Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Perhaps you've had a few of your poems published in local anthologies or small magazines or maybe you are unpublished but keen to let people hear your poems. It's time to put yourself and your work on the line, performing to an audience. This will not be an ordinary human exchange; the prospect of reading your work to other people, especially if most or all of them are strangers, is nervy stuff. Ellen Phethean, one of the organisers of The Blue Room poetry venue, writes: "Many of our new writers feel physically ill before they read."

Workshops and writing courses can help give a feeling of identity with the like-minded, but writing poetry is an individual, solitary thing. To go from making the poem, to the moment when you are standing up there about to lay your writing open to the world, is quite a leap, requiring self-belief and confidence. So why would you want to do a reading?

• To reach an audience, however small, with writing you believe in.

• To entertain and move those people.

• To get feedback, find out what works and what doesn't. Does
the audience laugh, fall asleep, or come to you after the reading
and say: "I knew exactly what you were getting at in that poem"?

• To sell pamphlets, books or anthologies in which you have work, if you have reached that point in your development as a writer. Small presses are finding it increasingly difficult to interest bookshops in their products, so there is a significant onus on authors to shift their own books.

Go to readings and make contacts. After all, if you want an audience
when you read, you should be part of the audience when other poets are presenting their work. Trying to get readings may be more successful if you are one of two or three writers (friends? workshop acquaintances?) who can offer an organiser a varied programme.

Chances are you will not have organisers beating a path to your door, so you will take the opportunity of reading anywhere. In my case this has included a quarry near Malvern; assorted rooms in pubs; a bleak, windswept marquee in Bradford city centre; a friend's apartment in a country house in Kent; a gazebo by the clear waters of the River Lathkill; a public library; and an International Mountaineering Literature Festival. Mark Robinson writes: "Poetry reading is actually one of the most natural things in the world, simply made strange by the odd culture which it finds itself in."

As you prepare for a reading, consider the audience and select your
work accordingly. Are they people who study and write poetry or is poetry more of a passing interest for them? I chose quite different sequences for example, when reading at the mountain literature festival to a very specialised audience, than when reading at the country house soirée, where I shared the bill with an artist's exhibition. The size and nature of the audiences and venues were very different so I took this into account when deciding what to read: an audience of 250 at the former, 25 at the latter; a microphone at the former, just my voice at the latter; 15 and five books sold respectively; two quite different but both very enjoyable reading
experiences.

In the current climate, the first outlet for a budding writer could well
be a local writers' group readaround or an open-mic event in a pub. Your slot may be brief, say three poems or five minutes. Explain your work so the audience have a genuine, if brief, sense of your writing. An open-mic evening might involve a fair bit of peripheral noise with half the audience shuffling their own poems, making late decisions about what to read, rather than listening to the poet who is actually reading, but that's no reason for you not to be confident and assured. You'll want people to enjoy your reading. It shouldn't be a test for them so it's worth considering an opening poem that is easily accessible, something to grab their attention and get them listening.

Practice reading your work out loud beforehand. Becoming familiar
with a poem's sound will help you understand how it works. Order your poems, coming to a sense of how they work best. Is there an overall narrative, or some kind of structure or theme that evolves through the work? Test it out on your partner or a friend, if they'll listen. Even better, find a workshop group whose opinions you respect, people who will give perceptive advice on your poetry.

Vary the intensity. Have some light poems in there. Listening to poetry should be enjoyable. Aim to make the audience laugh, or at least smile, now and then. You’ll want your work to be taken seriously, but don’t adopt a ponderous tone as if some special mystery is attached to poetry. The late Ric Caddell talked about hearing a well-known poet reading in a “demure, understated monotone, adding nothing to the possible levels of comprehension of the work”. Your reading should have life, nuances, eye contact, giving something more to the audience than the impact the poems
make when read on the page, otherwise why should they have bothered turning up to listen to you?

Poetry is written for the voice. Like song, it is an oral tradition. It works best when performed and surely best of all when performed by the writer. Then that writer can use their voice to add a huge dimension to the poems for the listener; this is the sound I want my poems to make, this is how I want you to receive them, with these pauses and stresses, these assonances and rhythms. The poet’s physicality, their interpretation of their own words, becomes part of the overall experience for the listener.

When practising, time yourself: reading your work is likely to take
longer than you think. Plan your introductions and comments: what you intend to say will depend on the kind of audience you are reading to. Accessibility is important, even for experienced listeners. You may need to explain the context of a poem or provide clues about your mood when you wrote it. This will be particularly relevant with a lengthy poem or one that is dense and difficult for an audience on first hearing.

An anecdote gives the audience a breather between the spells of
concentration required to listen to the poems. Generally, long poems
don’t work well at readings. I have read from a six-page poem written in ten sections, by selecting a few of the sections and explaining the overall context to the audience first. Such planning and practising is not intended to fossilise your reading but rather to give you the confidence to be flexible and spontaneous.

Let people know about the reading. When I was due to launch my
most recent collection, in a Sheffield pub room where readings are regularly held, but to small audiences, I gave and sent fliers to people I thought might be interested. Some of them turned up. It doubled the audience. It made me feel good about the event and I sold a few more copies of the book than I otherwise would have done. In the process it also ensnared a few folk who would never normally have contemplated attending a poetry reading.

Mark Robinson suggests that “those poems which work best in performance tend to be those which offer the listener both freedom and guidance in their reaction.” The listener needs familiar elements on which to hang thoughts or images, together with an opportunity created by the words and the silences between and around them, to explore the meaning of what she has just heard. Keith Jafrate suggests the poet in a reading is “acting in some way as a representative and researcher on behalf of the listeners, in a joint attempt to reach an understanding of human issues”.

What’s your best poem? Should you save it till last, providing the listeners with something they want to think about, something that will make them decide they really must buy your book? It’s the old adage: leave them wanting more.

Having heard your poems read out loud, your listeners will be able to go back to those poems on the page with greater understanding. And hopefully you will feel it’s been a strong exchange between you and the audience. Perhaps you’ll sense, as Andy Croft has it, that: “In performance, poetry... can send people home at the end of the evening feeling a little more connected to each other than usual.”

All quotations in this article taken from Robinson, M. (Ed) Words out Loud (Stride, 2002)