Oral Performance Quotes

The most exciting thing is to read a poem out loud for the first time.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.

Performance is really an important part of how I edit. I sometimes take something out because I realize I put in a joke just to be funny and the audience laughed, but I should be ashamed of myself. I sometimes take out sentences, which are perfectly fine on paper, just because they don't flow when I say them out loud. I always read my work out loud now.

There's always an added element of a poem when it's read aloud because then you can really hear the rhythm, and the cadence, and even the pronunciation sometimes adds another layer to the poem.

You read so many scripts, especially pilots, that really feel like marbles in your mouth when you go to read them out loud.

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

I find it creatively satisfying to write material and say it out loud in a public place, whether or not anyone's listening.

I was always into poetry and writing. So the urgency of spoken word is something that really has always appealed to me.

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.

What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.