The 2017 Poetry Out Loud competition for Liberty Bell High School was won by Mackenzie Woodworth, third from left, who went on to finish among the top five at the state contest.
Student poetry competition requires ‘deep reading’ of verses
If you’ve attended one of the Poetry Out Loud competitions at The Merc Playhouse over the past six years, you’re probably aware that the performances take some preparation.
After all, these are teens reciting complex and sometimes long poems, from memory, in public. Not only are the students’ memorization skills on trial, but their confidence, projection and poise are as well.
Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry memorization and recitation program created in 2006 by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Participants in grades 9-12 compete in classrooms, local venues, regional contests and state competitions, eventually resulting in a single representative from each state and U.S. territory performing at the national contest in Washington, D.C., each year. Locally, Poetry Out Loud is coordinated by Liberty Bell teacher Kelly Grayum and is sponsored by Methow Arts.
Preparation for Poetry Out Loud (POL) at Liberty Bell High School begins in the fall, with students selecting two poems from an anthology of hundreds on the POL website. Poems range from traditional to contemporary, from short to long, from humorous to sobering.
Tips for poem selection come from Thome George, who is in his fifth year of coaching Poetry Out Loud.
“Short poems are not always easier,” George cautions. “Rhyming poems are not easier or better, and they’re often more difficult to perform without falling into a predictable cadence.”
Most importantly, says George, “always choose a poem that you can relate to, because your proficiency in recitation hinges on your understanding of the words you’re saying.”
Once students have selected their poems, they begin working with George, who studied with 20th Century American poet Richard Hugo at University of Montana and later completed a minor in poetics at Evergreen State College. George focuses on a deep reading of the poem, where students examine everything from the author of the poem, to the vocabulary, tone, tenor and attitude of the poem.
“They need this deep reading to get into the poem,” says George, who aims to mimic the SIFT analytic technique teachers employ for other literary studies in in the classroom, where students explore the Symbols, Images, Figures of speech, Tone, and Themes of their poems. “At this point it really matters that the students understand the poem,” George says. “I’ll have them read from the page to see if they grasp it.”
Absorbing and delivering
Next, students work on memorization and delivery, again tutored by George. George can’t remember quite how he got into poetry recitation, but he recalls listening to cassette tapes as a teen, “obsessively playing and eventually memorizing all the songs on James Taylor and Cat Stevens tapes.”
He soon realized that the same technique of absorbing not just the words but the tempo and delivery of songs could be applied to reciting poems, once he reached college and got involved with a group of poets doing public readings of their own work as well as poems by published authors like William Stafford.
George passes these same memorization tips on to the students, who must recite their poems perfectly in order to receive full credit from the accuracy judge at each competition. Even mistakes as seemingly minor as saying “it is” when the poem reads “it’s,” or reversing the order of two words, results in penalties. George notes, “[former Methow Valley swim team coach] John Caesar used to say ‘practice makes permanent,’ and nowhere is this more true than in reciting poems. You have to load it into your brain 100-percent accurately before you can begin practicing it.”
George encourages students to read the poems straight from the page perfectly into the voice recorders on their phones, then replay these recordings and recite along until the words come like second nature, the way a familiar song does. “Don’t just listen to yourself reciting — talk along with yourself,” he tells them. After all, these are teens who can sing along to dozens if not hundreds of pop songs; they are fully capable of learning poems the same way.
The third layer of POL coaching comes in the form of learning to recite poems in a convincing manner. “Tempo is important,” says George. “Nerves tend to make people speed up, but then the listener can’t absorb the meaning of your poem. Big words get crushed. You might trail off at the end of stanzas. Your biggest challenge is to understand the poems and pass that meaning on to listeners. So you need to move at a pace that allows your listener to grasp the poem. Drop the internal metronome two clicks.”
In addition to tempo, George addresses posture, volume, eye contact and gestures. “There’s some grey area with gestures,” George acknowledges. “The Poetry Out Loud criteria are very clear that poetry recitations should not be dramatic performances,” he says, so he coaches students to make gestures subtle, and local judges are familiar with these expectations. But the judging at regional and state competitions has frequently been more lenient, resulting in winners who perform with a bit of a flourish. It’s a sometimes frustratingly subjective process.
George encourages students to make iPad recordings of themselves reciting their poems and then review them. After doing that, he says, “each student ups their game.” He continues, “They say ‘wow, is that how I look?’ and they are suddenly conscious of themselves in a useful way.”
Competing for a spot at The Merc
Liberty Bell students in 9th and 10th grade have completed their classroom competitions, and juniors and seniors are currently competing, with a teacher and an accuracy judge scoring each performance. Once classroom competitions are finished, 12 finalists — three from each grade level — will advance to The Merc competition, where three performance judges, an accuracy judge, and a prompter will judge the recitations. Students perform one poem each, then an intermission, then they perform a second poem. The top scorer of the evening advances to the regional competition in Spokane in February.
Liberty Bell students perform notoriously well at regional competitions, with a representative advancing to the state contest five out of the past six years, and both the late Tom Zbyszewski (2013) and Mackenzie Woodworth (2018) finishing in the top five at state. Zbyszewski finished second, narrowly edged out by a student he outdid at regionals.
But the final results are far less important than the experience of participating in POL. It’s a meaningful, challenging program, one that asks students to dig deep into their inner resources of motivation, analysis, and courage.
POL coordinator Grayum says, “Poetry Out Loud gives students the opportunity to engage in language and literature. They get to give voice to the words of poets and gain the skills to be more confident expressing themselves in front of others. Even students who are reluctant to participate at first, exhibit the great pride and satisfaction that comes from doing something hard and scary. Thanks to Methow Arts and the Methow Valley School District students at Liberty Bell see poetry as a valid art form that can be used to express the their own human condition.”
Although George receives a modest stipend for his work coaching in the classroom, he coaches mostly as a labor of love for the medium. “It’s not just that Liberty Bell has been very successful on a regional and state level in POL,” he says. “I’ve had kids come back to me who were extremely shy people, or introverted, and they tell me ‘I’m not afraid of talking in front of people any more.’”
How many of these kids are going to stand up and recite poems later in life? George wonders, although it’s always an impressive party trick. But given how debilitating the fear of public speaking can be for so many people, “for these students to acquire confidence in what they are saying in front of others, being able to at least appear confident, and pulling off the perception that they are fine — that’s a life skill.”
Out Loud at The Merc
The local Poetry Out Loud competition will be held on Wednesday, Dec. 12, at 6 p.m. at The Merc Playhouse in Twisp. All are welcome. Admission is by donation. For more information visit www.methowarts.org/poetry-out-loud-3/.
