Once a week, I try to take forty-five minutes to simply read poems out loud.
That might not sound radical. But for me, it is. It is a refusal of urgency. It is a small act of attention in a culture that trains us to skim, optimize, extract.
Poetry has been a source of connection for me for more than twenty years. I started organizing readings when I was sixteen and never really stopped. I’ve worked at Open Books: A Poem Emporium in Seattle for a decade. I’ve read thousands of books of poems. And I can say honestly that existence would feel estranged to me without poetry. Not just estranged from other people, but estranged from rooms, sidewalks, weather, cities. Poetry enables me to communicate myself to the world around me.
That is why I keep hosting these livestreams. That is why I keep reading poetry aloud.
I believe that taking forty-five minutes once a week to listen to poems makes us better off.
Why I Read Poetry Aloud
When people ask me how to read poetry out loud, I don’t have a technical answer. I don’t think it is about theatrical projection or dramatic pauses. It is about presence.
Reading poetry aloud forces me to slow down. It moves meaning from the purely intellectual into the body. The breath matters. The tongue matters. The friction of consonants matters. Sometimes even pairing complex words next to each other makes the glottal sounds stick together like fudge. That physicality reassures me that poetry is a shared human language.
Even when I don’t fully understand a poem, I can feel it.
And I’ve come to believe that understanding is overrated when it comes to art. I’ve probably understood ten percent of the poetry books I’ve read. But feeling something is enough. If a poem produces an effect in me, if it moves something, that is sufficient. If it doesn’t, I turn the page.
Listening to poetry is not about mastery. It is about attention.
Most Poetry Teaches Us to Exist Without Urgency
One of the things I return to often is this idea that most poetry is trying to teach us how to exist without urgency.
You can read a seventy-eight-page book in thirty minutes. But what happens if you stretch that thirty minutes into four hours? Who is going to object? It is not an affront to anyone. It is just a small sacrifice of time for yourself.
So much of contemporary life demands speed and certainty. Poetry asks for neither. It asks for patience. It asks for a willingness to sit with uncertainty. Some poems are straightforward and narrative. Others devolve into image and sound, resisting logic. Both are valid. Both have something to offer.
Sometimes the poem is a singular moment. A single utterance. A moment generative of sound. That is enough.
Why I Specialize in Poetry in Translation
I specialize in poetry in translation because I believe reading across borders changes us.
Translated poetry is remarkably undernourished in terms of representation and accessibility. That is part of why I built a clickable map organized by country and author, to help people explore contemporary poetry from around the world.
When I read poetry in translation aloud, something shifts. I am not just hearing a single voice. I am hearing the dance between languages. I am hearing the care of the translator. I am hearing cultural survival.
During this recent reading, we moved across continents: Mexican poets writing in Zapotec and Spanish, Iranian lyric meditations, Chilean and Latin American experimental prose poems, Swedish surrealism, Ukrainian wartime verse, Korean American imagery, postwar German devastation.
Reading across borders does something to the imagination. It destabilizes assumptions about metaphor and form. It exposes me to new syntaxes of grief, desire, humor, and endurance.
If I can leave anyone with one lesson, it is this: reading across borders is going to save the world.
Grief, Language, and the Limits of Words
When I read Paul Celan aloud, I am always reminded that language sometimes has to break in order to tell the truth.
Celan fused words together because ordinary German felt insufficient after the Holocaust. When grief is total, linear language feels false. So he abandoned it. He mashed words together. He made new constructions.
Reading him, I understand something about grief. Grief is imperfect. It keeps you angry and inflamed. It keeps you stagnant. Sometimes it is all-encompassing. Sometimes you want to tuck it away and pretend it is not there.
And when you are truly grieving, there are no words that can bring you comfort or justification for the collapse you have experienced.
But we read the poems anyway.
Poetry does not solve grief. But it creates a chamber where grief can resonate honestly. And that resonance is communal.
The Everyday in the Poem
One of the things I love about contemporary Ukrainian poetry, for example, is how it invokes what might seem implicitly anti-poetic: Facebook pages, elevators, media lulls, weather forecasts. That shiningness of the everyday matters.
Culture survives crisis by absorbing daily life into language. Humor matters. Kinship matters. Intimacy matters. If you do not hold onto those things through suffering, then suffering wins.
Poetry reminds me of that over and over again.
Books Featured in the Reading
Here are the books I read from during the livestream:
Carapace Dancer by Natalia Toledo tr. Clare Sullivan
Lean Against This Late Hour by Garous Abdolmalekian tr. Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey
Into Muteness by Sergio Espinosa tr. Kelsey Vanada
Speaking in Song by Pura López Colomé tr. Dan Bellm
A Field of Foundlings by Iryna Starovoyt tr. Grace Mahoney
Lobster Palaces by Ann Kim
Behind the Tree Backs by Imam Mohammed tr. Jennifer Hayashida
Breathturn into Timestead by Paul Celan tr. Pierre Joris
Each of these books demonstrates something different about what poetry can do. Some are brief and aphoristic. Some are mythic and surreal. Some are dense with grief. Some are bodily and erotic. Some feel almost nonsensical in their imagery. All of them are alive.
A Small Weekly Ritual
If you are wondering why poetry should be spoken, my answer is simple: it keeps us human.
Poetry is a shared human language. Even when we do not fully understand what someone is trying to say, the sound of it reassures us that we are imperfect creatures attempting communication. That we wish each other no harm. That sometimes we even wish each other happiness.
So here is my invitation.
Once a week, take forty-five minutes. Read poetry out loud. Read something translated. Read something you do not fully understand. Stretch the time. Let the sound move through you.
Understanding may follow. It may not.
Feeling is enough.
And in a world addicted to urgency, that slow act of listening might be one of the most meaningful things we can do.
