How To Give A Poetry Reading

Next week my company is going to host a reading. Several people, mostly from writing and editorial, read a little bit of their personal writing, and lots of other employees usually show up to listen and drink free coffee. (And yes, my workplace is awesome.) So I thought I’d post about on reading your poetry for an audience. This is a huge topic, but these are just some thoughts.

First you have to pick your poems. You can just pick your best ones, or you might want to do some that kind of have a similar theme. If you’re worried that a poem reveals too much about you or casts you in a negative light, but you know it’s really good, I say don’t be chickenshit. Read it. It’ll probably be everyone’s favorite.

Now you probably want to practice reading them out loud, to yourself and/or in front of a friend or two, if possible.

The main thing is that you want to read loudly and clearly enough so that everybody can understand the words.

Make sure you know how to actually pronounce everything in your poem. (Don’t laugh, this has been an issue for me!)

If your voice shakes, you’re not obligated to worry about that. It’s no big deal. It can even make the audience root for you more. I almost always have a little bit of adrenaline going before I read my stuff. The one time that I didn’t, I gave a terrible reading. Everything went fine, but it was flatter than a crepe. A little bit of energy is good.

If you lose your place, you don’t actually need to say anything about it. You can let the pause hang there and find your place again. It’ll keep your audience’s attention.  

I usually don’t do long introductions to poems. If the poem doesn’t work at all without the backstory, you need to revise the poem. Sometimes there might be a little reference or something in there that you want to tell your audience about, since they aren’t in a position to Google it or whatever.

Whatever you do, DO NOT apologize for your work. At all. Ever.

But if you forget and wind up apologizing after all, that’s okay, too. 

Now a lot of academic poets in the U.S. use this kind of slow singsong voice when they read their poetry. You can hear it in this poem by Billy Collins, to which someone made this great little animation.

That reading style is not my favorite thing. I think it’s like using corporate jargon: conformist, elitist, and unnatural.

Some poetry is written for performance. Places like the Nuyorican Poets Café, where the poetry is often (but not always) influenced by hiphop, and The Green Mill in Chicago, where Marc Smith started poetry slams in the 80s, incubate this kind of work. I met Marc Smith at the Green Mill once, and he already knew of me because I had dated a good friend of his for a couple of years. He seemed really cool and he invited me to be a judge of that night’s poetry slam. I agreed, but then I left the bar before the slam started, because I can only take crowds for so long. Sorry about that, Marc.