Poetry Out Loud 2013 finals: students from all over the US will compete

Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation contest, will help to wrap up Poetry Month tonight in Washington, D.C.

|
Andy Nelson
Poetry Out Loud contestant Aislinn Lowry recites a poem during the 2006 competition in Washington, D.C.

April's observance of National Poetry Month ends with a bang tonight as students from around the United States gather in Washington, D.C. for the national finals of Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest that encourages youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and performance.

The national Poetry Out Loud champion will be named during tonight's finals, which will be webcast at 7 p.m. EST. You can check out the live webcast here. 

Poetry Out Loud  was launched by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in high schools nationwide in the spring of 2006. The competition continues to grow every year, with more than 365,000 students competing in the 2011-2012 school year. The program starts at the classroom level. Winners advance to a school-wide competition, then to a regional and/or state competition, and ultimately to the National Finals, where finalists can win scholarship money and books for their schools.

Poetry memorization has been a pretty hot educational topic recently, with the UK having launched Poetry by HeartCanada, too, has introduced Poetry in Voice/Les voix de la poesie

For a pre-game show of tonight's finals, check out clips of last year's finalists at Poetry Out Loud's  YouTube channel.

Memorizing poems was a common classroom practice in the first half of the 20th century, but the learning exercise fell largely our of fashion in more recent times. Now, with poetry recitiation contests in the United States, Great Britain and Canada, the custom is making a comeback. 

Although the national contenders recite poems from memory, there's nothing rote about their approaches. These poems aren't just offered aloud; they're performed, and the results can be powerful, as with national 2012 national champion Kristen Dupard's heartstopping take on "I'm a  Fool to Love You" by Cornelius Eady. Last year's third-place winner, MarKaye Hassan, moved me to tears with her interpretation of Emily Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain."   

"I've been fortunate enough to attend the National Finals for the past three years, and each time I'm amazed by the talent of these teenagers," said Kristin Gecan of the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. "As our president, John Barr, has said, 'Once memorized by these students, great poems become their friends for life.'"

Danny Heitman, an author and a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate, is an adjunct professor at LSU's Manship School of Mass Communication. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Poetry Out Loud 2013 finals: students from all over the US will compete
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2013/0430/Poetry-Out-Loud-2013-finals-students-from-all-over-the-US-will-compete
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe