Monday and Tuesday mark the national finals of this year's Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest. The 53 regional champions competing this week represent the best of more than 375,000 students that participated from about 2000 schools across the country. Nine finalists will advance to the final competition on Tuesday night.
The Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts created Poetry Out Loud in 2005 to help spread a stronger appreciation for poetry in America's schools. The project calls for students to select, memorize and recite verse from an extensive anthology of poets ranging from John Keats to Jane Kenyon. The program is designed for easy integration into a teacher's lesson plans and includes all the resources needed to host and judge a school-wide competition.
While the top finalists will earn themselves and their schools up to $50,000 in awards, every student that competes in Poetry out Loud comes away with a reward: a poem they know by heart. In light of the competition, the NEA recently asked our state poets laureate what they thought about the power of memorizing poetry. Here are a couple that stood out to me.
"[Memorizing a poem] is the closest thing to writing the poem yourself. You take in a poem's beat and breath, learn the music it makes by saying it over and over, and relive every small decision as you speak it out loud. It becomes yours, and forever; you can retrieve it whenever you need it, or someone else needs it."
--Kathleen Flenniken (Washington)
"I heard my taciturn and reserved father recite poetry to me as a boy and I believe from that first instant I intuitively knew that words could be both music and magic. And soon after the desire began to grow deep within to be able to make my own words become music and magic, capable of singing and capable of transforming the very way I and others see this crazy world."
--Marc Harshman (West Virginia)
More than two million (!) students have competed in the Poetry Out Loud program since its inception in 2006. As you can imagine, those that survive to the final week are pretty phenomenal. Take a look at this clip of last year's champion, Kristen Dupard from Ridgeland Mississippi, reciting Philip Levine's great narrative poem "What Work Is."
And here's the 2011 champion, Youssef Biaz, reciting Sharon Olds' poem "Mrs. Krikorian" at the White House.
This year, you'll be able to watch the whole of the two-day competition live via webcast. The semi-finals run from 9 am through 8 pm on Monday and the finals take place Tuesday at 7 pm. Organizers are also encouraging you poetry lovers to host viewing parties. And if you're in the Washington DC area, stop by GWU's Lisner auditorium; all events are free and open to the public.
You can learn more about Poetry Out Loud at the event's website here.