Poetry Out Loud Makes a Comeback at LI
 
By David Stahler Jr.
 
The auditorium is dark, the assembly perfectly quiet in early February. Ten students sit in a row along the back of the stage, jittery with nervous excitement. One by one they come to the lone mic center stage and speak the words of their poem, not just for the panel of judges before them but also for their peers. As each one finishes, the audience erupts into cheers. Most of the crowd knows what it’s like, having memorized and performed poems themselves a few months earlier. For those who now perform—not in front of a class but the whole school—there is nothing but respect.
 
The final round of the Poetry Out Loud contest is one of my favorite “LI moments.” It is a time when the school gathers in the spirit of competition for something that isn’t athletics. While Spirit Week and the celebration around “The Big Game” is its own wonderful frenzy, there is also something special about seeing students stand and deliver in a way that celebrates both the written and spoken word. The fact that this annual tradition returned last year after a hiatus of several years makes it feel even more special.
 
Poetry Out Loud is a nation-wide contest that started twenty years ago. A partnership between The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and The Poetry Foundation, the goal is to both bring a greater awareness of and appreciation for poetry and to give students the opportunity to enhance their public speaking and presentation skills. In classrooms all around the country, students pick a poem to memorize from over a thousand options on the Poetry Out Loud website (poetryoutloud.org). School winners compete at the state level, with state winners traveling to Washington D.C. to vie for over $50,000 in prizes.
 
Origin Story
 
The national contest was still young when LI joined in 2008 at the prodding of Ben Doyle (class of ‘94), who was a member of the English department at that time. 
 
“I remember getting a POL mailing from the NEA one day and thinking, ‘You know what? I’m just going to do this!’ So I pitched the idea at our next department meeting and fortunately everyone agreed to sign on,” said Doyle.
 
Taking place in English classes over the course of November, the contest requires students to select a poem from the POL website, memorize it, then recite it in class before their peers. Students vote on their favorite performance, and the class winners compete in a semi-final round a few weeks later, along with any other student who wishes to vie for a spot in February's final round as a “walk-on.”
 
None of us in the English department were completely sure how successful the program would be that first year. After all, not all students are fans of memorization, performing in class, or poetry. And more than a few dread all three.
 
To our surprise, the vast majority of the student body rose to the occasion. It helped when Doyle introduced the program in an assembly by reciting Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” complete with a few mistakes and more than a little nervousness, modeling the idea that a moving performance requires courage, not perfection.
 
“The project seemed a little whimsical at first, then it got serious pretty quickly. But in a really good way!” Doyle added.
 
Over the course of a few weeks, students in every class were working on memorizing, sharing their progress, talking about their poems at lunch in the cafeteria and in study halls. Because every student was required to learn a poem, it turned into a bonding activity that cut across grades and course levels.
 
“I call it freedom through compulsion,” Doyle joked. “The project gives students permission to let out their inner nerd. I remember a few almost crying as they performed—kids I never would’ve expected—they were so connected to the emotional dynamic of their poem.”
 
When students first learn about Poetry Out Loud, their initial reaction is often, “Oh, I can’t do that.” Part of the thrill for both teachers and students is seeing them discover that they can.
 
“There is a danger in underestimating a kid’s ability, either as a teacher or as the student themself,” Doyle said. “That’s why this is so valuable and important.”
 
Doyle—who left teaching in 2012 to work for the Vermont Arts Council and now serves as president of the Preservation Trust of Vermont—is proud of his role in getting Poetry Out Loud off the ground at LI. “Honestly, it was the best thing I did as a teacher. I wanted our students to ‘feel’ poetry, and they did! They genuinely felt the material and took it seriously.”
 
Over the ensuing years, Poetry Out Loud became part of the fabric of the school year, a November staple. It also became increasingly competitive, with some years seeing forty students or more voluntarily competing in the semi-final round.
 
A Pandemic Setback
 
Like so many other aspects of our school and community life, Poetry Out Loud took a hard blow when COVID struck. After returning from the spring lock-downs in the fall of 2020, LI moved from year-long classes to a semester block schedule where only half the students were enrolled in an English class first semester, with the rest taking English the following semester, and a student body split into two separate cohorts who each only attended classes two days a week with the rest of the time spent working remotely. Poetry Out Loud became a victim of the fragmentation. 
 
Everyone was so busy the first year or two trying to make the day-to-day workings of our limited class time together successful and return to a sense of normalcy that a project like Poetry Out Loud falling by the wayside seemed low on the list of priorities. But soon, its absence was felt—communities are built around shared experiences, after all.
 
So last year, with LI retaining a block schedule but moving back to year-long classes, our department saw the change as an opportunity to revive the dormant program and begin working towards returning to where we left off four years earlier.
 
