Poetry Out Loud (POL) is a national competition held annually at Malden High School. All students are required to compete.
The competition starts small, within each English class. Each student picks a poem to recite. If the student wins the round within the period, that student moves on and competes in the auditorium against all of the other winners from the same period, but in a different class as a semi-finalist. If they advance to the next competition, they have reached the finals. In this round, they have to recite two poems.
The POL finals also have a teacher competition. A few teachers stepped up and recited a poem to show their gratitude for the students working hard with their poems.
POL provides many benefits to Malden High School students by helping them build creativity skills, enhance public speaking skills, and come out of their shells to present in front of a big crowd. For many students, that is a big fear, but this contest opens an opportunity for students to try something new. It helps them build confidence in their public speaking.
The competition encourages students to engage with poetry in a meaningful way. Malden High School librarian Stephen Nedell judged some of the rounds of POL. “It gives the students a chance to express themselves; essentially students who may not usually have that opportunity because there’s so much poetry out there… can find something that speaks to them because they’re given the choice. They’re not just given some poem written by someone 100-plus years ago whose experiences they would have no clue about. Overall I think it gives students a wonderful opportunity to express themselves in ways that they may not have considered before,” Nedell expressed.
One of the most stressful factors about POL is memorizing the poem you select. Remembering a whole poem is a task that takes up many days or weeks prior to the performance. When students are asked to recite a poem with other work for classes piled on top, that can get difficult.
After the first round of the poems, a few teachers recite a poem before the students go on to recite their second poem.
English teacher Pasquale Dibenedetto explained: “It signifies a nice gesture of support for all those students who can muster the courage to recite on stage.”
“When Ms. Marquez asked if there was anyone who wanted to present during the finals, I said, “‘Sure, why not?’,” continued Nedell. “So I offered and got chosen.”
After the round of teachers, the students then prepare to recite their second poem. “I enjoy listening to the wide array of poems that the students select and seeing them personalize the poem through their recitations,” Dibenedetto added.
This moment is where students have an opportunity to redeem themselves if they did not perform their best in the first round. “If there was a student who may have missed a couple of lines but had the confidence, we probably would have scored that more than someone who had memorized every single line. It almost felt that that student understood the meaning of the poem, even if they didn’t remember each and every word,” Stated Nedell.
This year’s winner was senior Natalie Keating, who recited a poem filled with emotion. “I’ve always been very impressed with Nat. I’ve known Natalie for the past couple of years. She definitely did an amazing job, she is a very talented person,” Nedell commented.
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