Billy Collins: Saying poetry out loud adds tremendously to the experience in terms of musicality and drama if the reader knows how to read well. Actors are notoriously awful readers of poetry because they feel they have to project themselves into the poem instead of just letting it speak for itself. I would rather stare at a poem on the page in silence that suffer through the experience of listening to an incompetent reader. I can hear the poet's voice when I read silently. It's my voice, and I don't even have to move my lips.
Marc Woodworth: I'm a great admirer of hearing poems read aloud by a good reader --- not an actor who dramatizes what's on the page, but a reader who uses the voice as a medium to register the human pitch of the language. I enjoy reading for an audience, especially when I feel I've served a poem --- whether mine or a favorite poem by another writer --- in a way that brings it to a listener.
Honor Moore: I consider giving a poetry reading one of the forms of a poem's publication takes. Poetry is a written art, but it is also an oral/aural art. It began as spoken word and evolved to have a written manifestation. I love giving readings; it is in giving readings that I feel fully alive.
Mary Jo Bang: Yes, I give readings and yes, I think it's interesting to try to reveal how the poem sounded in your mind when you wrote it. I know I find it interesting to listen to a poet read his or her poems. It given you a greater appreciation for what the poet was trying to accomplish.
Cornelius Eady: I think audiences enjoy hearing a poet read his or hers work --- regardless of how good or poor a reader they might be. I've given readings where the audience has brought along the book, and read along silently to see if indeed I break the line the same way! The added dimension of actually hearing the poets voice rise from the page, actually hearing how the line is inflected, where they pause, how fast or slow they read it, is an experience many audiences love to discover. When I write, it's my hope I come up with something that will do justice to both the page and the ear.
Marge Piercy: I give a great many readings, about thirty a year. Being a good performer is important to me. For many in the audience, it will be their first pleasant experience of poetry after being tortured to dissect and destroy poems in a classroom. For me the spoken poem is the real poem and the poem that only the eyes experience is only half the poem.
Jeffrey Greene: Sound is at the essence of poetry and I think that there are few poets that do not recite their own poetry even as they write. It is important to feel and hear the words as they are spoken, as they are given full voice. A poet experiences a poem emotionally and physically--mouth, tongue, throat, lips. I've given numerous readings to share my own poetry and to promote poetry itself. In addition, Mirror Visions has commissioned composers to set my poetry to music and have performed my work in New York City and Paris.
Richard Matthews: Yes, with the occasion of my first book, The Mill is Burning, being published, I have started reading my own poetry to audiences. I find the process a bit too anxiety inducing as yet for it to be hugely enhancing for my own purposes; although I should say that aural qualities of my poems are vitally important to me, and reading aloud can be, has been, useful in both undeceiving an ear occasionally gulled by the distortions of silent composition and in confirming the rightness of certain measures in poems. My auditors have been kind, but I'm not sure what the process is doing for them. I enjoy going to readings and have often found myself judging poems much more generously (and I think accurately) in the context of oral presentation. Unfortunately, I do get distracted rather easily at readings, tending to linger on, indulge and play with the excellence of a line or image while the remainder of the poem buzzes by unabsorbed.
