ways of reading

The other night I went to a poetry reading. My friend Laura organises some at a cafe in my suburb, it's so close I have no excuse not to go. Rhys Rodgers, a pink-haired poet-boy who I met at This is Not Art festival last year, was the feature poet. He's utterly lovely and generous and an amazing performer. So theatrical. They usually have an open mic night, and I had planned to take a poem of mine to read out, but I attempted to read it aloud earlier in the day and I wasn't feeling confident. There are a few different ways you can read poetry, I think. The wafty, timid, middle-aged woman way. Sometimes at these readings there are women who write about people they see at the pool during their morning swims; they usually do that voice. There are the writer poets, who don't really think about how their poems sound when they read them out, not really anyway. I am mostly one of these, I have to say. You might read them out to yourself, but that's just reading not performing. Lots of poets just read poems like they are reading a book. You have to make poetry with your voice, not just your words and your voice, well, it's an instrument so you have to sing.

A few beers later, after the reading, Zoe came back to the flat with Kym and I and we pretended to be poets. We pretended to be different styles of poets, using recipe books, textbooks and packets of bird seed for the poems. It was really fun. And hilarious. I read out the ingredients from some recipe book in the style that Rhys would do and it turns out that I'm actually decent at it. I suppose the beers probably helped slightly, but it was really amazing, I just acted like I was a really great poet, using my hands and giving the words crazy emphasis and playing around with the pace and volume of my voice. Zoe and Kym suggested I read my own poem like this. I DID AND IT WAS GREAT. 

Now, at the moment for university I am writing about the time I visited the Keats-Shelly museum in Rome.I It's been a poetic weekend, I suppose. Now young Stacey, you might not remember this, but it definitely happened when I visited you last year. We walked past that pub on the corner of K Rd and your street, whatever it is, and there was going to be a reading and for some reason we mused about the poets we admired and whose poetry we would read out. At Sospeso, the mc lady commended a person who read out a Tom Waits song for her open mic, saying that often people forget you can just read other people's. The Tom Waits person did a really nice version of it, but frankly I think she fell into the trap of half-singing it anyway, you could tell.

So my question, Stacey, is this: if you were to read at an open mic and were to read out another poet's work, whose poetry would you read and why? The challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to record yourself reading this poem! I'll post mine in the near future. I encourage any other literary (and non-literary!) folk to play along!