It’s 2006 and I
am a shy twenty-two-year-old from Manitowoc, WI bumbling along the route from
my Bartlett Avenue apartment in the pre-dawn dark to my barista job at the
campus coffee shop at UW-Milwaukee where I’m a grad student. I’m wearing some
ridiculous dangly fruit earrings. Honest to goodness, I am wearing plastic
pears on my ears. My professor James Liddy (yes, the Irish poet) has just
informed me that I’ll be reading along with another grad student and a faculty
member on Tuesday night (Tuesday!) at Von Trier. And today’s Friday.
As I walk, my
red floral shoulder bag bumps against my hip. I hold a crumpled stack of poems
and read them aloud as I pass two-story houses in shades of teal, lavender, and
forest green. A city bus screeches to a halt—hipsters and elderly people and
sleepy middle-aged workers inside the lit bus must think I’m a crazy person
talking to myself, but I don’t care. Now I stuff the papers in my bag and
recite the poems.
***
James Liddy had
floated into his Contemporary Writers class the previous evening, placed his nylon
duffle bag on the table, and said, “So our own Emilie will be giving a poetry
reading next week.”
Huh? I didn’t realize that Liddy even knew my name.
He spoke in a soft Irish lilt and never bothered to turn on the lights during
our evening class—even as 4:30 turned to 5 turned to 6:30 on those autumn evenings.
By the end of the class we’d be sitting in the dark, squinting to read our
notes, straining to hear Liddy whisper Jean Valentine lines from scraps of
paper he pulled from his duffle bag.
I vaguely
remembered having signed up via email to read for the student-faculty reading
series sometime during the academic year. But no one had told me it was
happening—and on Tuesday! But the
posters were plastered to every office and classroom door on the fourth floor
of Curtin Hall to prove it.
***
 |
| At a more recent poetry reading (not at Von Trier, of course) |
That night when
I entered the Farwell Avenue German tavern called Von Trier with its side room decorated
with antlers and beer steins, I entered another universe. This smoky universe
was full of shadowy figures—devastatingly chic blonde thirty-somethings in
berets and roomy cable-knit sweaters, bearded doctoral students who carried
leather bags of books by Foucault and Derrida, characters like the seasoned
professor with a dark brown bob who always wore an emerald trench coat and
matching beret (my grad school friends have claimed to never have seen her, so
now I’m wondering if she was a ghost).
That night, as I
stood in that smoky room at Von Trier and read my poems to a room full of
people who were infinitely cooler and smarter than I was, I entered a universe
where people love poetry so much they listen to it over beer and cigarettes. A
universe where a twenty-two-year-old from Manitowoc can go from a weird girl
with fruit earrings to a poet in one night. While I read, I entered the poems,
the dark room with its antlers and sticky wooden tables. I became part of the
poems and part of the audience as they reacted in the moment.
***
Looking back
now, I’m thankful that I was able to get into the zone as I read my poems to
the audience, because that reading changed everything.
So, how can a
shy girl (or guy) from Manitowoc--from anywhere--perform a poem?
On a recent
visit to my Creative Writing & the Visual Arts workshop at Silver Lake
College, poet Karl Elder divulged four tips for reading poems. I must have somehow
known these four tips intuitively as a twenty-two year old, but they are worth
spelling out and repeating here:
Tip 1: Determine the phrases.
Instead of just reading each line, figure out what your phrases are and
read the poem like that. This is especially important in poems that use
enjambment.
Tip 2: See it and say it. During his visit, poet Karl Elder
reminded my class that we have to see the poem in our minds so that we can
perform it in a way that will allow readers to see it in their minds.
Tip 3: Slow down. Elder urged us to “travel at the speed
of the readers’ visualization” so that readers can actually experience the poem
with us. Take a deep breath! No matter how nervous or caffeinated you are,
don’t blurt out your poem in double-time. Your poem is worth listening to.
Tip 4: Lend a sense of
wonder to your voice. While reading his own work during his visit to my
class, Elder spoke in such a way that we knew the poems were worthy of our
time. We stopped our own interior monologues to enter the poems with him.
Here’s hoping
your own poetry reading launches you into the universe of poets!
Do you have
other tips for reading poems aloud? Share them in a comment below.
 |
| Emilie Lindemann is an assistant professor of English at Silver Lake College in Manitowoc, WI. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Dear Minimum Wage Employee: You Are Priceless and The Queen of the Milky Way (both from Dancing Girl Press). After a stint as an apartment dweller on Milwaukee's East Side, Emilie now lives on a dairy farm in rural Manitowoc County. |
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