No Water River features poetry videos of children's poets reading their own work, plus classic poem performances, poetry performance tips, and interviews with children's poets.
I met Eve Merriam about 1982 when she read at a benefit for the poetry program at St. Clement's Church in Manhattan. After she read she sat down, and a young black man who had come in while she was reading, said to her, That was good! Who are you? :) She signed a book of her poetry for me that night which I've recently donated to Poets House in NYC.
A very good evening ma'am just could you help me out with atleast three poems which compliment each other and during the elocution few props can be taken up to make them look fancy .The poems I selected are The Walrus and the carpenter ,The blind man and the elephant and Middlesome Matty. Ma'am really need ur help kindly suggest more according to you which compliment each other. Regards Jade
My small village in Dorset, England (Hardy country - 2nd favourite poet after Kipling) has a thriving poetry reading society that has been going for something like 12 years. All manner of types of poems, and styles of reading, and the only one of your tips I wholeheartedly endorse is No. 5: Be natural, have fun. If you do that, you have poetry reading cracked! (I have been reading Jabberwocky for 65 years - that is FUN!)
Yeats himself did not read his poetry in the cadence you used: From a BBC article about Yeats in 2015: "The Irish poet made a series of radio broadcasts for the BBC in the 1930s. He seemed to know even then that his reading manner was going out of style. “I am going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm, and that may seem strange if you are not used to it,” warned Yeats when introducing the Lake Isle of Innisfree in a 1931 recording. “I remember the great English poet, William Morris, coming in a rage out of some lecture hall where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd the Volsung. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into verse.’ It gave me the devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.”
Alas, Yeats is dead and so we are free to interpret his poems as we wish! I personally cannot stand a reading that pushes hard on getting to an end rhyme.
Thanks for your juicy tips.I'm having a poetry competition,and I am not nervous,but mom daid that I should recite it with feelings since I am also a poet.Your video gave me confidence.Thank you.
One rule above all: Do not try to imitate current spoken word performers or their mannerisms. The way they murder any kind of nuance present in texts and throw up emotions all over the audience is not only exhausting to listen to, but also plain disrespectful. Walking someone through the story you want to tell and allowing the emotions come to your audience naturally is much more powerful than excessive screaming of your lines can ever be.
The Moo Cow Moo brings back warm memories. I can recite it by memory and can visualize every aspect of this beauty because in my my earliest memory every farmer milked with "squirts and squirts and squirts"!
The book of maths puzzles, Edgar Allan Poe's Pie, is invaluable! I use it with all of my younger private students. Thank you for writing this! Also beautifully illustrated by Michael Slack, it is a must in a young child personal library.
I have my competion tomorrow but I think that my peom is kind of sober though it has a great meaning but if any person will listen to it at first it will not feel very attractive and showy. So what should I do?
How did your competition go? To keep interest, be sure you score your poem really well and think about the phrasing -- which group of words go together, where should my pauses be, etc. If YOU believe in what you are saying, you will relay that to the audience.
