Most days, I listen to someone reading poetry, even if it’s just clicking on the Poetry Foundation Poem of the Day in my news reader. I also stop listening very quickly if it doesn’t go right, and by that, I mean, does the reader establish an end-of-line note and keep returning to it throughout the reading? If not, I’ll keep listening. George Szirtes (about whom I know pretty much nothing else) avoids this phenomenon, and I like that.

Test your own reading. Pretend the reading is a musical performance for a solo instrument and listen to the note that sounds at the end of most of the lines. If you hear the same end-of-line note repeated throughout the reading, go back and deliberately vary it each time. It’s a trap easily fallen into (speaking from experience here) but, once identified and acknowledged, also easily escaped from.

She reads her poem You here. More of her readings here.

When I was in the middle phase of dissertation writing, I developed a technique of reading I found so helpful and enriching that I want to urge it upon the whole world. This technique is a simple thing—“obvious”—yet I was forty before it ever occurred to me to do it. Now I can’t imagine my life as a serious reader of poetry without it. I’ll tell you the back story.

- So… Readings. What’s the point?

- Why Are Readings So Awkward?

(cross-posted at Very Like A Whale)

A reading. I find it a tiny bit overdone, and would have wanted to have less emphasis on the outbreath in many places, but still, he definitely has what it takes.

Here we have it again, in the voices of two Norwegian poets who do the readings for these two delightful videopoems by Kristian Pedersen (via Moving Poems):

(And just in case you think all Norwegian poets read like this, you can check out more Kristian Pedersen filmpoems at Moving Poems – Norway definitely has its fair share of non-singing poets.)

The House Gift by Joanie Mackowski (1 min)
poem text

Lovely warm voice and relaxed, natural reading style. I had never heard of her before, I have to say, but am happy to have found her voice.

I’m a big fan of Grace Paley’s poetry, as various Very Like A Whale posts have shown. Sadly, though, liking a poet’s poems is never any guarantee that one will like that poet’s reading of his or her poems. In this case, however, we are definitely lucky.

So what do we have in this You Tube video? A short, elderly lady with big glasses, a red hat, a gravelly old-lady voice and a pronounced New York accent. She doesn’t look up at the audience much while she reads. She uses no hand gestures or body movements. And she looks tiny and unprepossessing behind the big lectern at which she stands.

She clearly has a wicked sense of humor and is just plain wise, but it’s not just that that makes her completely engaging. The first big thing she has in her favor from my perspective is that she reads the poems as if she’s talking to you – conversationally. No rising inflections or declamation, no plaintive lingering on the last word/syllable of a line, no self-conscious ahem, I am reading a poem voice. She is obviously a natural story-teller, which helps – lots of convincing variation in tone, pitch, pace. Clear delivery. Appropriation of the material. She is in the poem as she reads. To repeat what I said of a couple of different poets in a recent post: what you feel when Grace Paley reads is not: Here I am, reading my poem. What you feel is just: Here is my poem.