Ah, how exhilarating and exhausting a week in New Orleans can be, especially if you're doing a conference by day and still sneaking out at night to enjoy the Big Easy nightlife.
The Saints & Sinners literary festival, one of my favorite LGBT annual events, coincides with the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival. This year their were quite a few poets on the official reading program and more poetry representation on panels than at some of the past festivals, which was fun for me -- especially since I got to be one of the readers.
Since I do public readings rarely, I'm still, despite hotel room rehearsing, a little nervous beforehand, and about midway through my eight minutes in the spotlight I found myself trying to rush through my reading, a mistake I've made before. But then I calmed down and managed to make more eye contact with the audience and add a little extemporaneous conversation between poems, and I think my work was fairly well received by people in the room. It was a mix of fiction, nonfiction and poetry folks, so the audience was perhaps more diverse in terms of literary tastes than at most poetry readings. I read exclusively poetry from my chapbook, Gotham Gray, and my general perception was that the poetry that had narrative content was more well received than my more abstract musings. I had the good fortune of reading with some very accomplished writers, namely Christian Baines, Kimberly Dark, Sven Davisson, Sukie de la Croix, J.M. Redmann and Jeffrey Round. Other poets participating in the festival included the amazing Justin Phillip Read, who was on a joint Saints & Sinners/Tennessee Williams festival panel with Garth Greenwell talking about what they write about when they write about sex; Brian Riggs, Steven Sanchez, Steven Riel, Brad Richard, Franklin Abbott, Louis Flint Ceci, and Gregg Shapiro. And Judy Grahn received a lifetime achievement recognition from the festival.
At any rate, I read a good article via Facebook recently that had some tips for doing public poetry readings, the most important of which is to remember that it is a performance, you are a performer, and you have to embrace that role. (I'm paraphrasing, of course, if I can find the link I'll share it here later. And I remember hearing the distinguished poet Timothy Liu say at a reading one time that the most important advice he'd received about doing readings was to always show up on time and be in a good mood, no matter how small the audience. (That was several years ago, so I hope my recollection is accurate.)
At any rate, I think I should seek out more reading opportunities, including open mikes and whatnot, if I want to improve. Hotel room rehearsing only goes so far -- in the end, that experience of speaking to or with an audience is what makes a reading a reading.
