Poetry Out Loud

We have something extra special for you today! Paul McCullough, SLOCA High School English teacher, introduces us to Poetry Out Loud™ and a few of our SLOCA High School students share their entries. Enjoy!

A poem is a world of thought and feeling, contracted into the smallest possible space that will contain it. A world so small we can carry it inside of us, carry it in words.

Here’s one I love from Gregory Orr:

River inside the river.
World within the world.

All we have is words

To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures.

Each year SLOCA High School students memorize about 100 lines of poetry. When they graduate, they’ll carry within themselves 400 lines, ideally, of “the best that has been thought and said”—that’s how the Victorian cultural critic Matthew Arnold put it in Culture and Anarchy (1869). Arnold thought that our education should provide us with a storehouse of precious gems, providing enough “sweetness and light” to sustain us here on life’s “darkling plain”: 

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

While memorizing poems is always a worthwhile endeavor for its own sake, reciting them in public also gives students a chance to build community, compete for the laurel wreath of poetic glory, and maybe even walk away with some college scholarship money. 

And so, for a fifth straight year, SLOCA is participating in Poetry Out Loud, a nation-wide recitation event sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. During this more socially distanced school year, four students have signed up to recite digitally: juniors Haelee Rochez and Sadie Richert, sophomore Isobel Ridley, and freshman Amelia Bircher. 

Each has recorded two poems at home to submit to the judges. I’m beyond impressed with both the selection and the execution on display here: the rapturous praise poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the mid-century modernism of Howard Nemerov, the incantatory Kabbalistic rhythms of Peter Cole, the wry and poignant World War I musings of Thomas Hardy, and the quiet prophetic vision of Lisel Mueller… You’ll find several of these recordings featured below.

Many of us have felt our worlds contract to about the size of a Haiku this year. I probably spent more time waiting in line at the grocery store than with my extended family. And yet poetry still helps us see the “river inside the river,” the grocery store within the grocery store: the “world within the world.” 

So watch below to encounter some amazing poems, thanks to the hard work and eloquence of these students. And feel free to share in the comments a poem that opens up a world for you. 

Sadie Richert: “The Universe as Primal Scream” by Traci K. Smith

Haelee Rochez: “The End of Science Fiction” by Lisel Mueller

Isobel Ridley: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sadie Richert: “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Haelee Rochez: “Life Cycle of Common Man” by Howard Nemerov

Isobel Ridley: “Song of the Shattering Vessels” by Peter Cole

Wow! Thank you to these brave and poised students for sharing with us their recitations.