The more you understand a poem and its complexities and depth, the more you will be able to do when reading it aloud.

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

I will be reading the poetry and I will read it aloud because I will be, you know, whispering the poetry, because poetry, I really believe, has to do with a sense of communicating and the idea of reading the poem, giving life to the poem, is important, and so the old tradition is very important.

Reciting a poem aloud, you are not like an actor, rather you come to understand, then to be, the voice of the poem itself.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

I mean to indicate the reading of poetry not merely for the sensual ear, but for the mind's ear as well; yet the mind's ear can be trained only by the other, and the matter, practically considered, comes inescapably back to the reading of poetry aloud.

A teacher (of poetry) has to know and feel what poetry is , and be able - and this is crucial- to read it aloud effectively.

When you read a poem, you may not get out of it all that the poet put into it, but you are different from the poet. You’re different from everybody else who is going to read the poem, so you should take from it what you need. Use it personally.

You have to read the poem and say, “My god, that’s a good poem,” and kind of smile at yourself. If you’re not willing to do that, then you’re wasting your time, and you’re hurting yourself in another way because you’re trying to please somebody who doesn’t like you. You don’t want to get in that position.

There may be nothing more "basic" in education than gaining a sense of one's own voice. By acknowledging and shaping shared experience, we grow bigger. Poems help us see the world around us as rich material. And nothing is better than reading the work of our peers, as well as the work of older poets, to get us going in our particular terrain. A poem we love makes us want to write our own-hand to hand, map to map, contagious, delicious voices spinning us forward inside our cluttered, clattering lives.

The proper act of reading of a poem was not an act of passive submission but one of collaboration with its author.

When you read and understand a poem, then you master chaos a little.

("What do you get from those people listening to you here? What happens between you and the audience at a reading?") I have to say again that the kinds of support and the kinds of challenge that I receive from the lives of others around me-poets, non-poets, other kinds of artists, and activists-carries me. I don't feel like a solitary person in my lonely room at all, even though I have to spend hours alone in a room to do what I do. I believe that a poem isn't completed until there's a reader at the other end of it. It can't just be produced, it also has to be received. And so, yes, I feel that the poems are being completed in so many different ways by so many different minds and consciousnesses.

The default designation of poetry has become written poetry. That's why we have to prefix the adjective "oral," because the unmodified noun no longer covers anything but written poetry. That's also why we resort to other unwieldy phrases to pigeonhole events and phenomena that our cultural proclivities have silently eliminated from consideration. Thus a "poetry reading" describes a performance (from a published text, of course) before a well-behaved, often academic audience. Thus "spoken-word poetry"—so redundant from a historical perspective—identifies voiced verbal art, verse that is lifted off the page and into the world of presence and experience.