James Wilkes, PhD

Durham University, United Kingdom

     The Poetry Reading as scene

     of Writing, Experience and Sound

What is the range of possible relationships between the written, the heard and the experienced? What happens when the implicit hierarchical order which sets the process of hearing after writing and before experience is broken down? This presentation reflects on the particular ways in which writing, sound and experience are joined and broken in the context of the poetry reading, using an experimental psychological paradigm called Descriptive Experience Sampling to explore what happens when writing becomes more than a token for the exchange of private experiences.