‘Poetry Out Loud’ Helps Students Build Self-Confidence

Nearly 400 students in the gym sitting silent, waiting for the results. As the winner is announced, the gym erupts into cheering.

This isn’t a pep rally or an athletic competition. This is our school’s annual Poetry Out Loud assembly.

Parents who attend the event can hardly believe the behavior of our students, astonished at how they sit in the gym quietly for an hour and a half listening to poetry. But after each student recites, it feels like a pep rally with the way students cheer and support each other. Even after more than a dozen years of participating in it, I still am struck by the spell it casts.

Poetry Out Loud (POL) is a national contest dedicated to increasing students’ engagement with poetry by having them memorize and recite a poem in front of their peers. According to the POL website (poetryoutloud.org), “Poetry Out Loud is a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation, and the state and jurisdictional arts agencies.” Its purpose is to help “students master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about literary history and contemporary life.”

At some schools, POL is optional; at our school, every single student participates. We begin at the classroom level in the English classes. After this round, teachers nominate a few students from each grade, resulting in a school-wide competition of 12-20 students.

The winner of the school-wide competition advances to regionals and then to states. In May, the national competition is held, with the national champion winning a $20,000 award, then $10,000 for second place, $5,000 for third place, and $1,000 for fourth-ninth places. The schools/organizations of each of the top nine finalists also receive an award for the purchase of poetry materials.

But the rewards students receive are greater than the material awards.

“Everyone always connects over a shared experience because everyone has to do it in the classroom,” said junior Moorea Lambert, the school-wide winner at Rice Memorial High School in Burlington, Vermont. “There’s a good amount of appreciation and respect when people go to do it in front of the school because everyone’s done it.”

In addition to the shared experience, it helps students explore poetry in a way that allows them to interpret and channel a poem, to practice close reading, and to recite poetry out loud in a way that their reading makes sense with the words and lines on the page.

Typically, we have our classroom recitations before the end of December and our school-wide competition early in February. The state competition takes place in mid-March.

However, in the classroom at Rice Memorial, Poetry Out Loud begins at the start of the school year. Each class starts with a poem followed by ensuing discussion with students. The poems that students recite have to come from the POL anthology on the website. There are hundreds of poems to choose from, and students are provided ample class time to wade through and discuss the myriad ways they can approach picking a poem.

Once students pick a poem, they are encouraged to spend time with it in various ways. They are encouraged to read it well and understand it before committing it to memory.

At this point, categories are suggested in which the student’s recitation will be judged: physical presence, voice and articulation, dramatic appropriateness, evidence of understanding, overall performance, and accuracy. Having this POL unit ensures that every English class develops the public speaking skills our students need.

When students complain, “When am I ever going to need to recite a poem from memory?”, they are reminded that someday they will be in a situation where they need to respond on the spot… and this is good training for that day. It’s necessary for us to be pushed out of our comfort zone and be able to think on our feet, to have the experience of standing there and needing to communicate a response.

With the dramatic increase in student mental health issues, we are mindful of students for whom their anxiety may interfere with their ability to participate effectively. As a result, we allow students to pick their own audience–even just two to three other students– and recite in the classroom after school. They may not cherish the experience, but we talk about the value of working through difficult things.

In a world where technology and social media dominate their daily lives, it is moving to see the power of the spoken word and the impact it has on our students, as well as the potency of their supporting each other through challenges and celebrating each other’s successes.

In our classroom display for POL, there is a passage from poet Elizabeth Alexander: “Poetry… is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?” The beauty of POL is the sharing of voices and the honoring of what they find.