The silence of the darkened auditorium was broken by a carrying voice, rising in pitch, soaring in intensity and quaking with emotion as it pleaded with the audience members to never give up.
That voice belonged to Amy Schultz, a junior at Wilmington Christian School, and she was using it to recite a 99-year-old poem by Rudyard Kipling during the state finals of the fourth annual Poetry Out Loud Competition.
“I love how poetry can have such incredible messages and express them in such unique ways,” said Schultz, 16, of Corner Ketch.
She and 11 other students from high schools across Delaware put their memorization and recitation skills to the test during competition, held at the Smyrna Opera House on March 5 and sponsored by the Delaware Division of the Arts.
Each student selected three poems to recite from memory before a panel of judges, who rated them on elements like vocal projection, word accuracy and articulation.
After three rounds of recitation, Tonisha Jones, a senior at Middletown High School, won the competition for the second year in a row. For the win, she took home $200 and an all-expense paid trip to Washington, D.C., to compete in the national finals in April. Julianne Morris, a senior at Polytech High School, was runner-up and received a $100 prize.
Jones, 18, of Middletown, said she selected poems that had an element of human emotion, like “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks, which tells a heart-wrenching tale of abortion.
“Each poem is like a gem from the poet and I kind of hold that for them,” she said. “Poetry is like this amazing world that has all this substance to it.”
The students showed off the art form’s substance, whether they were reciting a staccato string of verbs that shocked the audience, or slowly enunciating a selection of adjectives to paint a lyrical picture.
It was the different rhythms of poetry that attracted Hockessin resident Elizabeth Peck, 16, to the competition. She performed “When I Consider Everything That Grows,” by William Shakespeare, and while the poem may be hundreds of years old, Peck said it still rings true with her today.
“A lot of people think poetry is outdated, but it certainly is not,” she said.
Reading poetry is one thing, said Peck, 16, a sophomore at Mt. Sophia Academy, but memorizing it and reciting it is another. Good recitation requires poise and excellent public speaking skills, she said, and she noticed her own skills improving as she rehearsed.
Peck practiced her poems every day for weeks, and twice a day as the competition grew nearer, to make sure she had memorized every detail.
But reciting poetry is about much more than the letters and punctuation marks on the page, said Jacob Sackett-Sanders, of Pike Creek.
“It’s got to mean something to you,” he said. “You can read lines, but you have to get to know a poem.”
Sackett-Sanders, 15, a sophomore at Cab Calloway School of the Arts, said each poem he recited had a special meaning to him, like “I Am,” by John Clare, which is about how hard it can be to fit into a group.
Many people, teenagers especially, have a misconception that poetry is merely something scholarly, he said, reserved for university lecture halls and heavy tomes with yellowed pages. But it really is something alive that speaks in the language of emotions; something everyone can relate to, he said.
