April is Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets tells us. In 2012, there were seven thousand four hundred and twenty-seven poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing; in April of 1948, there were fifteen readings in the United States, twelve by Robert Frost.

So I claim. The figures are imaginary but you get the point.

Whenever a poet comes to the end of a poetry reading, she pauses a moment, then, as a signal for applause, says, “Thank you,” and nods her head. Hands clap, and she says, “Thank you,” again, to more applause. Sometimes she says it one more time, or he does. How else does the audience know that the reading might not go on for six hours?

For better or worse, poetry is my life. After a reading, I enjoy the question period. On a tour in Nebraska I read poems to high-school kids, a big auditorium. When I finished, someone wanted to know how I got started. I said that at twelve I loved horror movies, then read Edgar Allan Poe, then… A young man up front waved his hand. I paused in my story. He asked, “Didn’t you do it to pick up chicks?”

I remembered cheerleaders at Hamden High School. “It works better,” I told him, “when you get older.”

It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road. He spoke well, his metre accommodating his natural sentences, and in between poems he made people laugh. At times, he played the chicken farmer, cute and countrified, eliciting coos of delight from an adoring audience. Once I heard him do this routine, then attended the post-reading cocktail party where he ate deviled eggs, sipped martinis, and slaughtered the reputations of Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Moore…

Back then, other famous poets read aloud only two or three times a year. If they were alive now, probably they could make a better living saying their poems than they did as an editor at Faber and Faber, or an obstetrician, or an insurance-company executive, or a Brooklyn librarian.

In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three. The London Times remarked on my “appropriately lugubrious voice.” When I first did a full-length poetry reading, three years later, my arms plunged stiff from my shoulders, my voice was changeless in pitch and volume, my face rigid, expressionless, pale—as if I were a collaborator facing a firing squad.

A question period for undergraduates at a Florida college began with the usual stuff: What is the difference between poetry and prose? Then I heard a question I had never heard before: “How do you reconcile being a poet with being president of Hallmark cards?” This inquisitive student had looked on the Internet, and learned that the man who runs that sentiment factory is indeed Donald Hall.

It’s a common name. Once before a reading a man asked me, “Are you Donald Hall?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So am I,” he said.

When my first book came out, in 1955, it was praised. I did a second book, my poems appeared in magazines—but nobody asked me to speak them out loud. I taught at the University of Michigan, which sponsored no readings. To my students, I recited great poems with gusto and growing confidence—Wyatt, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Hardy—and worked on performance without knowing it. It was a shock when, late in the decade, a lecture agent telephoned to offer a fee for reading my poems at a college. It happened again, and I flew off on days when I didn’t teach. Michigan paid minimal salaries, and most teachers amplified their incomes by plodding to summer school. I stayed home and wrote instead of employing the Socratic method in a suffocating classroom.

As the phone kept ringing, I supposed that poetry readings were some sort of fad, like cramming into phone booths; I would enjoy it as long as it lasted.

When my generation learned to read aloud, publishing from platforms more often than in print, we heard our poems change. Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning sound was imagined through the eye. Gradually the mouth-juice of vowels, or mouth-chunk of consonants, gave body to poems in performance. Dylan Thomas showed the way. Charles Olson said that “form is never more than an extension of content.” Really, content is only an excuse for oral sex. The most erotic poem in English is “Paradise Lost.”

In concentrating on sound, as in anything else, there are things to beware of. Revising a poem one morning, I found myself knowing that a new phrase was repellent, but realized it would pass if I intoned it out loud. Watch out. A poem must work from the platform but it must also work on the page. My generation started when poetry was print, before it became sound. We were lucky to practice both modes at once.

A chairman of English warned a friend of mine about her approaching audience. “They’re required to attend,” he said. “They don’t listen to anything. Sometimes in class I ask them to open a window, or to close it, just to see if they’re alive.” He sighed a deep sigh, as ponderous as tenure. “I don’t know what I’d do if The New Yorker didn’t come on Thursdays.”

It’s alleged that Homer said his poems aloud, though perhaps it was more like improv over centuries. Somewhat later, we learn, Tennyson read his poems to Queen Victoria, but we don’t know much more. In the nineteen-thirties, William Butler Yeats travelled by train from east coast to west, but the master of poetic noise didn’t speak his verses. At universities, to butter his bread, he read the typescript of a lecture called “Three Great Irishmen.” Maybe poets used to be paid not to say their poems?

By chance, I had been an undergraduate at the one college in America with an endowed meagre series of poetry readings. Eliot was good, but most performances were insufferable—superb poems spoken as if they were lines from the telephone book. William Carlos Williams read too quickly in a high-pitched voice, but seemed to enjoy himself. Wallace Stevens appeared to loathe his beautiful work, making it flat and half-audible. (Maybe he thought of how the boys in the office would tease him.) Marianne Moore’s tuneless drone was as eccentric as her inimitable art. When she spoke between poems, she mumbled in the identical monotone. Since she frequently revised or cut her things, a listener had to concentrate, to distinguish poems from talk. After twenty minutes, she looked distressed, and said, “Thank you.” When Dylan Thomas read, I hovered above my auditorium seat as I heard him say Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” He read his own poems afterward, fabricated for his rich and succulent Welsh organ. I found myself floating again. In four American visits, from 1950 to 1954, when he died in New York, Thomas read his poems many times at many places, from New York’s Poetry Center through dozens of western colleges. Frost’s eminence among poetry readers disappeared for a time.