I use the word 'reading' advisedly. Philip Larkin once complained: "I don't give readings, no, although I have recorded three of my collections, just to show how I should read them. Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much - the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go at your own pace, taking it in properly; hearing it means you're dragged along at the speaker's own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing 'there' and 'their' and things like that.'

It's true, of course, that you don't necessarily grasp all of what's being read to you from the platform at a poetry event. The nature of poems is that, with the exception of the more free-wheeling, demotic kind of material, they are compacted, dense even, and that a lot tends to be going on at once - end-rhyme, internal rhyme, repetitions, deviations, complicated rhetorical structures, and so on. But very often the reader doesn't grasp this on the page either, at least not at first reading. When I listen to a poet in flight, I'm listening to a voice, a personality. What I listen for - the contours of the diction, the feeling for rhythm, the musical notation of the phrasing - provides another level on which to appreciate the quality of the poem. A poet being decent to his or her own lines will use the audience as a sounding board. You might describe this as a state of honest enquiry. How true are these words? The audience becomes quickly aware, I think, of any tendency to over-presentation, any actorly stage-rhetoric, any attempt to cover risible thought or indifferently plotted diction with false bravura.

I don't deny that I've been impressed with some poets' theatrical skills at the moment of performance, but reflection afterwards, and consultation of the text, reveals that this has been a bit of a confidence trick, or at least it is if we assume that poetry communicates first and foremost through the medium of print, and is thereby committed to avoiding all forms of redundancy. I don't, by the way, want to suggest that performance poetry is not a valid art form. You have to admire the ranting and clowning of poets whose gifts lie in that direction. What 'performance artform' means is that without the presence of the performer to put the material across, the poems don't work. They need simplicity of syntax and lightness of touch, and can't deal very well with complex emotion. They need to be full of redundancy - in the sense of repetition, overload, echo-effect - so that the audience has no trouble appreciating what is going on. This kind of poetry is a different animal to material that, whatever its acoustic manifestation, ultimately remains within the dimensions of printed text.

I was reading recently with the American poet August Kleinzahler at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in England, and we discussed a tendency I've noted of late for poets to throw away their books and become reciters. I believe Michael Donaghy started this fashion. Or rather re-started it. Both Kleinzahler and I agreed we didn't care for it - but the question is: why? I think it's because it suggests the poet is launching himself on the road to becoming a performer, rather than a reader, and in performance the personality is always more important than what is being read. That's why I, as a reader standing on a platform before a crowd, wish to hold my book in my hand, and glance down at it, even if I know the poem by heart anyway. I would embarrass myself if I held eye-contact with the audience for the duration of the poem. I'd feel like a goddam politician or something. The poem isn't me. It's something I wrote that I hope says something interesting or new in an interesting or new way, but now that it's written and is out there it has a life of its own, or not. All I can hope to do is reinterpret it each time I read it, and to do that I need to look at it from time to time in this new situation we find ourselves in - me and the poem - in front of some people I don't know and may never see again. I'm not an actor.

At this same Ledbury festival, the publisher Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books was making a film of Lewis Carroll's poem 'Jabberwocky'. He asked all the poets at the festival to read a stanza of the poem, and then cut them together so that each line of the poem was read by a different poet. It's an entertaining idea, and you can see the result on YouTube. When he wrote to me to ask if I would care to memorise a stanza from the poem, I wrote back to say I thought it was a bit of an insult to ask a poet to memorise a whole stanza of a poem. This was supposed to be a joke (not a very good one), but Astley wrote back to say I was the only poet who had refused to cooperate, and why was I being so difficult, and I explained that Alice in Wonderland is in fact one of my favourite books, and that I had read it so often to my daughter that I could recite the whole of 'Jabberwocky' off the top of my head. (And probably a lot more than that.) Just before the reading, therefore, I did give a recitation to camera, and it's full of mimic and eye-rolling, just as I would have read it to my daughter. I'll be honest with you, I find it slightly embarrassing to watch. God forbid I'd read one of my own poems like that.

In fact, a poetry reading is a mine field. The poet needs to tread carefully. I think about an upcoming reading by trying not to think about it, and then ideas slowly form. A lot of this is dependent on mood. Am I confident, sunny, irritable, annoyed, depressed, cheerful? By the poems I read shall ye know me. (And I shall know myself.) Which of the poems in this book do I feel like reading? None of them? Should I perhaps chuck the book out of the window and start again? Too late for that now. Take poem (a). It goes down well at readings, but the fact is that I've never performed poem (b). Shall I play it safe or continue to let the book shrink to just those poems I've already read from it? Poem (c) is guaranteed (well, almost) to produce laughter, and that's a gratifying effect. Sad poems produce plain silence. Or muttered mmms. These mmms make me uneasy. (Is this appreciation or anticipatory homicide?) A poem I read aloud at the TS Eliot Prize reading, which was my attempt at a poem about the disaster of the twin towers in New York, was greeted with whoops and catcalls. The prize judges looked extremely sour. But perhaps that was the effect I wanted.

