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It’s been described as embarrassing, clichéd or “unhelpful singsong.” Many poets dislike it too, but it’s a style they’ve learned from each other.

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Gregory Cowles

Gregory Cowles is senior editor of the Book Review, and has overseen its poetry coverage since 2008.

Feb. 2, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

Q: Why do poets read their work in that tone of voice when they’re performing?

Would it surprise you to know that poets themselves are also vexed by this (very real) phenomenon? A database search going back decades finds complaints about the so-called poet voice — using adjectives like “dreaded” or “embarrassing” or “soporific” — with nobody rushing to its breathy, singsong defense.

So what’s the deal? More than prose, poetry is inherently about the musicality of language: its sound and rhythm and rhymes, its capacity to please the ear even as it evokes an image or conveys its desired meaning. Good poets exploit that musicality the same way good rappers do, favoring one word over another for the way it interacts with the words around it. But poets, unlike rappers, are not generally performers, and it shows when they recite their work for an audience. Rather than trusting the music of their language to sing for itself, they try to impose an outside music on it, as if they were performing Handel’s “Messiah” to the tune of “Old MacDonald.”

“You could think about it almost as the same melody over and over,” the English professor Marit MacArthur told Atlas Obscura in 2018 after she published a study analyzing the components of poet voice. “It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, you just say it in the same way.”

A bid to be perceived as serious

Not all poets fall into this trap. The last two readings I attended — by Ada Limón at the Texas Book Festival, and by readers reciting Seamus Heaney’s poetry at the 92nd Street Y — were satisfyingly natural performances, free of poet voice’s lilting cadences and long pauses. But enough of them do embrace it that poet voice has become a pop culture cliché: Witness Mike Myers’s turn as a modern-day Beat poet in the underrated 1993 movie “So I Married an Axe Murderer.”

The Beats, in fact, may be close to ground zero of what the poet and Harvard professor Stephanie Burt identifies as two distinct strains of poet voice. The first, she told me, “takes everything at the same adagio pace and treats every line as equally portentous, like bad translations of Rilke or maybe Rumi.” The second stems from poetry slams and other performance spaces: “It’s dramatic or melodramatic, seeks to engage the audience by almost any means, varies its pace and volume (sometimes to extremes), and emphasizes anger, outrage or trauma.”

Burt is more annoyed by the first kind and sees its possible roots in a bid to be perceived as serious, coming either from the audience’s “misplaced respect” for poetry as a concept (she compares this to the dutiful silence you find at classical music concerts) or from “individual poets’ desire to act out the dignity of their art.”

The poet and critic Daisy Fried agrees that something like this is at play when poets intone their work. “Often it’s an attempt to make a thought or a feeling that’s dull and quotidian into something feeling, something interesting,” she told me, “or to try to imbue something with music that hasn’t any. But I’ve also heard good poems read this way, which is a shame.”

‘Root out this unhelpful singsong’

Now, if you picture a whole class of young poets listening to their professor read in peak poet voice, and internalizing the message that this is how a poem is “meant” to be heard, it’s not hard to see how the individual is passed on to the collective. That’s a point that The Times Book Review’s poetry columnist, Elisa Gabbert, made when I asked her about poet voice. “It’s a style poets learn from each other,” she said, “a set of intonations and vocal patterns that go with the role, and some of us pick it up more or less unconsciously while attending readings.”

Having a distinct performance style isn’t necessarily a problem, Gabbert notes. “Radio D.J.s, podcasters and motivational speakers have their own established voices, easy to conjure up and mimic,” she points out. “It’s not that poets should read a poem in their usual speaking voice — poetry isn’t speech.” The problem comes when the performer veers too close to the clichéd poet voice rather than finding “an authentic voice that arises through the writing of the poem.”

In other words, poets should let the music of their language dictate the music of their performance. That’s just what David Yezzi prescribed in a 2014 essay for The New Criterion, where he served as poetry editor. “The truth is that the music of speech — rising and falling intonations, etc. — carries a semantic charge,” Yezzi told me. “Overlaying an artificial music on top of a poem removes the ‘sense’ of what’s being said to a great extent.”

Yezzi himself is in a good position to change things for the better. The rare poet who is also a professional performer (his acting roles in recent years have included both King Lear and Hamlet’s ghost), he teaches a popular graduate and undergraduate course at Johns Hopkins University called Performing Poetry and Fiction, which is devoted entirely to eliminating the dreaded, embarrassing, soporific poet voice. “We work to root out this unhelpful singsong and arrive at a clear and powerful spoken expression that best serves the poem,” he said.

Now that’s poetry to my ears.

Gregory Cowles is the poetry editor of the Book Review and senior editor of the Books desk.

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