ABSTRACT
This chapter is an appeal to readers who have yet to embrace poetry as a revelatory and dynamic auditory encounter. The experience of listening to poems in performance, like W.B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, Elaine Feeney’s “Rise” and Stephen James Smith’s “My Ireland”, enriches their typographic iterations, since the addition of sound opens up the possibility of repositioning the poet and the reader in relation to one another, now jointly enveloped in a three-dimensional experience. Through this means, poetry demonstrates its ongoing democratic commitment to both the physicality of vocalisation and to the thrust of a poetic manifesto.
