Barry Brenesal responding to Mimi's excellent post: >Somebody once referred to poetry as emotion recalled in contemplation. Wordsworth called poetry "emotion recollected in tranquility." Well, that's probably true of Wordsworth's poetry. I do like the idea of the composer or poet as an actor: the emotion is realized through technique and contemplation and there's a certain distance between the artist and the emotion "for real." Anyone ever see the movie A Double Life? It came in at the tail of the film noir craze of the 40s. Ronald Coleman plays a Shakespearean actor in the role of Othello who comes to believe he is indeed Othello. As scary as Di Niro got in Taxi Driver, you knew deep down it was a performance and that someone was in superb control. An actor who completely melded with the part scares *me*, by golly. Steve Schwartz