How (not) to Read Poetry Out Loud

Half the joy of poetry is reading it aloud—as long as you do it well!

A few months ago, I was invited to judge a poetry recitation contest at a local high school, and it was actually pretty cool. I really enjoyed seeing the students recite the poems they had memorized, and I was especially impressed that so many of them had chosen to recite contemporary poetry!

I mean, with all due respect to Mr. Shakespeare, I think a lot more people would like poetry if they read poetry that was written sometime in this century. 

But, as fun as it was, the experience also got me thinking about all the ways that reading or reciting poetry can go wrong—probably because my task that day was to look for all the ways that it can go wrong. 

See, poetry has its roots in oral traditions—it was spoken long before it was ever written down, and that orality is central to how poetry works. If all you do is read it silently—or, worse yet, speed read it, you’re missing out on one of the most important features that sets poetry apart from other forms of literature. 

So, today, I’d like to talk about how to read poems out loud. We’ll start with a few ways not to do it and then wrap up with an explanation of how to do it better. 

And, before we begin, I hasten to add that this is in no way a personal critique of any of the reciters that day—this isn’t about them specifically, but the experience did get me thinking about this topic.

Also, this is really a discussion of reading literary poetry out loud—I don’t have anything to say about slam poetry because that’s a-whole-nother thing with its own set of rules. 

So, with that out of the way, let’s get into all the ways not to read a poem out loud.

Poems are not nursery rhymes

Because poetry and nursery rhymes often have rhyme and rhythm, it’s easy to confuse them for each other. But they really aren’t the same thing. Unfortunately, when people start out reading poetry, they often fall into the most inane drumbeat, as if every poem were just another nursery rhyme like:

Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon

The the little dog laughed to see such a sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon.

For example, you might hear the ever famous Emily Dickinson read in the most grating lilt that you’d have a hard time taking it seriously [and here is where I'd recommend the video version]:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

Reading a poem like a nursery rhyme is like making ice cream with expensive vanilla and then drowning in it cheap chocolate syrup. Sure, a little chocolate can complement the vanilla, but, when all you can hear is the rhythm and rhyme, you’ll lose all sense of everything else. 

A more nuanced reading would keep the rhythm in balance with the meaning of the words and structures of the sentences. So consider how the piece changes when it’s read with an ear for poetry rather than for nursery rhyme [again, see, or hear the video.]

Here, the reading is guided more by punctuation than by form—and that’s a good thing. The form is there as a complement to meaning, but the form is not the point. So pause when you hit a comma—pause more when you hit a semi-colon or period. But don’t get so carried away by the rhythm that you end up singing and forgetting what the poem is even about.

Poems are not monologues

The least experienced readers of poetry will read them like nursery rhymes, drowning out the nuances of the piece in driving singsong. More experienced readers of poetry will wisely avoid the nursery rhyme reading—but they often fall into another trap: thinking that reading a poem means performing a poem. 

Maybe something like this:

Behind Stowe, Elizabeth Bishop

I heard an elf go whistling by, 

A whistle sleek as moonlit grass, 

That drew me like a silver string 

To where the dusty, pale moths fly, 

And make a magic as they pass; 

And there I heard a cricket sing.

His singing echoed through and through 

The dark under a windy tree 

Where glinted little insects’ wings. 

His singing split the sky in two. 

The halves fell either side of me, 

And I stood straight, bright with moon-rings.

Sure, it’s exciting—but it’s a caricature. We’re reading poetry, not auditioning for a play. So don’t feel the need to shout, don’t feel the need to conjure a tear or pause for the length of a dramatic breath. Smirking and gesticulating aren’t really the point—we’re hear to here to poet’s words, not see your dramatic prowess. 

The trouble with a dramatic reading is that it takes attention away from the poem and puts it on the reader. It also misunderstands poetry’s role. It isn’t theater, so it shouldn’t be read as a monologue any more than a script should be read as poetry. 

So dial back the drama and honor the poet and her piece with something more thoughtful.

Here, we get to end in the resonance of the poem, not the reverberations of the performance. It’s quiet, thoughtful, and sincere. Even when a performance is sincere, it tends to be perceived as artificial, and that’s not what we’re after. So don’t cheapen the poem by overdramatizing it.

