Poems in Performance

So I was at this Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J., conference over the weekend in Denver. It was a good time and I met a lot of swell people with a passion for this obscure Victorian. One of the highlights was not reading my own paper but hearing British actor Richard Austin perform a number of Hopkins's poems. GMH wrote with his ear--his poems are marked up like a music score--and believed poetry's meaning wasn't fulfilled until it was performed. Austin grew up near Hopkins's own hometown, and so may even have a similar accent as the poet. More importantly, he loves the poetry and tries to draw out its meaning and sound together in his delivery. For poems as quirky as Hopkins's, hearing them opened their pleasures up to me in a way I wasn't prepared for. You can listen to a couple poems at Austin's website, conveniently linked below:

http://www.richard.austin.sh/index.htm