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From: annie Category: TV Date: 11 September 2006 Time: 02:11 PM Review: Family, friends read out the names of their dead on sky news. why commemorate. you can't forget. these days ordinary people are more important than poets or statesmen on such occasions. why remember publicly? on channel five UK they had simon armitage read by rufus sewell. it was good. no poetry after auschwitz? after 9/11 it is easier to stomach than all the democratic stuff. no criticism of the suffering. pain buys you an opinion. poetry, rhyming even, is at least subjective without being too personal. all the real life testimony sounds like itself. reality imitates reality. cliches of authenticity. we need escape from the everyday to see it. artificial old poetry says it better because it is weird and formal and pierces the fog. swings and roundabout. what goes up comes down. sell survivors truth, buy the abstractness of art. maybe when we don't believe in the truth we no longer require truthful forms.