As I said in my last post, YouTube is an amazing place to discover poetry. I feel very privileged to live in an age in which these online resources exist. Playing a poetry reading on YouTube will never replace going to a live reading, but it does allow you to watch both historic readings and readings in other countries. Plus, it does allow you to skip any boring bits or move onto another reading completely. I've watched many readings by the former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, whose popularity prior and subsequent to that post speaks for itself. In one of many engaging talks uploaded to YouTube, he says that when he's flicking through a book of poetry, he always reads the short poems first, just so he can get a flavour of what the book is like as a whole. It seems right to do this, because trying to getting into the zone in a bookshop is hard thing to do. To my mind, poetry is an ascension, then a descension - or is it the other way ...