces voiceless fetishes which pass themselves off as, and are taken as, poetry.