How to read short poetry – an introduction (of sorts)

Have you ever tried to listen to someone struggling over how to read short poetry? It can be an aggravating experience. In any case, I’ll try to explain why I find it so, in a moment, but first I should acknowledge that short poetry – such as haiku and similar short forms – haibun, tanka and so on, are wonderful, disciplined writing forms, designed to pack a big conceptual and meaningful impact in just a handful of words. I like that concept very much.

I don’t enjoy the strictures and discipline that the forms demand.

For the most part, I also don’t enjoy listening to them being read aloud to an audience.

How to read to an audience – a brief refresher

Many, if not most authors have little idea of how to read to an audience or how to present their work to best advantage in a reading. This is the case whether for live or recorded readings.

It is something of an absent art which I don’t want to address in detail here, but will mention a couple of the more obvious “do’s and don’t’s“. My personal context is poetry reading, but the general principles apply regardless.

Quick Refresher Points

Pace of reading

• Speaking too quickly. The golden rule is to read slowly. If you think you are reading slowly enough – go a little slower still. The audience needs time to take the material in and to extract a little meaning from it. Give them that time.

Love the microphone

• Develop a love affair with the microphone. The mic needs to be part of an intimate relationship with the reader. It takes time and a little practice, but failure to develop this skill makes for a very dull experience for the listening audience.

Engage the audience

• Failure to engage with the audience. The reader needs to look out at the audience from time to time during reading, to let them know that he or she is reading to them and for them. Catching the eye of one or more audience members at different points in the reading adds meaning and engagement with the audience. It can be tricky to achieve initially but needs to be practiced.

Select your material

• A failure to select material for reading. This is more a problem for long-form writers – novelists and short stories. I’ve been in many audiences where the writer faces the page and reads – everything. No stopping until the end of page five, at least, of the reading. By this time the audience is all fidgets and is hearing little beyond a constant droning.
• A reading goes much better with a selection, perhaps a few paragraphs to introduce a character, perhaps another few paragraphs to highlight an aspect of him or her, in the context of the story.
• The audience wants to engage and the author can do worse than to share an anecdote that illuminates character development, rather than chapter and verse. They should buy the book to get that!

Pace of Reading

• Read slower. Just because you thought you were reading slowly doesn’t mean that you were. Learning the pace to read at is a key part of the craft.

So, enough of that more general discussion. What I was really meaning to focus on was how to read short poetry. I’ll move on.

Reading poetry, in general, and in short

My experience of reading poetry in general is that it is a short form of writing. In my own work it is rare for a poem to span two minutes in reading time from start to finish. This most likely developed as a result of my early experience with open mic readings where the poet puts his or her name on a chalkboard to have their turn at reading three poems in five minutes (or less). If any one poem was too long, the poet had less time available to read more pieces on the day.

Focusing my mind on getting as much meaning as I could into relatively short pieces of writing shaped my writing. Most of my work, now, requires about one minute (more or less) to read to an audience.

That is a very short period of time in which to communicate what you want a listener or reader to take away with them. Imagine how much more difficult it must be to successfully master how to read short poetry.

Drawing again on my experience from open mic readings, it is very difficult and few master it (myself included). 

Also from my experience from open mic readings, it is very difficult and few master it (myself included).

So, how should short poetry be read

After such a big build-up, I have to fudge my answer a little bit. I’m not aware of any one ‘right‘ way to do it. How to read short poetry remains in the domain of the writer, but I do have a couple of small ideas that perhaps serve as clues.

Back on the open mic stage, from time to time a short-form (usually haiku) poet would mount the podium in a way that held audience attention. This was difficult enough to achieve for the best of readers, because the sessions were always held in bar rooms, with a room full of self-centered poets all waiting their own turn at the mic, and not necessarily interested in other self-centered poets having their moment on the stage.

These few occasions caught my attention because I was interested in my craft and wanted to know everything.

What I learned at Open Mic

1. Engage the audience. Speak to them, catch their attention, perhaps give a little context for the reading. If the audience is listening before the poem is read, there is a good chance they will hear it as it is spoken.
2. Read the poem, the first time, slowly. A haiku can be read in about 5 seconds flat, or less. What is the point of that? Go slow.
3. Read it through a second time, equally slowly. The first time through, with a short poem, the listener is being asked to hear the structure and flow, the rhythm. A second reading allows the content and meaning to be taken in. If the reading is introduced in this way, and the audience invited to listen in that way, the reading becomes a very much richer experience.
4. Perhaps allow a moment of silence at the conclusion of the poem and before launching into the following poem.

That, I think, is how to read short poetry.

Some examples

Now that I have your attention . . .

No, I’m only jesting as, for all I know, I have already lost my audience by dragging this discussion out too long. Such things happen, but I have scoured through my Seventeen Syllable Poetry blog for some examples to read, just to see if the views I’ve expressed hold up in practice (I don’t get to open mic readings any more).

I’ve done these poems with a blank image background for the first read through, and the words superimposed for the second read through.

must be

must be is  a short poem from a collection I worked on called ‘From NASA with Love’. The series came about in a period of delight after I discovered that the NASA Image and Video Library had been made available for access by the public.

worshipful

worshipful comes from a short series of poems written to celebrate a number of images I took – photographs – of mornings. I had in mind, and still am interested in pursuing, a book of morning poems (and a book of cloud poems, and a book of flying birds poems . . .).

bee sweet for me

bee sweet for me is a poem that comes from simple delight, and the desire to join with the image and the moment in some way.

at the last

at the last comes as the final poem in a series I wrote on a walk. Just a random walk, in this case, taking photographs and later trying to match some words to them.

Conclusion – thank you

That concludes my attempt to discuss and describe a few thoughts on how to read short poetry. I hope you found it interesting, amusing, provocative or outrageous. If so, please feel free to let me know.

If you’d like to read more of my thoughts on writing and poetry, you might enjoy these articles, or perhaps these.