Tuesday, April 28, 2009

April Halprin Wayland - How to Read a Poem Aloud

HOW TO READ A POEM ALOUD
by
April Halprin Wayland

First, read the title of the poem

and the poet’s name.


Be clear.


Now completely

disappear.


Let each line

shine.


Then read it

one more time.

When the poem

ends, sigh.


Think about the poet at her desk,
late at night, picking up her pen to write…

and why.

© 2009 April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved.


April Halprin Wayland writes stand-alone poetry, novels-in-poems, and picture books (including a brand new one, New Year at the Pier, coming out in June!). She's a teacher as well, and she is now part of a collective of six fellow teaching authors who have just started blogging together at TeachingAuthors.com. Oh, and she still has time to be one of the nicest folks I've met in the children's book world!

April is another poet who sent me a few poems to choose from, any of which, again, I would have been incredibly happy to post here. The poems were different as could be, but shared the same ability to connect with me... to make me see things from a new perspective (in one case, that would actually be from a dog's perspective!)... to make me ask myself fun questions. I always love reading April's work, so I'm especially glad to have gotten to read extras AND to be able to have a poem of hers here as part of 30 Poets/30 Days.

Yesterday, Kenn Nesbitt gave us My Chicken's On The Internet. Tomorrow... Douglas Florian!

10 comments:

tanita✿davis said...

I like that this seems to be about reading a poem aloud when you're alone -- which isn't something a lot of people think of doing.

david elzey said...

i'm not generally a fan of poems (or fiction) that draw attention to themselves, but i do like this and am going to share it with my daughters later. what a great piece of instruction-by-example.

Lee Wind, M.Ed. said...

How fun that she broke down the fourth wall and made us think about her writing the poem and how we read it - and it's still a poem! "The Medium IS the message" comes to mind!
awesome!
namaste,
Lee

holly cupala said...

Lovely.

FITNESS - It's M-O-M (Mind Over Matter) said...

Love it - thanks for sharing!

gteamhj said...

Wonderful! Teaches, reaches out, makes the process a puzzle, and entertaining, too.

David LaRochelle said...

Lovely indeed, April!

And I enjoyed reading it aloud to myself!

April Halprin Wayland said...

Thank you, David!

One of the most important things I've learned about reading a poem aloud, is to read it twice.

The first time we're walking into the room the poet has created.

The second time we're comfortable on the couch with a cup of raspberry leaf tea.

K-Sue said...

I love this! And I love April's comment - well said.

web said...

Ah, that's lovely.