If you are or were a sophomore at Shorewood in English 10, you may recall your experience with Poetry Out Loud.
Memorizing a poem’s lines, reciting them in front of the class, and perhaps, for the top few, moving on to the competition in the Black Box theater.
For those unaware, every year, Poetry Out Loud is a part of the English 10 curriculum. Students learn about and study poetry before choosing a poem from the Poetry Out Loud website (poetryoutloud.org) to memorize and recite.
Within each English class, sophomores present their poem recitations, which are then voted on by their classmates. The top three from each class move on to the school-wide recitation. From there, the finalists from each school advance to the regional competition, then state, and finally nationals in Washington, D.C., where the first-place winner has the potential to win $20,000.
This year, Shorewood will send Madison Lambert and Haadia Hashmi to the regional contest.
Lambert, who won first place in the school’s competition on Dec. 11, recited a poem called “Rehearsal Notes” by Len Verwey. Her reason for choosing the poem was simple. “I’m a big theater kid, and I love theater, and so I was like, oh, rehearsal notes. I know all about that,” Lambert said. Her theater background helped her prepare to recite her poem “Because I do acting, I memorized it how I memorize lines, repeating it over and over again,” she said.
Even though she placed first in her grade, Lambert says she wasn’t always a fan of poetry. “I only started looking at [poetry] during the summer…I was a counselor in training, and the camp counselor had me shadow over their stuff so I could see how they do an activity. And one of their activities was poetry, and that really inspired me to get more into poetry,” she said.
Haadia Hashmi, who earned second place at Shorewood, chose a poem with a personal connection. “I was reciting a poem called ‘Apologies to All the People in Lebanon’, by June Jordan. I’ve always been really passionate about the Palestinian cause, and to get the chance to recite a poem about it out loud to everyone was basically a form of activism to me,” Hashmi said.
Her chosen poem, which, according to the Poetry Out Loud website, is dedicated “to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983,” discusses watching global conflicts occur from an American perspective.
“It’s a very accurate representation of the Western ideology. Like, ‘as long as a problem does not affect me, it simply does not exist, and I am not responsible for it’. But… just because something is happening [far] away doesn’t mean that you don’t play a part in it,” Hashmi said.
For Hashmi, memorizing her poem was straightforward.
“There wasn’t much of a process. When it comes to poetry, I soak it up like a sponge,” she said. Hashmi enjoys reading and writing poetry in her own time, and even hopes to publish her writing someday.
Poetry Out Loud is an opportunity for every sophomore to gain exposure to acclaimed literature, work on their memorization tactics, practice public speaking, and maybe even win a competition.
