Roughly 10 Leland students will be competing in a poetry recital competition Yesterday at Leland High School called 'Poetry Out Loud.'
Leland junior Ingrid Paciorka and Eliza Aldridge are excited for the opportunity to recite famed poems throughout history.
The winner of the school competition will get an invite to the state championships where Ingrid finished runner-up in 2024.
“I wasn’t really expecting it but when we got down there, they put us in a hotel and we basically did a workshop with the poet laureate of Michigan and then the next morning the competition began. I ended up making second runner-up that year, so it was really exciting. I was not expecting to get that far at all,” Paciorka said.
Paciorka recited three poems on her way to the runner-up finish call “I eat breakfast to begin the day”; “Where The Wild Things Are” and “I Won’t Come.”
Paciorka and Aldridge are both stand outs in theatre and take this opportunity to build there public speaking skills and more.
“I mean the requirements is one of the poems has to be less than 20 lines and one has to be pre- 20th century so you get to see a lot of different works from a bunch of different time periods, but I think that the competition is really helpful for public speaking and stuff like that I would say that you get a lot of benefit from working towards the goal like that where you have a deadline and you have memorization,” Aldridge said. “It’s something that we’re not guided we’re not exactly coached to a deadline or anything we kind of we’re guided by our teacher, but it’s on us to do our memorization on ourselves and it’s on us to hold ourselves accountable ... you get to share something that you’re interested in with a large group of people.”
For Aldridge, English is her favorite subject and has a passion for public speaking. She enjoy the exercise that is different than her day-to-day school duties.
“I think it’s great for me to experience some new poetry and experience, different poets and for me to be able to share that with other people,” she said.
Last year was the first year back after being canceled due to COVID.
The competition is run by Leland Public School secondary English teacher Jennifer Walter-Paciorka. She helps students pick out poems and challenges to memorize the poem.
Paciorka says she read each part of the poem 15 times and the whole poem over 30 times to get it down.
“Eventually it’s like Just stuck and you don’t even really realize that you haven’t memorized until you’re able to just throw away the paper and say hey I actually know this now,” Ingrid said.
Both Aldrige and Paciorka wish more students would participate in the future because of the experience gained from this competition.
“I would love to see more students participating and pushing themselves to do something like this competition right now we only have about 10 students which out of the whole four grades in our high school very small margin. A lot of students I know would do great at this competition and I just feeling a little shy or uncomfortable with doing something that they haven’t done before and so I would just love to see more people get involved and excited about an art program like poetry out loud,” Eliza said.
A partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and state and jurisdictional arts agencies, Poetry Out Loud provides free lesson plans and other educational materials to teachers and organizers, including an online anthology of 1,200 classic and contemporary poems.
The program starts at the local level with a school or participating organization. Winners then may advance to a regional and/or state competition, and ultimately to the national finals. Awards and placements are determined solely by judges’ scores based on the Poetry Out Loud Evaluation Criteria. Poetry Out Loud takes place in all 50 states, American Samoa, District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Since the program began in 2005, more than 4.4 million students and 81,000 teachers from 20,000 schools across the U.S. have participated in Poetry Out Loud.
