December 3, 2013

Tomorrow night I'll be one of the judges in the finals of Centennial High School's Poetry Out Loud competition. Sarah E. Barry, who along with her fellow English teacher, Lynn Taylor, coordinates the program at Centennial, has asked me participate. The Poetry Out Loud program was piloted in 2005 and since then millions of students from across the country have participated. Over the years thousands of poems have been learned, memorized, and taken to heart. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarship money has been awarded to deserving students. The Poetry Out Loud Program is a big deal. I'm honored to have been asked. 

Centennial is ranked one of the best high schools in the Columbus City School system, and Ms. Barry and Ms. Taylor, both of whom are National Board Certified teachers, a very difficult-to-earn certification awarded to the nation's best K-12 teachers, are two of the reasons why. It is primarily through their efforts that Centennial has entered into this national recitation contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. They've been doing this for three years now, and more than one of their students have advanced the finals in the state competition, whose winners advance to the National Finals in the spring, where $50,000 in awards and school stipends will be awarded.

So a lot is at stake, and Ms. Barry and Ms. Taylor have been working hard with the twenty-six students who will be participating  in tomorrow night's competition, helping these winners in the classroom competitions to select and understand the two poems they'll be reciting in the school-wide competition, working with them as they memorize their "lines," pushing them, inspiriting them.

As judge, I have to evaluate each student for her "Physical Presence," her "Voice and Articulation," her "Dramatic Appropriateness,"  her "Evidence of Understanding," her poem's "Level of Complexity,"and her "Overall Performance." They'll be around five of us judges, and I'll be sitting next to my good friend and fellow writer and teacher of poetry at The Ohio State University, Mike Lohre. It will be a fast-paced night, and the energy in the school auditorium where the competition is  held will be electric.

The students will be all dressed up, excited and nervous, and they'll come up onstage, one by one, stand alone at the microphone, and perform their first poem choice to the audience spread out below them. From that first round, five students will be selected to move on to the second round. Now the judging really gets tough. Only one can more on to the next level. The students will be reciting everything from contemporary favorites like Maya Angelou's "Caged Bird" or Philip Levine's much anthologized poem, "They Feed They Lion," as well as poems by other contemporary poets such as Joy Harjo, W.D. Ehrhart, Amiri Baraka, Gregory Pardlo, Eaven Boland, Mark Strand, and Ai, to poems by more canonized poets like Walt Whitman, Christina Rossetti,  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Hardy, Countee Cullen, Robert Frost, Anne Bradstreet, Wilfred Owen, and Emily Bronte.

As you might imagine, the pedagogical fruits from gaining such intimacy with great poems are many, and in the auditorium the sweet words will soar. It will be a great night, a memorable evening. I can't wait.