Ernest Hilbert’s lighthearted guest essay for the Times Literary Supplement details the perils, pitfalls, and pratfalls of the contemporary poetry reading. Here is a sample:

I often encounter poets, or emcees to poets, who appear unduly nervous before a reading. My first effort to comfort anyone in such a state is to ask: “What could go wrong?”

The answer, unfortunately, is “Plenty.” A poet may go over time and ask, “How about two more poems?”; or, to no one in particular, like a deep-sea diver short on oxygen, “How am I doing on time?” Often, no one answers. It could be worse. Even established poets might turn up to find no one there to hear them. There may be rude talkers or, in the front row, an audience member scrolling through TikTok on a large phone. Drunken heckling remains a remote but real possibility. Sometimes the unexpected and even the serendipitous occurs.

Some poets may choose never to read in public at all. Aside from small informal gatherings of fellow staff in the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, where he worked for three decades, Philip Larkin enjoyed considerable success as an author while avoiding the podium altogether. Others, particularly contemporary performance poets, rely on public readings as the fullest expression of their art. While certain poets are lucky to earn substantial sums from public appearances at universities and arts organizations, others gladly appear at unpaid readings and open-mic events, sometimes several times a week. I straddle both of these worlds.

I once gave a paid reading in upstate New York, in the Finger Lakes region – which also included accommodation, sponsored by Poets & Writers magazine and the National Endowment for the Arts – which was followed by a local open mic. One poet energetically read three or four pages before stopping and demanding of the audience, “What order were these supposed to go in?” She stood shuffling her sheaf for several minutes, then shrugged and simply continued from her last place. Another approached the microphone, lifting her iPhone like an amulet, and whispered: “My bees are my poetry, and I ask them to speak for me.” She then held her screen to the microphone. We glimpsed some swarming, hive-like motion displayed in a video, but could hear nothing. I tepidly raised my hand to inform her that the phone’s speaker was on the bottom of the device and needed to be moved closer to the mic. “Well, how was I supposed to know that?!” she snapped. We then enjoyed the surprisingly soothing drone of bees for several minutes–a techno-pastoral that would have impressed the Dada poets at the Cabaret Voltaire.

Click here to read on.