Reading a poem aloud by someone who understands it, can be a crucial experience, but better yet is reading it aloud oneself.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A poem should go beyond what you already know, and if it’s going to go beyond what you already know, a poem might say something that begins to have you question what side you’re on, which, in turn, might begin to have an audience question what side you’re on…

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.

Poets know their own poems in a way and to a depth that is unique.. even if they mumble a bit ..their delivery will still have important things to tell us.

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.

What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don’t understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day.

if you read the poems of someone somewhere you know a lot more about that country than you know if you just study its crops or weather conditions.