Reading a poem aloud for the first time

Nothing else in the route tells a writer as much in as little time. Reading a draft aloud takes 2 minutes and returns information that 3 more days of silent revision would not produce, because the mouth and the ear catch what the eye has stopped seeing. Spoken word poetry is written for exactly this moment, which is why it is worth reaching stage 4 of 11 quickly rather than perfecting a page nobody has heard. How to write a poem sets out the stages either side of it.

What does poetry recitation mean, and how is it different from reading your own draft?

Poetry recitation means saying a poem out loud from memory, usually somebody else's poem, and usually with attention to accuracy, pronunciation and expression. Reading your own draft aloud is a different activity with a different purpose: the page is in your hand, nothing is memorised, nobody is scoring it, and the aim is diagnosis rather than delivery. Both are poetry said out loud, and the words get used interchangeably, so it is worth being clear which one a room is doing on any given evening.

Recitation is a school tradition in a great many languages, and a poem recited in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, Welsh or English does the same job in each: holding a text in the memory and giving it back to a room. A first reading is the other thing, and the 2 differ on 4 points that matter in practice.

What does a writer hear that they could not see?

A writer hears 5 things in their own draft that were invisible on the page, and every one of them is a revision instruction rather than a verdict.

1. The repetition. A word used 4 times is inaudible while reading silently and unmissable at speaking speed.
2. The line with no breath in it. If you run out of air halfway through, the line is 2 lines, and the break is in the wrong place.
3. The abstract patch. The mouth skids over any run of general words, and the room's attention goes with it.
4. The real ending. Most drafts end 2 lines after they finish, and the writer hears the true last line as they pass it.
5. The truth about the opening. A run-up that looked fine on paper takes 15 seconds out loud, which is a long time in a quiet room.

None of that requires anybody else to say anything. It is why the first reading is worth doing even alone, into a phone, standing up, with the recording played back once and then deleted.

How is a first reading set up so a young writer survives it?

A first reading is set up so that the writer is exposed to the poem and not to a verdict, and the arrangements do the protecting. Chairs go in a circle rather than in rows facing a front, so nobody is on a stage and there is no back of the room to hide in. The reader stays seated for the first week. And the order of events is fixed before anybody starts, because improvising it is what turns a first reading into an audition.

• No preamble: the writer says the title and reads, with no apology, no explanation and no it is not finished.
• Read it twice: once to get through it, once to be heard, with a silence between the 2 readings.
• Silence after: 10 seconds in which nobody speaks, which stops the fastest talker setting the tone.
• A cap: 1 poem each and about 2 minutes, so the room can hear everybody in a session.
• The right to pass: available every week, used without comment, and never negotiated in front of the group.

Nothing goes underneath the reading. Background music, a video behind the reader and a projected poster all pull attention off the words and make a nervous reader compete with a soundtrack. Nerves, and what to do with them covers the body's side of this, which is real and physical and does not respond to being told to relax.

What happens in the minute after the reading stops?

In the minute after the reading stops, the writer writes rather than talks. Two questions are worth answering on paper before anybody in the circle says a word: which line did you want back while you were saying it, and where did the room go quiet. The first is the writer's own evidence and it disappears within about 5 minutes. The second is the only audience measurement worth having at this stage.

Then the room describes the poem back, which has rules of its own: a group asked for opinions gives opinions, and a group asked for descriptions gives the writer something to work with. The reading and the response are 2 separate stages for that reason. Starting from a prompt, a draft, a revision and a reading all fit inside a fortnight, but a room that has not agreed how it talks about a poem should not be asked to talk about one.

What are the rules at a recitation competition?

The rules at a recitation competition are the organiser's own, and they are published in the entry pack rather than fixed by any national standard, so the first move is to read the pack for that specific contest. Across school, festival and national competitions the same 5 criteria recur in some form: accuracy against the printed text, pronunciation and clarity, pace and use of pause, physical presence, and the difficulty of the chosen piece. Time limits, whether the poem may be read from the page, and whether a writer may perform their own work all vary between contests and are the details most often got wrong on entry.

In England, Poetry By Heart runs a recitation competition for schools and publishes both its rules and the collection of poems entrants choose from, which makes it a useful model of how such a contest is built even for a group that never enters, while schools in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland go through their own national bodies. A slam works differently again, with the audience scoring and the poem usually the performer's own. Recitation contests sets out how the American Poetry Out Loud contest runs from the classroom round to a national final, what a panel actually scores, and how reciting somebody else's poem differs from performing your own.