Performing your poem

Recitation is the older word for the same act, and a performance poem is simply a poem built for it from the first draft onwards, with its effects placed in the ear rather than on the paper.

What a performance poem is, and what it is not

A performance poem is written to be heard once, at speed, by people who cannot go back a line, and that single condition explains most of its habits: repeated phrases so a listener can find the shape, images concrete enough to build in one pass, and endings that land on a stressed word rather than trailing off. The forms taught on paper, such as the cinquain and the diamante, are shaped by how they look; a performance poem is shaped by how long a listener can hold a sentence.

Two things it is not. It is not a monologue, so a poem does not need a character, a costume or a voice that is not yours. And it is not automatically a poem about your own life. Writing about yourself is one route, taken in the first draft stage of the route in How to write a poem, but a persona, an object, a place or somebody else's story are all legitimate, and the audience cannot tell which is which. That distinction matters most for young writers, who are sometimes handed the idea that a poem is only good if it costs them something.

Pace: the one fault nearly everybody has

Pace is the fault to fix first, because speed is what nerves do to a poem and almost nobody speeds up on purpose. Spoken word poetry is delivered slower than ordinary speech for a reason, and the numbers are easy to hold: ordinary conversational English runs at roughly 130 to 160 words a minute, and a poem said to a room wants to sit at the bottom of that band, near 130 to 140, a reduction of about a sixth, so that images have somewhere to land. The practical measure is a stopwatch: time the poem in rehearsal, time it again on the night, and treat any gap of more than 15 seconds as adrenaline rather than interpretation.

Two habits hold the pace. Start slower than feels natural, because the first line sets the speed of everything after it and a first line taken at a walk is worth thirty seconds of rehearsal on its own. And put the brakes where the meaning is, not evenly: slow through the image, move through the connective tissue. Poetry read at one flat speed is the commonest reason an audience stops following a poem it can hear perfectly well.

The pause, the breath and the marked script

The pause and the breath are the same tool used for two purposes, and both are decided in advance and written on the page. There are three useful lengths: a beat, which is the gap at a line break inside a sentence; a breath, which is a full inhale at the end of a sentence or an idea; and a hold, roughly two seconds, used once or twice in a poem where a line needs the room to catch up. A hold used four times is a mannerism; used once it is the most powerful thing in the performance.

Breath is placed by the same logic. Take it at the punctuation, never in the middle of a phrase, and take it low, so the shoulders stay still and the sound comes from further down than the throat. A performer who runs out of air at the end of a long line has not marked the script; a performer whose voice climbs in pitch through the poem is breathing high and shallow, which is exactly what fear does to a body and what Nerves, and what to do with them addresses directly.

Hands, eyes and standing still

Hands and eyes are what an audience watches when it is listening hardest, and both have a default. The default for hands is at your sides, loose, or one hand on the mic and one at your side. Anything else is a decision: a gesture works when it arrives slightly before the word it belongs to and stops when the word does, and it fails when it repeats every eight seconds, which is a nervous system talking rather than a poem. Holding paper solves the problem of what to do with hands and creates the problem of a barrier at chest height, so a marked script is best held low and to one side.

The default for eyes is three points in the room: left, centre, right, roughly at the eye level of a seated audience. Look up at the end of each stanza rather than trying to hold eye contact continuously, which is unsettling for both parties. Standing still is the last piece, and the hardest for anyone under sixteen: feet at shoulder width, weight even, knees unlocked. A poet who rocks steadily from foot to foot sets a rhythm the audience starts hearing instead of the poem.

Emotional connection without emptying yourself out

Emotional connection when performing a poem comes from specificity and restraint, not from volume or tears. An audience connects to the detail it can see, the seven o'clock bus and the watch on the wrist, and it disengages from a poem that announces its own feeling. The rule most working spoken word poets use is to be one step calmer than the poem: let the writing do the sadness or the anger, and deliver it plainly. Michael Rosen, the UK Children's Laureate from 2007 to 2009, is the usual reference point for poetry with younger children, and his poems are widely used at Key Stage 1 in England and at the equivalent stage under the Curriculum for Wales, Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland and the Northern Ireland Curriculum.

There is a boundary underneath this, and it belongs to the writer. A young poet who has written something true about a family, a bereavement or an illness is allowed to perform it, allowed to change the pronouns, and allowed to withdraw it the afternoon before. An adult who has asked a room for honesty has taken on the job of making all three of those genuinely available. Starting from a prompt is the safest way to build the habit, because a prompt gives everybody a subject that is not their own worst week, and it turns out that a poem about a bus stop performed well moves a room more reliably than a confession delivered fast.