Randolph High School Team

Sweeps 'Poetry Aloud' Event

By M. D. Drysdale

After two rounds of competition Tuesday evening in Randolph, the judges called a halt, so that they could put their heads together and so that the participants could rest up and relax before the final grueling round.

Cheers rang out as each participant finished.

And it was all pure poetry.

"For the moon never beams/Without bringing me dreams/Of my beautiful Annabelle Lee," sang out Hannah Butterfield of Randolph Union High School, as she recited Edgar Allen Poe's classic.

This was the Poetry Out Loud competition, being held across Vermont to test the memorization and delivery skills of high school students, and intended also to spread the love of poetry.

The Randolph event included three schools- RUHS, Rivendell Academy, and Williamstown High- and was being held for only the second year.

In many ways, the event was just a great way to enjoy public poetry, but it was a competition, after all, and three 10th-grade RUHS students, coached by English teacher Tina O'Donnell, ended by sweeping the honors.

Rachael Dube and Zoe Gaby-Smith won the right to represent Orange County at the next level of Poetry Out Loud in Montpelier April 12, while Lauren Soares won honorable mention. The other members of the Randolph team, Libby Crowe and Hannah Butterfield, also shone.

A dozen students in all took part, each of them reciting three poems from memory from a list of poems provided by the Vermont Arts Council.

"I was just thrilled, not only with the outcome, but with the whole program," O'Donnell said later.

"I'm so proud of the way our five girls handled themselves in every part of the process- the careful choosing of poems, the commitment to knowing them inside out, the work in memorizing and presenting and refining their pieces, the poise they brought to the Chandler Stage, and the support they showed to each other and to the competitors from the other schools."

O'Donnell had earlier staged a preliminary contest at the high school, with some 15 students participating.

'Empowering Thing'

But isn't memorizing poetry a little passé in today's fast-paced world? How did she get so many students to participate?

O'Donnell is passionate about the benefits. She related that she herself had to bring a memorized poem to a workshop about the program,.

"It was good to be both reminded of how powerful it is to 'own' a poem, and how nerve-wracking it is to get up in front of an audience of strangers to recite a piece you love," she reflected.

"Poetry memory was an annual requirement for me all the way through school and college as an English major. And my father still recites poems he learned in graded and high school.

"It's a powerful thing to own a piece of our culture, and an incredibly empowering thing for kids to get up in front of their parents and peers in performance."

Rachael Dube was equally enthusiastic. She won the judges' hearts with three very different poems- the inspirational "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman, the whimsical morality tale "The Spider and the Fly" by Mary Howitt, and Langston Hughes' "The Weary Blues," in which she chanted some of the lines in a blues riff of her own making.

"Poetry is a great way to express feelings about all kinds of things," she explained later. "And it's easy to memorize things you love."

In particular, she loved the Hughes poem, feeling it speaks directly to to her.

"I love music," she said. "It's the biggest part of my life, and this is the best way to express my love. This is a black person who is singing his heart out, it's about all the emotions that come from a song; and I know that feeling"

Poetry Out Loud is partly funded by the Poetry Foundation, which received a $100-million bequest several years ago and is attempting to find ways to bring poetry back into mainstream culture.

Host for Tuesday's event was poet Geof Hewitt and prompter was Morgan Irons. Judges included Lee Duberman, owner with her husband Richard of Ariel's Restaurant, as well as Hewitt, Alan Paschell and Stacy Raphael of the Vermont Arts Council.