I'm doing a reading this weekend at the 11th SoundEye festival in Cork. Of the 11 festivals so far, this is the 10th I'll have read at, so it seems that I enjoy the experience, despite the fact that I have some reservations about the idea of the poetry reading. For the last week or two, as a result, I've been wondering about what readings are good for. Here's what I've come up with.
1) You get paid for doing it. Not a lot, a couple of hundred euros or so, but when you add in travel and accommodation expenses and sales of books, readings probably provide the single largest source of writing-based income that most poets will ever see.
2) They are opportunities to meet your readers. The great American poet Ed Dorn once said that, "My readers are the people who have read me. I know almost exactly how many they are, and I even know a large percentage of them personally. And by statistical extension I know them all." Readings are one of the few chances that most poets have to "know them all" face-to-face. Individual poets respond differently: some prefer to come in, do the reading, do a formal Q&A and go; others (myself included) prefer to mingle before and after the reading and talk individually to anyone who approaches. Of course, the danger with this is that maybe nobody will!
3) When the reading is at a festival like SoundEye, there's the additional benefit of meeting the other writers who are attending. Some of them will be old friends, others people whose work you know but who you've never met in person, still more will be completely new to you. One way or another, there's always something to be learned from conversations with these fellow poets, and the time spent with them outside the reading venues can be the most rewarding part of the whole festival. Of course, there can be negatives to this; books end up being swapped or bought instead of sold, for one thing.
4) While all these benefits are, to some extent at least, external to the fact of writing, readings can have a direct impact on your work, too. When you read your poems aloud, you get a much clearer sense of what works and what doesn't, and the reading can become part of the editing process. This is especially true when you read new, unpublished work.
So given all these benefits, why do I have reservations about poetry readings? It's not just because I just don't see myself as primarily an oral poet, or as a performer, which I don't. My main problem is with the idea that some people seem to have that if you hear a writer read their own work, you are somehow closer to an authentic understanding of what they "mean" or what the work should sound like. A lot of poetry that is written for the page (actual or virtual) does not allow of a single interpretation, and if you heard the poet read it 10 times you'd probably get at least nine different interpretations of it. It's a bit like listening to different performances of a single piece of music. Maybe the best thing to do is play it yourself?
