A young girl stands behind the podium rhythmically reciting words penned by poets of long ago.
A lost art, she draws those listening closer. They hang on every syllable.

KATE LITTLE of Maple City, shown while
reciting a poem as part of Poetry Out Loud
at The Leelanau School, won first -place
in the competition.

That was the setting for the first Poetry Out Loud, poetry recitation contest last week at The Leelanau School.

English instructor Norm Wheeler organized the local event, which is the precursor to the state competition March 8 in Lansing and April in Washington, D.C..

“By memorizing a poem, you understand it better,” said Wheeler, who has developed a reputation for his recitation skills as a member of the Beach Bards. The bards gather Friday evenings during the summer months to share songs and stories. “It’s a great way to be able to entertain yourself.”

Seven students took the microphone to participate in poetry recitation, which is a competitive event as old as the Olympic Games. Along with wrestling, long-distance running, and the javelin toss, the ancient Olympics included contests in music and poetry. Performers trained for years and travel great distances to the games. At Leelanau Feb. 7 a group of four judges — Adam Couturier, Elizabeth Blondia, Cindy Leo and Jen Semanco — critiqued performers on six characteristics, including physical presence, voice and articulation, appropriateness of dramatization, level of difficulty, evidence of understanding, and overall performance.

Audience members were also given an assignment.

“Listening to poetry is an active pursuit, not passive,” Wheeler explained. “You need to concentrate on what they’re saying with attention. They’ll feed on your energy.”

Stuart Burnholc of Raleigh, N.C., stepped to the podium and recited Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Burnholc’s enthusiasm and frustration was palpable as he struggled with his second poem, The Mother’s Son by Rudyard Kipling. Other selections by male contestants were less intense and included The Road Not Taken and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.

Recitations were also performed by Andrew Campbell of Benzonia, Sarah Wadleigh of suburban Chicago, Kip Zanardi of New Jersey, and Lindsey Weiss of Indianapolis.

After brief deliberations, Kate Little of Maple City and Avery Lipman of Nashville were identified as first- and second-place winners. Lipman, a ninth grader, recited I, Too, a poem by Langston Hughes, and Shakespeare’s Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? Little, a 10th-grader and the daughter of Ellen Spang of Maple City and Jay Little of Ann Arbor, recited Crepuscule With Muriel by Marilyn Hacker and Agoraphobia by Linda Pastan.

Both were lengthy pieces and the Hacker poem, in particular, had an interesting mix of consonants that would challenge even the most experienced performer.

“I’m not agoraphobic (someone with an abnormal fear of open, public places),” she said. “What drew me in was the first line, about the snow.”

When Little was small, she vividly remembers looking out the window with her older sister at an unspoiled blanket of snow.

“We’d argue about who was going to step in it first.”

The Hacker piece is about two friends sharing a cup of tea.

“I liked the consonants and the images created by the words,” she said.

As first-place winner, Little received a $20 gift certificate at May Bings in Glen Arbor. Lipman received a $15 certificate to Riverfront Pizza, also located in Glen Arbor.

In addition, Little will travel to Lansing next month to compete with 30 to 40 of the state’s best performers. The state champion will win a trip to Washington, D.C. and a chance at a $20,000 college scholarship.

Poetry recited by student competitors

The following poems were recited by Kate Little of Maple City during Poetry Out Loud at The Leelanau School:

Agoraphobia,
by Linda Pastan

“Yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace, Hooting and shrieking.”
— William Shakespeare

1. Imagine waking
to a scene of snow so new
not even memories
of another snow
can mar its silken
surface. What other innocence
is quite like this, and who can blame me for refusing
to violate such whiteness
with the booted cruelty
of tracks?

2. Though I cannot lave this house,
I have memorized the view
from every window —
23 framed landscapes, containing
each nuance of weather and light,
And I know the measure
of every room, not as a prisoner
pacing a cell
but as the embryo knows
the walls of the womb, free
to swim as its body tells it, to nudge
the softly fleshed walls,
dreading only the moment
of contraction when it will be force
into the gaudy world.
3. Sometimes I travel as far
as the last stone
of the path, but
every step,
as in the chilldren’s story,
pricks that tender place
on the bottom of the foot,
and like an ebbing tide with all
the obsession of the moon behind it,
I am dragged back.

4. I have noticed in windy fall
how leaves are torn from the trees,
each leaf waving goodbye to the oaks
or the poplar that housed it;
how the moon, pinned
to the very center of the window,
is like a moth wanting only to break in.
What I mean is this house
follows all the laws of lintel and ridgepole,
obeys the commandments of broom
and of needle, custom and grace.
It is not fear that holds me here but passion
and the uncrossable moat of moonlight
outside the bolted doors.

Crepuscle with Muriel,
by Marilyn Hacker

Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milk-
silk whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six
o’clock teatime, cup of a stumbling block,
cup of an afternoon unredeemed by talk,
cup of a cut brown load, of a slice, a lack
of butter, blueberry jam that’s almost black,
instead of tannin seeping into the cracks
of a pot, the void of an hour seeps out, infects
the silt of a cut I haven’t the wit to fix
with a surgeon’s needle threaded with fine-gauge silk
as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock.
Late afternoon light, transitory, licks
the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue, flicks
itself out beneath the wheel’s revolving spoke.
Taut thought’s gone, with the blink of attention, slack,
a vision of “death and distance in the mix”
(she lost her words and how did she get them back
when the corridor of the day was a lurching deck?
The dream-life logic encodes in nervous tics
she translated to a syntax which connects
intense and unfashionable politics
with morning coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex;
then the short-circuit of the final stroke,
the end toward which all lines looped out, then broke).
What a gaze out the window interjects:
on the southeast corner, a black Lab balks,
tugged as the light clicks green toward a late-day walk
by a plump brown girl in a purple anorak.
The Bronx-bound local comes rumbling up the tracks
out of the tunnel, over west Harlem blocks
whose windows gleam on the animal warmth of bricks
rouged by the fluvial light of six o’clock.