A poetry reading is a public oral recitation or performance of poetry. Reading poetry aloud allows the reader to express their own experience through poetry, changing the poem according to their sensibilities. The reader uses pitch and stress, and pauses become apparent. A poetry reading typically takes place on a small stage in a café or bookstore where multiple poets recite their own work. A more prominent poet may be chosen as the "headliner" of such an event and famous poets may also take the stage at a bigger venue such as an amphitheater or college auditorium.

How early poems like the Illiad were transmitted to audiences is not clear. Modern poetry readings only became popular in the last half of the twentieth century, at least in the United States, with stars like Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost. Live poetry reading competitions, called poetry slams and beginning in the 1980s, also remain popular.

Voice is an active, physical thing in oral poetry. It needs a speaker and a listener, a performer and an audience. It is a bodily creation that thrives in live connection. The voice is the mechanism by which a "poet's voice" comes alive. Reciting a poem aloud the reciter comes to understand and then to be the 'voice' of the poem. As poetry is a vocal art, the speaker brings their own experience to it, changing it according to their own sensibilities, intonation, the matter of sound making sense; controlled through pitch and stress, poems are full of invisible italicized contrasts. Reading poetry aloud also makes clear the "pause" as an element of poetry.

"The hearing knowledge we bring to a line if poetry is a knowledge of patterns of speech we have known since we were infants." Every speaker intuitively course through manipulations of sounds, almost as if we sing to each other all day. Even after three millennia of writing, poetry retains its appeal to the ear, the silent reading eye thereof, thereafter, hears what it is seeing. Sound that was imagined through the eye gradually gave body to poems in performance.

A public reading is typically given on a small stage in a café or bookstore, although reading by prominent poets frequently are booked into larger venues such as amphitheaters and college auditoriums, 'to take poetry public'.

Poetry readings almost always involve poets reading their own work or reciting it from memory but readings often involve several readers (often called "featured poets" or "featureds"), although one poet can be chosen as a "headliner".

How early poems like the Illiad were first experienced by audiences remains unclear. (But see rhapsode)

American poet Donald Hall described the increase in emphasis on public readings of poetry in the United States in a 2012 New Yorker magazine blog post where he recounted it a phenomenon that grew in the last half of the twentieth century.