We recently had a poetry reading workshop at the Plough led by Sara-Jane
Arbury, a performance poet and actress who toured recently in 'Staying
Alive' (a performance based on the excellent Bloodaxe anthology of the same
name). It was aimed at building confidence, and what she did worked very
well. Anyone who runs, or is part of, a writers' group might like to try the
same thing.

After the usual preliminaries, she split us up into pairs and gave each pair
a couple of stanzas of Auden's 'Miss Gee' to work on, coming round to help
each pair individually. We then read the whole poem through as though to an
audience, each pair presenting their stanzas in their own way, and
afterwards discussed our individual approaches and how well they'd worked. A
lot of practical points were made about standing square to the audience and
not fidgeting, looking up and making eye contact, printing your poems out on
separate sheets so that it's easy to shuffle the correct one to the front,
speaking slower than you think - and never, never apologising for your work!
She told us that we should go out there, look the audience in the eye and
say (inwardly, of course), 'This is my poem, I'm proud of it, and you're
going to listen to it!'

We had all brought along a poem of our own to work on, and next she got us
to read these to her - all at the same time. It sounds odd, but if you've
ever read one of your own poems in public you will know how extraordinarily
hard it can be just to get started, and doing it like this 'broke the ice'
without any one of us being the center of attention (except for the chap
who'd brought along a four-page epic, and was still reading long after the
rest of us had finished). After this, we took it in turns to read our poem
to the group, and then we read it again into a microphone. We all got a CD
of the day's poems too keep.

It was a basic course - we didn't talk much about the content of the poems,
though we did talk a bit about introductions. Afterwards, everyone agreed
that it had really helped to boost their confidence, and we'd picked up some
very useful, practical tips, too. It was very obvious that if you can at
least look confident, however you feel,  you're half way to convincing the
audience of the merit of your poem. That's mainly a question of getting your
body language right.

Good luck Matt!

Sarah