I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.
“I was born in 1940 in Minnesota and grew up in the country... dirt roads, swamps, lakes, woods.”
“There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.”