Destruction is quick and easy; building back is harder and takes time. Since an entire cohort of students had come and gone since we’d last done Poetry Out Loud, in a sense we were starting from scratch. And with a new block schedule that has classes meeting every other day, fitting Poetry Out Loud into a busy end of the semester was a challenge. 
 
But in some ways it was good—seeing an entirely new group of students discover Poetry Out Loud for the first time was fun and, in some ways, liberating. Last year culminated in a semi-final round with fewer competitors than in the pre-COVID days and final round with eight reciters rather than ten. But the February assembly—the first in four years—had the same spark of magic as before, the same impassioned performances, the same audience respect, the same feeling afterward that something special had just transpired.
 
The Vermont state semi-final round that followed at the Barre Opera House brought a pleasant surprise on March 7th when school winner Tim Tester put on a strong performance and made it to the state finals the following weekend at the Flynn Theater in Burlington—one of the top ten performers among the roughly 3,000 students who participated across the state.
 
A Roaring Comeback
 
This year, we’re building on that momentum and success, working towards maximizing the number of students and classes participating, and devoting more class-time to the project. 
 
In my classes, students are given an in-depth tour of the Poetry Out Loud website and time to browse in the hope of finding the perfect poem. They analyze and reflect on their poems in writing. Before memorization, they read their poems aloud—first in pairs, then to the class—to workshop their performances and focus on style without the stress of memorization. We practice breaking the poems into smaller parts for easier memorization. Other teachers use innovative techniques: Richard McCarthy takes his students to the gym and has them take a step up the bleachers for every line break in their poem then walk back down, repeating the process with the poem’s sentences to emphasize the structural differences within their poems.
 
English department chair, Magen Bias, has been excited about the program’s revival. “For me, there are multiple layers that make this a great project,” she said. “The biggest is probably the shared experience. To have all our students doing the same thing at the same time. It connects us and serves as a unifying, communal experience. We have other events here at LI that do this, but they’re usually athletic in nature, so it’s a refreshing addition. The fact that they’re doing it alongside other students across the state and the country at large adds another layer to this communal aspect.”
 
Bias also appreciates the way in which Poetry Out Loud pushes students to go outside their comfort zone. “And it does it in multiple ways,” she adds. “For some kids, it’s just engaging with poetry. For others, it’s the public speaking aspect. For many, it’s the challenge of memorization. There’s something for everyone to lean into, and typically in a light and playful way.”
 
At a time when Lyndon Institute is embracing a school-wide emphasis on its five Transferable Skills—soft skills that work across the curriculum and help students focus on aspects of their education that go beyond content—Poetry Out Loud provides a perfect opportunity for kids to engage. 
 
“Really, pretty much every one of those skills [Clear and Effective Communication, Self-Direction, Responsible and Involved Community Engagement, Problem Solving, and Collaboration] finds expression in some aspect or stage of this project,” notes Bias.
 
It also, as Bias points out, opens up opportunities for students to engage with outside artists.
 
School librarian, Trisha Jackman, who helps coordinate the Poetry Out Loud program at LI, agrees. Taking advantage of a grant from the Vermont Arts Council in conjunction with the Flynn Theater, Jackman has brought in several guest artists over the last couple of years to work with students, including this year’s guest, Quinn Roll.
 
A Columbia-trained actor who lived and worked in the New York theater scene before relocating to Burlington a few years ago, Roll recently spent the day working with multiple classes of LI students, taking them through a series of exercises that encouraged them to go beyond just reciting the words and infuse the right kind of dramatic and emotional resonance to bring their pieces to life. 
 
“This is the first year we’ve brought in an artist who has more of a performance-based approach as opposed to a literary background,” said Jackman. “The kids really enjoyed working with Quinn. He brought a lot of energy and humor to the process.”
 
Like Bias, Jackman appreciates what a guest artist can offer. “It’s always good to bring in an outside person to work with students. There’s something about working with a stranger that changes your frame of mind and gives you another chance to branch out of your comfort zone.”
 
Jackman, herself a 2016 LI graduate, knows a thing or two about Poetry Out Loud. She competed in—and won—the final round her junior year, going on a month later to compete at the state finals. “I remember being surprised at how many other people there were competing from around Vermont. It was interesting watching and hearing them and wondering how I matched up.”
 
With class competitions happening in English classrooms the week before and after Thanksgiving vacation, the February finals feel like a long way away, but already next week’s semi-final round is shaping up to be more competitive than last year’s. My own classroom competitions before Thanksgiving break brought back a familiar feeling—the vast majority of students had their poems fully memorized, with many having made ambitiously challenging picks; classmates were passionately supportive of their peers, took their judging duties seriously, and thrilled at the outcomes, with many already declaring their intent to compete at the next level. 
 
A few months from now, ten students will stand in the spotlight of a darkened auditorium and bring their poems to life, and we will remember not only the power of verse but how art takes on a new kind of value when it becomes a shared experience.