The first poet I ever heard read in person was e. e. cummings. I went with some high school friends and remember looking down from the balcony at Town Hall in New York City onto his shiny bald head. Since so many of his witty poems are made up of letters and word fragments scattered on the page, you may wonder how he could perform them. I wondered too, but checking out recordings of his live readings on the web I find that for the most part he read his less scattered, more traditional poems like “Anyone Lived in a Little How Town” and “My Father Moved through Dooms of Love.” Trying to put each word over, he reads too slowly for my taste and adopts an upper-class accent that I find somewhat off-putting.

My second live reading was by Robert Frost. As a college freshman I was pretty scattered myself and only decided to go at the last minute. As a result I had to sit way over to the side at a sold-out out Sanders Theater. I had a good view of him in profile, however, and that’s how I remember him. Old and craggy, with a lock of hair flopping over his forehead, much as he appears on the commemorative 10 cent stamp. But Frost was a polished reader and when he spoke the phrase, “one step backwards taken” from the poem with that title I remember him taking a wary step backwards to avoid the roaring flood the poem describes.

Perhaps the finest reader I ever heard was the Black poet Patricia Smith. She’d been a champion slam poet early on but at some point decided she needed more training. She took an M.F.A. and as a result her poems gained a formal mastery, which comes through in her marvelous readings.

I first got to read my own work as a college junior. After winning an undergraduate poetry prize I took part in a reading at Lamont Library but I have almost no memory of the occasion. I do remember a reading five years later at the 92nd Street Y. I’d been chosen along with three other young poets for the Discovery Award. My family and friends who attended said I did a good job but clearly the star of the evening was a heavy-set African American woman somewhat older than the rest of us. When I said hello to her at a writers conference a number of years later, Lucille Clifton looked me over and said, “Oh, weren’t we ‘discovered’ together?” We invited her to come up to Fairbanks where she read in a large ballroom to a standing-room only crowd.

Hearing a poet read either live or in recordings can help you get closer to the voice on the page. That was the case with Robert Lowell. Who’d have guessed that this Boston aristocrat would have a southern drawl? And of course it’s also true of the wonderful recordings by Dylan Thomas. But sometimes a reading can seem to diminish the work. Richard Wilbur may just have been having an off day, but when I heard him read, I felt there was a lot more tone and spirit to his work than he was putting across. I was similarly disappointed when I heard John Ashbery. Poets are often introverts so perhaps it was their shyness in front of crowds that threw off their performances.

When I give a reading, I don’t necessarily expect a large audience. Fifteen or twenty people is fine. The smallest group I ever read to consisted of my host and two of his students, one of whom had to leave half-way through. With fewer than ten in attendance it helps to sit in a circle and make it a conversation. Take questions between poems and find out something about your listeners.

My largest audience was around 250 people. At my 50th Harvard reunion, I was part of a panel of artists in various media and my presentation consisted of a talk on poetry followed by a reading of some of my Alaskan poems. I’ve posted a video of the occasion on my website, titled "Forms of Feeling: A Talk". It includes a slide show focused on Alaska and if you’re interested it can be found at www.johnmorganpoet.com

I have some suggestions for poets who are getting ready to read in public:

1. Make a list of what you plan to read and if the poems are in a book be sure to note the pages. Nothing is worse for an audience than watching a poet fumble through a book or manuscript trying to decide what to read next.
2. Practice your program out loud on the day of the reading. No matter how well you know the poems, they can sound disconcertingly strange when you hear your own voice actually saying them.
3. Time the reading. If you’ve been given 15 minutes, don’t read for half an hour. If you’ve been given an hour, aim for 50 minutes and take some questions afterwards.
4. Try not to apologize. Since none of us is Shakespeare or Robert Frost for that matter, and since writing poetry is a very private activity, there is a natural tendency to put yourself down when faced with an expectant audience. But don’t do it. It will only encourage your listeners to wonder why they bothered to come.
5. When a poem needs some kind of introduction, make it brief and to the point and get on with the poem. Of course there are exceptions to this rule. Some poets are so charismatic and charming that almost anything they say will entertain. But that’s not me and I know it. My best thoughts, my most engaging words, are the ones on the page and I do best when I put them out there without too much preliminary banter. On the other hand, William Stafford used to say that he wanted his poems to go over in his natural conversational voice. He would chat with the audience between poems and he considered it a compliment when people said they couldn’t tell where his introductions ended and the poems began.
6. Limit the alcohol. When John Berryman came to Iowa, my wife and I were invited out to dinner with him before the reading and Berryman’s wife kept refilling his coffee cup and saying, “Drink your coffee, John.” In spite of the caffeine, he was still noticeably drunk for the reading, but since it fit pretty well with the eccentric voices in the Dream Songs, he was able to pull it off. But most other alcohol-fueled readings I’ve been to have fallen flat.
7. No hard drugs. I once heard Laurence Ferlinghetti read coming off an LSD trip. He kept talking about the amazing clouds he’d seen earlier in the day as he flew to the reading site. Members of the audience were shouting the titles of poems they wanted to hear. He’d nod and say he’d get to them and then go off on another interminable description of those fabulous life-changing clouds.
8. Although it’s not an absolute rule, avoid reading from your cellphone. Most poets who do tend to hold the phones close to their face, blocking their mouth and making it harder to follow what they’re saying. Too often the line breaks are unclear and eye-contact is lost. Better to read from a book or a print-out.
9. And be sure to save one of your best poems for last.