How to Perform Your Poetry (the Way I Say It Should Be Done)
First, piss on the mic stand to mark your territory.
Note: At some point, everybody’s had to irritably scroll through the equivalent of Jonathan Livingston Seagull to get to the actual recipe for like cacio e pepe or whatever they’re trying to cook. I feel you. If you want to skip the opening rant and go to the practical tips on how to perform your poetry live, the section’s called Tips for reading less bad-like—it’s in big letters. If you’re reading this on a desktop browser, you can use the navigation on the left to hop down directly.
Here at Discordia Review, we traffic in controversial opinions. This is one of mine: many people are perfectly capable of enjoying a poetry reading (or “show,” as I optimistically insist on calling them). The reason most sane individuals do not enjoy poetry readings is because of you people.
“You”: Who I mean by “you people”
Given the option of attending a poetry reading versus a concert, vernissage, minor traffic accident etc., under most circumstances you would have to be pretty in the tank for verse to choose the reading. So, if you are a person who would rather squirt strychnine into your eyeball with a hypodermic needle than attend a reading, you can stand over there for a minute, this part isn’t about you.
No, when I say “you people” I mean those poetry scene people, the aspirants and hopefuls clinging like barnacles to the face of poetry, who have pilled themselves into thinking that the dominant performance style and its attendant tropes are a feature of the genre rather than a bug. You know the tropes I mean:
And so on. Downright disgraceful performances, all of the above,1 and yet at the end of each debacle the speaker receives their pre-weighed ration of applause anyway. Why?!
It is an unfortunate characteristic of poetry that it appeals to some very corny people, and when enough of them are gathered2 they reinforce one another’s worst tendencies. These habits might have been sanded down had these people been forced to perform for (and win over) smart audiences3 that expected better of them and were willing to let them know when they were embarrassing themselves. But this is seldom the way it goes. The fact that poetry is often obscure, messy, experimental, difficult etc. is no excuse for giving up on trying to reach people with it in a live setting. Good performance is what allows poetry to bridge the gap—bad performance is like trying to swing across it on a wet spaghetti noodle.
Performance is a discrete skill from writing. It comes less naturally to some, but it can be learned by most. Ultimately, one’s performance style is an outgrowth of one’s innate voice and thought, albeit an outgrowth that must be refined through practice to develop properly. As such, this post (like its predecessor on how to run a poetry reading) can’t tell you everything you need to know about how you can learn to read well in your own idiom—but it might be able to help you stop reading badly, which in its own right would be a noble service to the art.
Tips for reading less bad-like
Preparation
Write good poetry. I’ve never managed to do it myself, but if you can, it’s a great place to start!
Spend time reading aloud at home: your own poetry, poems you love, prose, whatever. In any text, even the most prosaic, rhythms and complimentary sounds will organically emerge. As you develop your ear, you will start to key in on a general cadence that makes sense to you. Watch your breathing—if you try to jam in too many words without taking a breath, your voice will weaken and your cadence will soon falter.
Linebreaks remain the great challenge for many readers. In traditional metrical poetry their function was clearer, indicating a pause,4 but contemporary writers tend to be quite arbitrary with them—sometimes stopping at the end of each line, sometimes barreling on through into the next. If you don’t already have a clear sense of what linebreaks are doing in your own poetry, the notion of the line as a breath unit is a useful starting point (essentially that each line should contain no more than what can be uttered in a single unstrained breath).5 Which is to say: read as naturalistically as you can, as though speaking conversationally, and then, once you’ve reached a certain level of functional comfort, start experimenting with your weirder ideas.
As a challenge, read a dry, non-literary text and try to convey emotion without varying the tone or volume of your voice: no yelling, no smiling, no fake crying, no gritting your teeth etc. Much of what sounds to us like emotionalism in the spoken word is actually a function of rhythm: where you pause, where you place emphasis. Overt theatricality in a poetry performance usually feels heavy-handed; if you can nail how to read with a flexible, regular cadence, often only minor ornamentation is required to hit your mark.
If you have the self-confidence, record yourself reading in private, and make notes of where you seem to consistently waver, and the places where you really hit your stride. Modify your approach accordingly.
Time yourself. It is insanely rude to go over your allotted time, whether as an open micer or a feature. You should absolutely know how long it takes you to get through your set before you hit the stage. Remember to add on some time for any intro or awkward interstitial banter you expect to attempt, and remember: it’s better to read one good poem without rushing than it is to try to jam two in and perform them sloppily. And hey, if you do your job well enough people will sometimes ask you to keep going6—I saw Fellow Traveller Gwen Aube get the encore treatment just a coupla months ago. Waiting till you’re asked feels a lot better than trying everyone’s patience.
You don’t need to memorize your stuff, though it can help your presentation. What you do need to do is be familiar enough with your own work that you can read with a minimum of fumbling, and to be able to at least glance at the audience on occasion without losing your place.