Poems are not unimaginable expressions of artistic genius

Where inexperienced readers of poetry default to the nursery rhyme and intermediate readers fall into performance, the greatest crime against poetry might just be the way that overly earnest poets read their own work. 

With their tortured souls and black berets, young poets are given to treating each individual word like crystallized dew from the peak of Mt. Parnassus and to uttering each line with the gravity of cosmic decree.  

What happens, though, is that their work ends up sounding like scrambled nonsense coupled with insufferable self-seriousness. 

When I was poetry school, we called this kind of reading “poet voice,” and we had a pretty good time making fun of it—reading everyday things like menus and textbooks in this exaggerated way:

A Jelly-Fish, Marianne Moore

Visible, invisible,

A fluctuating charm,

An amber-colored amethyst

Inhabits it; your arm

Approaches, and

It opens and

It closes;

You have meant

To catch it,

And it shrivels;

You abandon

Your intent—

It opens, and it

Closes and you

Reach for it—

The blue

Surrounding it

Grows cloudy, and

It floats away

From you.

Get the cadence right and you’ll fool people into thinking you’re a real serious artist. If you had the audacity to read it like actual language, people might not think you were a genius. They’d just think you were a regular person with cool things to say. And that would never do—you’ve got to live up to your beret!

So, instead of reading in poet voice, just read in your own voice. Read the poem the way a person would say it—the way you would say it. Nobody speaks in poet voice, except maybe MFA students reading their grocery lists. 

Principles for reading poetry

So there are all kinds of ways to turn a poem into a disaster. But the good news is that all of them involve an exaggerated effort on your part. To read a poem like a nursery rhyme or monologue or to read it in poet voice requires you to do unnatural things that ultimately distract from what the poem is after. 

The best thing to do, then, is to read a poem in your natural voice. That’s what poetry is meant to be, after all, natural language. Sure, a heightened language, but a natural one nonetheless. 

So here are some principles for reading or reciting poetry out loud more effectively, honoring the poem and the poet as you do:

1. Prioritize meaning—yes, poems are attuned to sound in ways that other literary genres aren’t. But that doesn’t change the fact that poems have something to communicate. That should be the priority—and exaggerated reading styles pull attention away from what the poem is about

   
   

2. Follow the sentence more than the form—poetry immediately made more sense to me when a teacher told me to read through the line breaks rather than pausing at the end of every line.

   
   

Lines and line breaks are important tools—something we’ll talk about another day—but they aren’t meant to be breaks in your reading. If you pause at the end of every line, you’ll break up the meaning of individual sentences and make it so much harder to understand what the piece is saying. 

Instead, let punctuation be your guide. When reading aloud, treat the line breaks as if they weren’t there. They do important things, but what they don’t do is tell you where to pause. That’s what punctuation is for.

3. Take it slow. And I don’t mean that you should read in slow motion, but I do mean that you can afford to take a slower, more deliberate pace when you read a poem. Poems are short—why read them in a rush? 

   
   

When you listen to poets read their own work, you’ll notice that they tend to read thoughtfully, carefully. In fact, I’ll link a few poets reading their own work in the description (tell ‘em I sent you!)

4. Be natural. There’s a reason we go to poetry readings rather than poetry performances. You don’t need to pretend you’re someone you’re not or put on airs to read a poem. It’s not about putting on the best show or dragging readers to the edge of their seats. It’s about respecting the language and the subject of the poem. 

Wordsworth said that poetry comes from emotion recollected in tranquility. There’s an evenness, a peacefulness to poetry that ought to be part of reading it. And, even though people accuse poetry of being pretentious, it really isn’t. It’s just people writing about everyday things in careful, but ultimately human, ways. 

So don’t sweat it. Just take it easy and have some fun with it. Poetry isn’t all that it’s often made out to be. Anyone can read it and anyone can appreciate it. And reading it well can be a great way to appreciate it more. 

Because then you’ll see that it isn’t doing anything much more than drawing our attention to the beauty of the world and the beauty of language.

Conclusion

So, my dear friends, thank you for watching. It really is such a treat to spend this time with you, and it’s such a delight to see how many more of you there are week after week. 

Writing is the good stuff—and poetry is the best of the best—so I hope you’ll come back soon to talk about writing again. 

In the meantime, though, I think we should all go read some poetry. That sounds pretty nice.