Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Radio host Garrison Keillor is back home recovering from a minor stroke he suffered last week
and says he expects to launch a new season of a Prairie Home Companion on schedule the
weekend after next. We saw him in action recently at another kind of show. An unusual contest
where young people were the stars and what was exciting was the reciting.
Poetry has been the stuff of all kinds of competitions. Consider poetry in motion, poetry
in a human face. "The rain is full of ghosts tonight,"
Not long ago we found a competition where the poetry is poetry itself.
"I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen." Welcome to the finals of the National Poetry
Out Loud Competition, a joint project of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry
Foundation. "I know what the caged bird feels..."
Two hundred thousand high school students from across the country took part. Then the
53 finalists gathered in Washington. "You were forty and married,"
"Alabanza! I say," It's a poetry contest, not writing it, but
reciting it. "Life is but an empty dream, for the soul
is dead that slumbers, and things are not what they seem."
David Bellamy is the contender from the great state of Michigan.
You need to come with a mindset, you know, I want to win.
First prize is twenty thousand dollars. Poetry is not something that has generally
been a..a competitive sport. "I saw you Walt Whitman, childless, lonely
old grubber," Kareem Sayegh is the Illinois Champion.
It turns into this kind of weird feeling like yes we're here to celebrate something that's
been enjoyed for many, many years, but at the same time you're here to to go against
other kids your age. "What if we got outside ourselves?"
Students can choose from more than six hundred English language poems.
"And in this flea our two bloods mingled be." A few students even chose the same poem.
This one: Rudyard Kipling's "If." "If you can keep your head when all about
you are losing theirs and blaming it on you" "If you can keep your head when all about
you are losing theirs and blaming it on you" So how do you judge the merits of a poetry
recitation? Scott Simon, the NPR host and contest moderator.
The contestants will be evaluated on seven criteria: physical presence, voice and articulation,
evidence of understanding, level of difficulty, appropriateness of dramatization, accuracy,
and overall performance. These kids all have a great time.
But Garrison Keillor of Lake Wobegone fame, one of the judges, takes a more, well, free
verse approach. What are the standards you use?
I just want to hear a young person stand up there on that stage and give me a poem in
a way that, in a way that moves me. And when that happens it's, um, it's electric.
Electric too are some of the contestants names. "Sit on my lap you said,"
Here's South Dakota's champion Wiyaka His Horse is Thunder
And how about Tiffany Hill of Oregon? Her recitation was in American Sign Language.
It's William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." It goes like this:
"I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."
I liked "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" because I like more...I like to be quiet and that
poem had no sound in it. It was just a guy wandering and seeing some flowers.
Of course whether you sign it, "Come up from the fields father,"
Recite it "We can pull and haul and push"
Or perform it "Tomorrow..."
First you need to memorize it. "He was running with his friend,"
It's more than just memorizing, it's more than just reciting words off a page.
"Turned his head," Amber Rose Johnson, the Rhode Island champion.
You have to really feel it and other people have to feel that you feel it.
"And his body was scattered across the field," Memorizing, the concept that's poetry to Garrison
Keillor's ears. I was made to memorize a poem by Helen Fleischman,
my 10th grade English teacher. When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state, So you still remember it?
Of course I do. Everything I that I learned in high school is gone. Algebra, disappeared,
eroded. Biology, I can't identify trees. You know, physics, plane geometry. But fourteen
lines of Shakespeare. Right there.
Yeah, right there. Do you want to hear the whole thing?
Uh thanks just the same. "A silver Lucifer serves *** in cornucopia,"
As Emily Orellana, the Nevada champion, was reciting, her mother Kim's feelings could
hardly be put into words. She traveled here from Reno, even though she's
battling brain cancer. You know wild horses couldn't have kept me
away. There was nothing that could've stopped me other than, you know, being put in the
hospital. For Kim, knowing that Emily made it all the
way to Washington on smarts and *** gives her faith that her daughter will have the
tools to continue her own life's journey when the time comes.
As a mom, and the fact that I'm terminally ill, to see my daughter find her niche, her
thing at this early of an age; it brings me a lot of peace.
I think it's safe to say the students have been just extraordinary. Could we have another
round of applause for all of them? In the end after two days and nights it's
time to hear the judges' verdicts. Each who spoke out loud what's in 'er, by
being here, became a winner. And finally, from the State of Virginia
But only one can they proclaim, William Farley was his name.
So happy, to paraphrase poet James Wright, if he stepped out of his body, he would break
into blossom.