Why I Want to Learn to Read My Poetry Aloud (And Why You Should Too)

Right. Before we begin, I’m gonna have to warn you.

The following video contains me, sitting in my garden, reading aloud a poem I wrote this very morning while my girlfriend (aka trusty online-pimp/videographer) filmed from behind.

There is mumbling, and stumbles, and moments where my brain forgets how words work.

There is absolutely no professional audio equipment in sight —not even some £10 piece-of-trash microphone from Amazon— and most importantly (perhaps most bizarrely) there is no face.

I’m developing something of a mysterious, faceless persona, you see. I have no qualms about being on camera overall, but I’ve decided I’d like my face to remain hidden from the public.

I don’t know… I enjoy the mystery. I also quite like the idea of letting my words become more recognisable than my face.

But let’s be real… I’m simply too handsome for the naked eye. It’s a burden I’ve had to carry for years and I’m simply tired of all the marriage proposals.

So for now you’ll have to just settle for the back of my head while I find my feet with all this. Because underneath all the mystery, terrible audio, and cringe humour, there’s something I’m actually quite serious about.

And that’s learning how to read my poetry properly.

This is my starting point.

Heard it? Hearted it? Listened again? Left a comment? Reshared it? Perfect! There we are then.

Not exactly Stephen Fry at the O2, was it?

But you know what?

I’m actually quite pleased with it. Not because it was good, particularly. In fact I’m almost certain that it wasn’t. But I did it. I actually did it.

After years of avoiding things I’m not immediately ‘good’ at, and shying away from the things I know I want to do in fear of failing before I fly, I feel somewhat… proud. Of myself?

Hear me out. We wait until we’re confident before we begin anything. We wait until we’re knowledgeable. God’s gift. Fit enough, talented enough, interesting enough, experienced enough, attractive enough, successful enough.

We wait until we can imagine ourselves doing the thing well so intently we end up never doing the thing at all.

I’m trying to get better at NOT doing that. At taking the swing. At doing the thing. At accidentally rhyming mid-paragraph because poetry just comes that easily to me, I guess.

I’m Learning to use my voice.

Writing poetry is one thing but reading it aloud is something else entirely.

There’s a rhythm to the words that aren’t always obvious when they’re sitting silently on a page. There’s pace, breath, emphasis, articulation, volume, tone, cadence and all sorts of other things I run away scared from.

Apparently speaking is a skill I never knew needed developing. Who knew?

If Young-Me were a little less interested in smoking behind the bike sheds, climbing fences and discovering increasingly inventive ways of not being where I was supposed to be, I’d have learned all this in school.

But alas, here I am now, making up for lost time.

Over the coming weeks and months I want to develop my confidence with this. My diction, clarity, enunciation, breath control. I want to develop my ability to breathe life into a sentence rather than simply reading one.

I want the confidence to perform the poem. When a word should breathe, sing, rush, slow down. When the silence between lines become part of the poem itself.

And I’m going to learn those things in exactly the same way you learn almost anything:

by doing it badly until you stop doing it badly.

This recording is the beginning of that process.

So Why read poetry aloud anyway?

Well that’s simple: I don’t think poetry is supposed to exist exclusively on a page.

At least, mine isn’t.

Take Me From Here has a particular rhythm to it. It begins with frustration and disgust, moves through this increasingly claustrophobic catalogue of modern life, and eventually reaches something softer.

Something living, real, and almost painfully simplistic. To be where the butterflies dance.

I want people to feel that movement, and while doing so, give the words somewhere to go.

Also I want to bring my poetry into the wider world. My Instagram needs a little kick up the arse, for one thing, and it’s about time I take myself at least a little seriously.

Overtime I’ll do all the cool social media stuff. I’ll extract the audio from the readings and layer my voice over photographs and footage from my many walks through nature.

Then I’ll add soft, atmospheric backing tracks beneath the words — something soothing and complementary.

I want to make the sort of thing you might stumble across while casually scrolling and, instead of carrying on, decide to stop for a minute and listen.

A poem to listen to while drinking your tea or out with the dogs, you know?

That’s where I’m heading.

But let’s be real nobody gets to begin there.

They begin here, with terrible audio and nervous mumbling. Awkward pauses. The raging certainty that somebody out there is watching you make a complete tit of yourself.

And you do it anyway, because perhaps that’s the real point of all this.

You don’t have to be good enough to begin. You just have to be brave enough.

So if you’re reading this while putting something off because you don’t think you’re ready yet, perhaps this is your invitation.

Take the swing. Miss. Embarrass yourself. And then do it again tomorrow. And then again. And again. And again.

And then one day you’ll look back at the thing you once found terrifying and wonder why it ever frightened you in the first place. At least that’s what I’m hoping to discover with this.

So, for now, please bear with me.

I’m going to be terrible at this for a while.

But I’m gonna keep going with it.

And perhaps one day you’ll stumble across one of these recordings while walking through a forest, sitting beneath a tree, or drinking tea in your garden, and instead of hearing a nervous bloke mumbling his way through his first attempt at reading a poem, you’ll hear exactly what I intended when I wrote it.

That’s the goal.

But for now… my work here is done.

Take Me From Here

Take me from here.
From shallow hearts and empty souls,
From lives consumed with consumption.
Take me from slavery, submission,
Obsession and depression,
From everything nobody knows they are suffering.

Take me from ignorance,
From compliance,
From complacence and complainants,
From conversions and coercions,
And conversations with…
It doesn’t matter.

This is it. Isn’t it?
This is where we are.

In concrete jungles and cables,
Tangled in disconnection and disillusionment,
In disgrace and disgust for anything that isn’t make-believe,
Anything that’s…

Real.

Take me from here.
To where the butterflies dance.

*****

Well, that’s all from me today! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed your visit, and please feel free to subscribe and connect through here and Instagram 😊