This past November, the school held auditions for Poetry Out Loud, an annual poetry recitation competition. The program, founded in 2005, was designed to offer high school students nationwide an experience through which they may gain confidence, enhance their public speaking skills and learn about literary history and contemporary life. Poetry Out Loud begins at the local level. Winners at the local level then advance to the regional/state competition, where they compete for the chance to perform in the national finals.
Among the frontrunners of the 2023 competition was senior Erin Klein, whose renditions of Danielle Boodoo Fortuné’s “How to Break a Curse” and Edna St. Vincent’s “Ashes of Life” earned her a spot in the state finals. Klein’s experience in the school’s theater program inspired her to compete.
“From the start, I thought that this could be a really fun and unique opportunity because I do a lot of theater, and theater in school tends to be more about learning about theater than really getting a chance to perform,” Klein said. “I had done a summer program that was like a pre-college auditioning program, and we learned a lot about how to perform monologues, so I kind of approached this poem as just a chance to perform a monologue and show some people in my class that don’t know a lot about me, one of my talents.”
The skills Klein developed through her involvement in theater and guided her approach to performing, but also influenced the early stages of her preparation process. Her first step: choose a poem.
“By the last round [of the state final], I needed three poems,”Klein said. “One of the things that I focused on was trying to find three very different poems because I wanted to be able to use different emotional ranges: one of them was this kind of creepy character poem, the second one was depressed, like [a] loss of love. [The] third one was the opposite: It was, I’ve lost love, but I’m hopeful for the future and I’m gonna do better this time. And it was pretty scary.”
A secondary aspect of Klein’s preparation involved her analysis of each poem. She notes the significance of embodying the character that the poem has created.
“For each poem, I thought about who the character was,” Klein said. “I thought about who the character was talking to, so that [I] wasn’t just there talking to the sky, but [I’m] talking to a person and that way, there can be tactics, which we use in theater, where you use a motivation and you try to achieve a goal by employing different strategies. For each poem, I decided what the tactic I was using was going to be and how the person I was talking to was going to respond so that I could react to their response.”
Despite her extensive knowledge of theatrical strategies, Klein was unfamiliar with the competition itself. . In previous years, she missed the local round of the competition due to personal matters.
“I had no idea what it was going to be like,” Klein said. “I guess I was worried it would be stressful because you’re going up on a stage in front of people that you never knew. But they brought us there several hours early [and] we had lunch together, and then we [Klein and other contestants] played some improv games and get to know you games. For only being in a room with 10 other people for three or four hours, I felt like we got to know each other really well. We became as close as you could in that amount of time. We were really all just supporting each other, and cheering for each other, giving each other high fives through the whole process. It was really, really fun.”
Aside from the camaraderie she established through the competition, Klein also thoroughly enjoyed performing. A particularly memorable performance was “Ashes of Life” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Despite having already recited Ashes during the local and regional rounds, Klein found her final performance in front of the larger state audience most exciting.
“My favorite poem that I recited was Ashes of Life by Edna St. Vincent Millay because of the reaction that I got when I did it,” Klein said. “The character is really, really depressed and – the way that I did it – she’s trying to make her best friend understand why she is unresponsive, and she just gets more and more frustrated until she just kind of bursts, and I loved just yelling at the audience.”
Klein notes memorization as her primary challenge when preparing for a performance.
“The hardest part for me was, usually, there would be one or two lines in a poem that I repeatedly messed up with one word or something,” Klein said. “And I would drill it in front of my mom until I got the words down three times in a row. And then once I was confident that I really had the words, I would start incorporating the emotion back into it.”
Though Klein made it to the top three in the state final, she was ultimately not chosen to advance to the national competition. Despite this, Klein’s perspective of the experience remains positive.
“I learned that jumping at these weird, cool opportunities can be really great,” Klein said.“The whole premise of Poetry Out Loud seems kind of strange to me. But when you learn about it, you learn that it’s really rooted in our oral storytelling tradition, and that was where the idea came from. From the competition and through the process, I got to meet a lot of really cool, talented people. And I got a chance to express myself and show a skill that I don’t often get to show.”
