How to Encourge High School Students to Read Poems Out Loud

The Library of Congress has a wonderful program called Poetry 180, designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. The poems, which are all online, are primarily intended for high school students, though they could certainly play a part in lower grades, or in college classes as well. Here are some Poetry 180 tips for helping students to learn to read poems out loud before an audience.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Read the poem slowly. Most adolescents speak rapidly, and a nervous reader will tend to do the same in order to get the reading over with. Reading a poem slowly is the best way to ensure that the poem will be read clearly and understood by its listeners. Learning to read a poem slowly will not just make the poem easier to hear; it will underscore the importance in poetry of each and every word. A good way for a reader to set an easy pace is to pause for a few seconds between the title and the poem's first line.
2. Read in a normal, relaxed tone of voice. It is not necessary to give poems a dramatic reading as if from a stage. The Poetry 180 poems, in particular, are mostly written in a natural, colloquial style and should be read that way. Let the words of the poem do the work. Just speak clearly and slowly.
3. Obviously, poems come in lines, but pausing at the end of every line will create a choppy effect and interrupt the flow of the poem's sense. Encourage readers to pause only where there is punctuation, just as you would when reading prose, only more slowly.
4. Use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words and hard-to-pronounce words. To read with conviction, a reader needs to know at least the dictionary sense of every word. In some cases, a reader might want to write out a word phonetically as a reminder of how it should sound.
5. Learning to read a poem out loud is a way of coming to a full understanding of that poem, perhaps a better way than writing a paper on the subject.
6. Use the resources immediately below to introduce yourself and others to the beautiful poems at Poetry180.

Tips & Warnings

• Danger: Can be habit forming.