Poetry Performance Anxiety
Confidence-Building Techniques For Successful Poetry Reading
Speaking your art in public can be scary. But good psychological preparation and effective organisation can turn butterflies into power.
After you’ve made the decision to perform your poetry and sorted out a venue suitable for the type of writing you do, the work begins. Now you need to get your mind and body organised so that you are able to give a brilliant reading.
Dealing with Performance Anxiety
Knowing that everybody experiences this—the elevated heartbeat, the cold clammy hands, the shakey voice—is not particularly helpful to most first-time performers.
It is important to realise, however, that other poets as well as actors, musicians and sportspeople consider pre-event anxiety to be important to a successful performance.
The trick is to turn the nerves into excitement, to achieve what is known in sport as optimal activation or “psych-up”.
According to Ken Hodge in his 1994 book Sport Motivation: Training your Mind for Peak Performance, every activity and every person is different in respect of what level of activation is “optimal”. You will learn through experience how you need to feel to produce a magical or “flow” performance. For now, simply be aware that pre-performance nerves are actually a positive.
To manage your anxiety, deep slow breathing and realistic, positive self-talk are useful strategies. Learn how to relax through deep (but not too deep), regular breathing, which will slow down your heart rate. Practice mental messages that tackle your particular negative “voices”. For example, if your self-criticism is a weak voice, say: “I speak confidently and clearly.”
Performance anxiety tends to feed on itself, so it is important to tackle it early, before you take the stage. Here are two further tips for when you are actually out there: remember the audience and engage in task relevant thinking.
Focusing on the audience is a good way of not focusing on your own physiological responses to stress. After all, members of the audience are the reason you are there, and you have taken on a responsibility to make their experience worthwhile. Very few audiences are in fact hostile. Most have some empathy with the performer and want that person to do well.
Don’t carry audience identification too far, however, or you will be alarmed by every cough or out-of-place giggle. David Roland in his 1997 book The Confident Performer is an advocate of task-relevant thinking. Concentrate on exactly what you need to do at this moment to perform well. And (this is a message from sports psychology as well), if something does go wrong, let it go. Move on to the next line or the next poem.
Sorting Out the Logistics
In order to perform your poetry in a confident frame of mind, it is important to arrive at the venue calm, having organised as much as you can in advance. Here are some tips on what you can do to manage your performance environment.
Make an effort to see the performance venue ahead of time. Will there be a microphone? Will the chair on offer be a high bar stool, an uncomfortable perch? (You can ask for another chair, or stand). How much light is there likely to be? If not much and you are planning to read rather than recite, make sure your script is in large black type.
Invite friends and family to the performance if this helps. In New Zealand having people close to us participate in an important but possibly stressful event is known as “whanau (the Maori word for family) support.” To many new performers having a friendly face in a sea of unfamiliar ones is a lifeline.
Organise clothes and transport ahead of time, and arrive in plenty of time. Some performers may thrive on the adrenaline of just-in-time performing, but not many. Also, rushing in when the audience has been waiting is not a way to win its support.
If you can control your “nerves” and sort out the organisational side of performing, you are well on your way to a brilliant reading. After a few performances you may even begin to enjoy it, and start to focus on the nuts and bolts of speaking your poetry better and better.
