When was the Western idea of the poetry reading invented?

I imagine the first “poetry readings” were done around fires and at night (naturally, as was everything in my over-idealized notion of what it was to be a neanderthal). Was the poetry done to music, was it a precursor to music, was it music to begin with? I don’t know, because I wasn’t alive then. I should mention now, to make it pretty clear, that this entire blog is speculative.

I’ll guess I’ll just jump thousands of years into the future and end up somewhere like 1000 BC with Homer. Poetry readings must have been more or less big public events, where bards, fashioned like the criminally insane (and probably very, very drunk) just kind of went off of crowd reaction and spun wild narratives. Yes, believe it or not, this woman turned all of the men into pigs–and then there was a cyclops . . .

Jesus Christ himself was a poet and gave readings all the time, but they were very short and people found him too “radical” or whatever.

Things continued in this manner, with Vikings and Medieval dudes (what a crude sense of history I have). When good old Gutenberg came along, things would change forever. Memorization? Psshaw! Now you can just read right off the page! Shakespearean plays could be considered poetry readings, but not very “modern” ones, considering all that worthless memorization. At least those readings had dirty jokes strewn throughout them (oh Shakespeare, you dog!).

What next? Milton must have given some version of a reading  to whoever the hell wrote down Paradise Lost. What’s cool about Milton is he was “old-school” where Shakespeare was just outdated. Milton would yarn-spin just like those old Greek bards, and he was blind. Maybe he was Homer, disguised as a Puritan.

I’m just going to skip the Romantics. But telling from Wordsworth’s Prelude when he gets drunk with some boarders and they all sing and dance around a table, as well as some things mentioned in Keats’s letters, they seemed a rowdy bunch and their poetry readings were probably pretty fun. Who wouldn’t party with Lord Byron, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”?

I imagine it wasn’t until the 20th century that poetry readings became unutterably dull. I’m going to blame T.S. Eliot, simply for the sake of it (I know no reason for doing this).

Jump ahead a few more years: The Beats tried to make poetry “hip” again, but just being in a room with Jack Kerouac made too many people uncomfortable. I’m pretty sure Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder went on to do silly festival readings, where each would dress up like members of the Grateful Dead.

It seems as though the poetry reading may be dead (isn’t it fun making vague generalizations?). The days of the Romantic poetry party are long gone, and now we are stuck with the “academic” reading, in which every member of the audience politely shrugs or “hmmms” after every poem. Cocked eyebrows are a necessity and if you even think of shouting out of exuberance (this does not ever really happen, but it could, I guess) you will be considered to be “trying too hard.” You will listen very intently to the first four lines, trying to picture everything in front of you, but then start thinking about how amazing it was that dinosaurs existed on earth for as long as they did. The poet will usually say something completely useless between each of his or her poems: “This is about a toilet I met” or “You had to be there.” Many will attempt jokes: one out of every twenty poets is also a comedian. God bless the musician-poet, who likes to strum a little ditty on their zither between poems (a move introduced by Yeats).

Obviously, this is written very tongue in cheek, and grossly exaggerated–I recently went to a reading I very much enjoyed (but I still did not shout, though I wanted to). But why don’t I have fun at readings?

And I mean real, genuine, fun. Where’s the crazy Homers who just say things magically strung together by loose narrative and a music that cannot be touched (even if only for its spontaneity?) Maybe slam poetry? I still feel like I have to be pretty proper at slam poetry readings too, but I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a good one. Maybe I’ve never really been to a good poetry reading in general. But still, where is the Romantic poetry party? Where’s the fire and the night?

Maybe I made it all up . . .