{photos by Andy Zink}
A couple of weeks ago, four of our high school students participated in SLOCA’s second annual Poetry Out Loud competition, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and our local Arts Obispo Council. Meg Campbell, Caedin Hilton, Reagan Lee, and Brigitte Rein each memorized 2 poems and recited them to a panel of judges and an audience. Each recitation was assigned an overall score based on a rubric which measured Physical Presence, Voice and Articulation, Dramatic Appropriateness, Evidence of Understanding, and Overall Performance.
Our high school English teacher Paul McCullough began the evening with a warm welcome, suggesting that one reason we read poetry is because, “In an age of busyness, specialization, and rationalized self-interest, we go to poetry because we know that at some hard-to-define level, it helps us to see more of what there is to love in the world, to love more of what is there before us.”
He further explained how poetry “widens our hearts” by sharing the following words from Garrison Keillor, who says it best:
“People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they’re assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don’t know well, which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience—think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouses: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It’s there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn’t matter—poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart.”
The recitations prepared by our SLOCA high schoolers that evening were certainly enjoyed by those in attendance with open ears and open hearts.
The winner of our SLOCA competition, Meg Campbell, will go on to represent our school at the county level this Friday evening, February 10th, for a chance to recite at the state and national levels later this year for up to $50,000 in scholarship money. Way to go Meg!
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{photo by Sammy Rein} |
As proud as we are of these high school competitors, we also wanted to share this today to encourage all of you parents who are helping your younger kids memorize and recite poems. One of the pillars of classical education is the memorization of great poetry, and that doesn’t stop in the elementary or middle school grades – our high schoolers memorize around 100 lines of poetry each year, with students who opt to participate in competitions like this going above and beyond that! For assigned memorization this year, our high school students are choosing poems from authors such as Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, ee cummings, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, and T.S. Eliot.
So know that this skill, as well as the treasure trove of beautiful language stored in your child's mind, will continue into high school here at SLO Classical Academy. Many of the poems they learn, as well as a deeper appreciation for poetry, will likely stay with them throughout their lives.
