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Poet Roundtable with
Children's Poets
3.
AOTW: Does reciting poetry enhance the experience? Do you ever do readings of your own poetry for an audience?
Maria Testa: I think reciting poetry is a different experience. It's always interesting to hear someone else recite my poems, to listen to another voice, to hear different rhythms and inflections. I do read my own work out loud quite a bit, at schools and libraries, bookstores and conferences, to myself. I enjoy the recitation experience very much, but there's also something special about reading poetry silently, when no one else knows how loudly the music is playing in your head.
Nikki Grimes: I read my poetry to audiences at every opportunity. In fact, I create the opportunity! The poem on the page is only half the experience. The poem performed closes the circle, makes the poem whole. For me, that's not only true in front of an audience, but also when I'm all alone. I don't know whether a poem is working until I've read it aloud, until it hits my ear. For me, hearing the poem is critical to writing the poem.
Brod Bagert: I am what some people refer to as a "performing poet." I travel over two hundred days a year, and each year perform poetry for about a hundred thousand children and twenty-thousand adults. At some point in each of those performances I say something like this:
"How do we find the music we love? We certainly don't just look at the notes on a page with our eyes. Someone plays the notes out loud with feeling so we can hear the music.
"And how do we find the poems we love? We certainly don't just look at the words on the page with our eyes. Someone says the words out loud with feeling so we can hear the poetry."
So you see, I really believe in the performance of poetry. Sometimes I get carried away and say something like this --- "A poem does not exist on the page; it exists in the air as sound spoken from the mouth of a human being." That's probably a little overboard and you certainly don't have to believe it. But this is a promise: you will enjoy poetry more fully when you read it out loud.
Andrea Perry: I've done a lot of reading my poetry out loud recently at book signings since my first book was just released last month. And though I feel that reciting poetry out loud most certainly enhances it, particularly when you are familiar with what you are reading, I think that kids also feel as I do, that sometimes it is also a pleasure to read your favorite stuff over and over again to yourself.
Jane Yolen: I do quite a lot of reading both poetry and verse, to adults and to children. I think I am a good reader and that it enhances the poetry. However, there are many poets who either read in what I call Poetspeak, that kind of quasi drone that emphasizes the end of the line but the sense or lilt of it. That does not help the poem at all.
Tony Mitton: I often perform my poems, particularly to audiences of elementary school students. I think it can take the work across to people, especially if they have a limited experience of poetry. Reading silently on your own is a different thing altogether, and can be very rewarding if you're reading a poet or poem that really sings to you. But reading and performance can be a corporate experience, and if managed well by the performer, can create a real engagement with the work, so audience members are more likely to feel positive about the poetry afterwards, more inclined to go off and read it for themselves. Aloud reading can also model for prospective readers the way poems might be made to sound when voiced. Like drama script read aloud by a good actor.
April Halprin Wayland: Reading poetry aloud absolutely enhances the experience. And yes, I often do readings of my poetry.
Alternately, I'll find the closest middle school or high school to the event I'm going to do (a conference, a bookstore, etc.) and cast two girls and a boy from the school's drama department to do a dramatic reading from my book. I send them my 17-poem script a few weeks in advance, and then rehearse them for one hour before the event. The reading takes about 15 minutes and always knocks the socks off the audience. It's a great way to preview a book. (It also makes me understand the allure of playwriting. I love hearing others speak my words!)
Ron Koertge: I used to read a lot and still read every now and then. Reading a poem alone in a room is an entirely different experience from reading to an audience. The latter is performance/entertainment. I have poems I like a lot that don't go over well read aloud, so I rarely perform those. I don't know about "enhance."
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