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May 02, 2008, 07:27 AM ET
Poetry Out Loud
The Poetry Out Loud finals were held in Washington this week, and the winner was a student from the Virgin Islands who recited “Frederick Douglass” by Robert E. Hayden. You can hear him perform here. A story in USA Today on this year’s contest is here, and the Web site for the project is here. Go here for visuals and audio of previous contests.
It’s a national competition like the National Spelling Bee, except that students recite poems instead of spell words. Contestants are scored on a range of performance measures, and they win scholarships for themselves and cash awards for their schools. The competitions are intense and dramatic, with the crowd shouting encouragement and judges swept away by the talent on stage. Last year, more than 100,000 students participated.
The numbers are proof that poetry can become a popular activity for adolescents if educators and organizers cast it right. Most kids never think of opening a volume of verse, and they hate their poetry homework reading. But put them in the audience at a Poetry Out Loud event and they get into it right off. (I’ve seen it happen.)
What are the keys?
One, competition. Kids practice for weeks, battle each other, and shoot for Number One. No touchy-feely-everyone’s-a-winner outlooks.
Two, recitation. Students pick from a list of poems and recite them from memory. They can’t pick their own work (a restriction that earned some criticism in the planning stages), and if they miss a word or forget a line, they lose. “Rote memorization” is a bad term in education circles (see here), but without it, none of the drama and emotion would follow.
Three, drama. For most kids, poetry means a textbook on the desk and a class discussion about form and meaning. Poetry Out Loud, like poetry slams, puts verse into action and makes it a challenge. (See here, and click on “Da’ Poetry Lounge” for a model program.)
Finally, money. When they know that cash depends on how well a student turns a phrase, changes her posture, and modulates her voice, tension rises.
If more high school students get involved, maybe fewer of them will come to college regarding poetry as a stuffy, unnecessary distraction. Maybe they won’t say, as one student did recently when I announced a homework assignment of memorizing 20 lines of verse to recite to the class the next meeting, “Why?”
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