Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.
You can't read to yourself. It's your inner ear that hears a poem. If you hear a poet read his own work, it becomes very exciting. The melody is a great part of it.
Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.
Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.
Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
I heard David Sedaris read live recently which was a complete delight. Few writers make me laugh out loud on the bus. He does.
My dad read The Hobbit to me originally when I was young. So, it was the first imaginary landscape I ever had in my head from the written word. It gave me a passion for reading, thanks to my dad's performance of the book.
It's a bit unusual that I'm the novelist and the actor who is reading out his own material.
Audience participation can often inject a dose of adrenalin into your average dial-tone literary reading, especially if a handful of audience-members are mentally unhinged, and let's face it - you can always depend on at least one crackpot at these things.
Writing is very much perceived as something distinct from performance. I don't see it like that.
I think you can perform any poem. But what I believe is that the best examples of spoken word poetry I've ever seen, are spoken word poems that, when you see them, you're aware of the fact they need to be performed. That there's something about that poem that you would not be able to understand if you were just reading it on a piece of paper.
If you can read, then you can recite Shakespeare. But that's not acting.
I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'
There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.
My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language.
Who all in raptures their own works rehearse, And drawl out measur'd prose, which they call verse.