If you’re reading a longer set (say over ten minutes) try to pace out your setlist so that there’s a good flow between pieces. If you’re more experienced or have a wider variety of stuff available, I also recommend bringing a few extra pieces so that you can make some game-time decisions if the crowd isn’t feeling what you’re doing—there’s nothing worse than bringing a bunch of raunchy material to an extremely tight-assed show and having to die a thousand deaths because your jokes keep bombing and you have nothing else to turn to. On the other hand, many times I have assumed an audience would not be game for more risqué material, but was able to pivot my set a bit after realizing they were rowdier than I gave them credit for.
Showtime
Use your eyes and ears. Poets seldom get soundchecks. Hopefully your show has a competent tech to set the mic up and ride the sliders on the board to account for howler monkeys and churchmice, but in my experience that’s the exception. If there are multiple speakers before you, watch and listen: loudness, clarity, feedback, grotesque mouth sounds and indrawn breaths; how far are they from the mic, do they have to stoop, do they seem to be talking normally or yelling etc.
Whether you read off your phone or print your setlist out, make sure your stuff is organized and readily available before you go up. You feel like a jackass when you have to riffle through a disorganized stack of papers / apps looking for the poem you want to read, but hey, this is only because you look like a jackass.
On this note, make eye contact with the host every once in a while to see if you’re getting the sign to wrap it up or keep rolling.
The best advice I ever heard about performing cunnilingus also often applies to reading poetry: move your tongue in wet, irregular figure-eight patterns. Wait, no, it was the other thing. Uh, make sounds like you’re eating a delicious meal so the recipient knows you’re really into what you’re doing and doesn’t become self-conscious? That’s not bad, but not quite it either… oh right, I remember. It’s, “Whatever you’re doing, do it slower than you think you should.” If it feels like you’re reading slowly, read even slower than that. Time dilates while you’re on stage, and nerves lead to undignified hurrying. As long as you didn’t overpack your set, you have plenty of time to do what you need to do in there. Oh yeah, and don’t be afraid to use your fingers.
Don’t bury yourself. Whenever a reader says something like, “This poem isn’t very good” and then proceeds to read it anyway I want to stand up and shout, “Then why the fuck are you reading it to us?” If you don’t even think it’s good, you are openly wasting the audience’s time, which is frankly insulting. Equally loathsome: “I wrote this on the way here.” This kind of self-deprecating move is incredibly annoying, because it doesn’t allow the poem to stand on its own: you’ve basically placed the audience in the position of having to be like, “Oh, no no, it was good though!” because they pity you, and you will never know what kind of reaction you would’ve gotten if you didn’t grovel for one.
Limit your intros. Some very charming or thoughtful writers are able to do a lot of good stuff with their stage patter, to the point that the poetry becomes just one feature of the overall performance that is the poet’s self (Eileen Myles is a great example of this). More often though, writers blather on and on and on about what fancy retreat they were on when they wrote the poem; or how it fits into the asinine concept of their forthcoming collection; or how kooky they are for writing something so like weird!, until their voice begins to sound like it is whittling away at the already uncomfortable seat beneath you and you are finally impaled by it under the weight of your own polite, mandatory attention. Most poems require no intro at all if written well—others can make do with the most minor contextual details. It’s good to establish some rapport with the audience if you can, but if you’re going to tell a whole ass story, it better be funny or goddamn fascinating, so help me Shiva.
Consider delegating. Do you really, honestly, genuinely hate reading publicly? Have you tried it out enough times to know it’ll never be for you? And do the demands of having a writing “career” mean you keep getting hauled back up there despite your distaste? That’s fine! All it means is that you have the opportunity to do something more interesting with your readings. Get friends to read in your stead; pre-record your voice and play it over the PA, possibly with a bunch of weird distortion over it; project your poems on the wall; hand out your poems like hymnals and conduct the audience as they collectively read them aloud. There are a million ideas out there that don’t involve you groaning your way through a reading like someone is forcing you to perform by holding a gun to the head of your least-favourite cousin.
A few exemplars
Once again, many different kinds of poet out there, and a lot of my suggestions only obliquely apply if you’re doing, say, sound poetry. Still, it never hurts to learn from people who are legitimately good at what they do.
This is probably the single poetry reading I have watched the most times, despite it taking place very much in the winter of the poet’s years, and in the airless institutional confines of the Library of Congress. But Philip Levine is, for my money, a faultless reader, and the combination of his amiable stories and a selection of his finest poems makes this a blissful watch.7 The clip above should start with Levine’s opening poem, “Baby Villon” (from 1968’s Not This Pig), and it’s worth following along and considering how Levine paces his words out. He’s inconsistent with observing his own linebreaks because he places his emphases for rhetorical and emotive reasons: consider how he moves rather quickly through the expository stanza (“He asks me to tell all I can remember…”) that establishes the speaker’s background and connection to the poem’s subject, but takes his time with the visceral, sensuous words of the stanza that follows it, so that each has ample time to settle in the reader’s ear, eye, and mouth:
The windows of the bakery smashed and the fresh bread Dusted with glass, the warm smell of rye So strong he ate till his mouth filled with blood.
