10 Tips for the Perfect Poetry Reading By Taylor Mali

10 Tips for the Perfect Poetry Reading
By Taylor Mali

The extent of the advice given to poets for how to present their work aloud at poetry readings usually boils down to reading slower, louder, and clearer. And while those are important improvements to almost anyone’s style of recitation (albeit extremely difficult to make yourself do, especially at the same time), there are several other factors to keep in mind if you want your audience to appreciate your skills as a writer and perhaps even buy your book after the reading.

1. Try to make the first thing out of your mouth poetry. What else could be more important than immediately giving the audience an example of what they came to the reading to hear? Insipid chatter between poems is bad enough, but introductory insipid chatter is even worse and tends to go on and on. Sometimes it will be five minutes before a poet even gets to the first poem! Everything you think you need to say—thank yous, shout outs, announcements about journals in which your poetry will be forthcoming, or plugs for your books and next appearances—all of this can be mentioned after the first poem. Or maybe not at all (except for the thank yous).

2. Know what poems you will read and have them close at hand. Don’t burden the audience with having to watch you flip through your own book or resort to looking at the table of contents while you make a self-deprecating joke only to realize finally that the poem you wanted to read is actually in your other book. Have your poems picked out in advance as well as the order in which you will read them. All of your fussing between poems counts toward the time you have been given to read.

3. Don’t be the poet who reads forever! Time limits do not only apply to bad poets; they apply to brilliant poets like you as well. Unfortunately, it’s usually the bad poets who have no concept of time. Before the reading, rehearse your set (with a stopwatch if possible) and do not go over the time you’ve been allotted. Losing track of how long you’ve been reading is no excuse for going over. Don’t ask the organizer to give you a signal when you have five minutes left or periodically look up and ask, “How am I doing on time?” It’s your responsibility to know how you are “doing on time.” If anything, be a little under time and leave your audience wanting more.

TAYLOR MALI is a teacher and voiceover artist. A classically trained Shakespearian actor, Mali was one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. He is a veteran of the poetry slam and the author of What Learning Leaves and several spoken word CDs and DVDs. He lives and writes in New York City. For more information, visit www.taylormali.com

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4. Keep your chatter between poems to a minimum. Most of what poets say between poems comes from nervousness and not any real need to explicate the poem.

5. Perform one poem by someone else. Depending on how much time you have been given, it’s a nice idea to celebrate the work of someone else beside yourself. Introduce your audience to one of your favorite poems by one of your favorite poets. Tell them where they can find this particular poem and two things you love about it. Then, at the end of your reading of the poem, say the author’s name one last time.

6. Perform at least one of your poems from memory. Once you experience the freedom of being able to make constant eye contact while having your hands completely free to gesture or hang naturally at your sides (which doesn’t feel natural at all but looks perfectly normal), you will want to memorize more of your work. And you should! The roots of poetry are bardic, not literary, so it is entirely fitting to work on making the recitation of your poem a better performance. Work at memorizing more and more poetry every day. The mind is a muscle; the more you use it, the stronger it gets.

7. Let the audience clap if they want to clap. If one definition of a “performance” poem is that after it’s over, the audience not only wants to applaud but knows that applause is appropriate, then you could say that one definition of an “academic” poem is that after it’s over—assuming you know when that is—the audience doesn’t even know if they are supposed to clap. Poets with limited performance skills will often request that audiences not applaud between poems because they are uncomfortable with the awkward silence that fills the room when they finish each poem. In fact, sometimes the only clue that such poets have finished a poem is when they say, “The next poem I’d like to read.” Certainly don’t telegraph the end of your poem by speeding up or trailing off or both. Rather build toward it, perhaps nodding your head ever so slightly at the end.

8. Make eye contact. Real eye contact. Look at different parts of the room as you glance up from your text every now and then. Poets who look at the exact same spot as they methodically lift their heads every seven seconds to pretend they are looking at the same person (whose chair is apparently attached to one of the lighting fixtures) aren’t fooling anyone. It is better never to look up at all than to do so perfunctorily to mask your nervousness.

9. If there is a microphone, use it. Granted, when the microphone is attached to a podium, you won’t have much choice but to use it. But faced with a solitary mic stand and the possibly awkward task of having to adjust it for your height while somehow also managing a bottle of water and the text from which you are about to read, you might decide you don’t need a microphone at all. Not a good decision, even if you have a big, boomy voice. Without a microphone, you cannot get quiet when the poem invites it, or else no one will hear you when you do. Unless the system sounds like crap and has for the whole night, use the microphone, even if it takes a few extra seconds at the outset to adjust it.

10. Enjoy yourself. This seems obvious, but audiences love to see people who love what they do, especially when they do it well. Smile a lot. Try reciting an entire poem while smiling. Let people suspect you are having the time of your life. And whatever you do, don’t ever suggest that your reading is a kind of torture you are inflicting on the audience (“Don’t worry. You only have to listen to three more!”). You are a genius, and your words are the proof. Knock ‘em dead!