The great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis remarked: 'If you're not nervous, you're not paying attention', and that's true. It isn't possible to remove every element of showmanship from what you're trying to do, and awareness of the audience is part of that. At one point in his career, Davis took to turning his back on the audience. If you think about it, that was also a form of showmanship, and audiences were tolerant for the most part. But an artist who wholly rejects the audience is a contradiction in terms. The audience is there to be both wooed and rejected; a skilful operator plays the crowd as a fisherman plays a salmon. Both audience and performer know this. There are rules to the game, and enjoyment is heightened when the person on the rostrum breaks them  - with the proviso it is clear this is intentional and not inadvertent.

Most poetry events will pair two poets on a platform, and I always hope to be paired with someone whose work I enjoy. That way a few sparks may fly between the readers. Naturally, this doesn't always happen. After a reading with Michael Hamburger, the crusty old gentleman turned to me and said: 'Hrrrrmpff! Not my kind of poetry!' That put me in my place. My brother, who is a novelist and movie writer, had a similar experience at a festival. He congratulated the lady novelist he was partnering on her latest novel, saying how much he liked it, and she fixed him with a glare and said: 'I thought yours was rubbish.' One does try to keep one's cool.

Some years ago I had the wonderful experience of being invited to the International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia, probably the most extraordinary poetry festival in the world. In the amphitheatre where the opening event is held, there must have been as many as 15,000 people, and I think I understood what a rock and roll singer experiences. All the events for this festival were packed out, most are held in the open air in Medellin's extremely agreeable climate, and late at night, in this city of drug barons and gangs, there was a feeling of poetry reclaiming the streets. The sheer numbers of people turning up to the events meant that dark squares suddenly became inviting and unthreatening. I had been paired one evening with a Jamaican reggae poet, and my request to go first was granted. However, there was some trouble in the crowd, and the organisers put the reggae poet on first. He soon had the audience clapping along and half-singing. How the hell am I going to follow this, I thought. I slipped off the platform and downed half a bottle of Chilean red wine, then went back up to do my stint with all cylinders primed. The Indian poet who was sitting next to me said he'd never heard anyone read with such passion.

There are certain basic rules for a poetry reading that you depart from at your peril. Time-keeping is important, so I have a fob watch with a large white face, easy to see at a distance. A prominent clock at a venue is always helpful. The audience, I think, doesn't want to see you consulting your wrist watch, and it's very awkward if the reader asks the organiser in the middle of the reading: 'How much time have I got?' (My reply would be: 'You're finished' - unfortunately, most organisers are far too polite.) Sometimes I'll announce the number of poems I'm going to read beforehand, but mostly not. I usually tell the audience when I have reached the final poem. I make a list of the poems I want to read, with the page numbers. Nothing is more irritating than to watch a reader flicking endlessly back and forth through a book while either trying to decide what to read, or simply hunting for an unfindable poem. I may or may not have an introduction for each poem; some poems seem to require a little background. Often the interpolation of a brief chat between each item gives the audience a little respite from concentration. However, I have seen poets allot fifteen minutes to the introduction of a four-line poem. You need to have a strict throttle control on your gab.

At the end of a reading, I usually feel I haven't acquitted myself very well. The writing of a poem, almost any poem, holds a complexity one had best close one's eyes to. (Most firmly do close their eyes.) Read aloud, the words given, as it were, plastic form (well, acoustic form, anyway) exemplify their deficiencies. If the audience reacts approvingly to what I've have delivered, I have a feeling it may be due to some inappropriate touches of showmanship I have inserted into my renditions. Poetry is not a matter of showing off.  But of course it is a show, and that is the problem. I think it's the intimate nature of poetry itself that gives rise to these doubts. A certain decorum needs to prevail in the poetry parlour, and the reader aloud has a duty to realise the lines on the page with absolute honesty. The meretricious is always with us (as well as the simply incompetent), and for some people Being The Poet is more important than Reading The Poem. That, I think, is what once gave rise to this reaction, from Flann O'Brien:

I was once acquainted with a man who found himself by some ill chance at a verse-speaking bout. Without a word he hurried outside and tore his face off. Just that. He inserted three fingers into his mouth, caught his left cheek in a frenzied grip and ripped the whole thning off. When it was found, flung in a corner under an old sink, it bore the simple dignified expression of the honest man who finds self-extinction the only course compatible with honour.