His cadence has something of the preacher in it, something of the political orator, something of the father recounting a deep truth to his child. You have the sense from the way he speaks that you are being told something real, something it is now incumbent upon you to know.
The point of this post is not to be prescriptive about what you read (that’s what the rest of our Substack is for), but how you do it. If your preference for poetry is lush, confessional, and focused on The Body, better to look to someone like Warsan Shire for inspiration than most of the spoken word or Instagram “spilled ink” types. She is not only much stronger in terms of craft and imagination than the run of the mill, she is a skilled and comparatively subtle performer. Despite a bit of nerves showing through in the above piece (“The House”), Shire has an admirable stillness, meaning that when she deviates in her delivery (leaning into her accent for “Are you gonna eat that?” for example) it makes those lines pop; she also does good facial work, casting her eyes down when she alludes to abuse, giving a smirk and a light eyeroll as she documents the ineptitudes of certain lovers. Her diction is impeccable, and the way she varies her affect and register works very nicely for the piece, which slides from the comedic to the macabre from section to section. It’s all a bit more theatrical than I tend to go for, but perhaps the best of its (very, very popular) style I’ve come across.
Contemporary spoken word gets a bit of a rough go around here, but that’s only on the basis that it is all complete dogshit, not any personal gripe! That said, even the most accursed styles have their outliers, and Vancouver’s RC Weslowski is an admirable example of how, by swimming against the dominant tropes (not once does he affect a Brooklyn accent or compare himself to a political prisoner!) you can make honest a much debased form. In the above “Floyd Jones,” a virtuosically vulgar riff on roughneck blue collar storytelling, Weslowski hollers his way through dynamite line after line (“the road was as narrow as a cunthair and about as straight as a pisstrail”), leaning into his natural, amiable holler to help get across his underlying theme about the music of common speech, the way men who’d never think of themselves as “poets” use language as fondly and creatively as any scribbler. I’ve heard construction guys tell stories like this, and this actually sounds fairly naturalistic; you can hear from the audience’s reactions that they are processing it as a story (the horrified gasps at the truck stopping on the railway tracks). But pay attention to the density of the lines and his breath control, the way he clearly knows his money lines (“it sounded like Thor smacking his dick on the mountain”) and manages not to step on his own punchlines, giving everything juuust enough time to breathe before he surges onward.
You no doubt have your own stylistic aspirations, and there are innumerable valid models out there: the serial killer flatness of Ai; the brassy, shit-talking swagger of Harold Norse; Joshua Chris Bouchard’s forceful declarative lines, each arcing to the point like a javelin; the calming, faintly songlike cadence of Robin Blaser; Lydia Lunch’s jittery, nicotine-witch screeds;8 practically every holder of an Irish passport. Read, listen, and then pretend you’ve never heard of them once you’ve stolen all your belly can hold.
The end
You know what, that’s it, this blog is over.
Karen Connelly might be the most irritating reader, full stop, in all of Canadian letters.
A community, or, to use its traditional collective noun, “an enoughalready of poets.”
The trouble of course is that the audience at most readings is nearly always composed mostly of one’s peers. It takes some stones to jeer someone right before you yourself have to get up there and do your own set.
Of course, even in days of yore, how a linebreak should be treated orally was very much at the performer’s discretion—consider how Shakespearean actors convert the sewing needle rhythm of stresses of iambic pentameter into a melodious but plausibly naturalistic form of speech, rather than screeching to a halt at the end of each line.
One favour you can do me though? Don’t do that breathy upward lilt at the end of each line. I’m aware of the gendered politics around “uptalk” but this isn’t that—it’s a weird theatre kid affectation that is supposed to sound sort of ethereal but usually comes across as goofy because the stress doesn’t align with what is actually being said.
Let’s be honest, this probably won’t ever happen for most poets. But it especially won’t for those jabronis who don’t read the footnotes. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’ll be doing more encores than Foghat in Toledo before you know it.
Levine’s masters were types like Whitman and Lorca who held forth on the great themes of human nature with sensuous, passionate, visionary language, but he was also a scrawny Detroit Jew who was born to the working class and grew up surrounded by the wounded and romantic anarchist and communist refugees of Spain and Italy, who studied under Berryman and counted writers like W.D. Snodgrass and Galway Kinnell as peers. He knew the value of taking Poetry seriously without being a puffed up snob, in other words.
Like her male analogue Jello Biafra, a lot of the actual content of Lunch’s stuff is little more than vinegary ranting being passed off as spoken word, but I respect how accurately her performances simulate being cornered at a party you shouldn’t have stayed at by a terrifying woman who has an itemized list of every way the world has screwed her over and will not let you go till you can recite it back to her perfectly.
Excellent! And hilarious as well. Got vicarious satisfaction from footnote 1 🤣🤣🤣
Fantastic piece, equally catty and informative - thank you