The streets of Portsmouth may be confusing, but the arts are hopping in that town. So many people were at my reading! It was lovely and encouraging to have so many attentive and engaged listeners.

But life has now returned to its previously scheduled program--which is to say, it's twelve degrees below zero, and I'm doing laundry and editing other people's books. At the same time, however, I'm mulling over a few conversations I had in Portsmouth about the art of reading aloud. For me, it all comes down to the advice my dear, dead best friend gave me, in the days when she was thriving as an actress and I was fighting poet stage fright: "Respect your punctuation." This simple advice has improved not only my performance skills but also refined my approach to revision. If I can't say the poem effectively, then there's something wrong with the poem.

I think being a musician has also helped me. For instance, many songs slow down in the final few measures. Often the pitch drops back to the root note of the key and/or is held for an extra number of beats and/or becomes softer. In more dramatic endings, the final note may become louder or denser, as more instruments join in on related pitches or change their long smooth notes into tremolos. (For bowed-instrument players, this means repeating the same note using a succession of rapid bow changes. For other instruments, it may mean alternating rapidly between two different notes.)

Anyway, I think about these musical messages when I think about how to revise or to read a poem, and I would enjoy leading a class about performance strategies.