Introduction

Abstract

Reading on the poetry circuit changed how poetry happened. Poems now had to work within a risky and unpredictable situation where every word would be framed by the author’s body, the reading’s time, the audience’s social expectations, and the institutional powers bringing them together. Surveying readings by Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden, this Introduction sets out how the live reading became a new poetic medium for the twentieth century, distinct from radio or recording, and why readings have remained something of a blind spot for literary criticism and theory. By involving the whole setting, the reading brought back the author to read their own poems, only to open up a challenge to what the ownership and authorship of poems was.