The Pitch and Tuning of Poems: Poetry Out Loud
by Brandon Cesmat

 “Many times we’d try to analyze the poetry without speaking it,” says Kayla Jackmon, South Dakota’s 2006 champion of Poetry Out Loud (POL), the new national poetry recitation contest. Jackmon critiques just one of many shortcomings in contemporary standards-based education. Sure, the standards clearly articulate important objectives, but often recitation is not integrated with analysis, and rarely are students asked to use classic literature to create new work. Until creative writing has equal standing in the language arts standards along with expository writing and literary analysis, California’s language arts standards will remain incomplete; however, Jackmon’s linkage of recitation to analysis is a step in the right direction.

            As the president of CPITS, I felt resistance when we first decided to participate in POL. High school students memorize and perform poems for prizes in competitions similar to the National Spelling Bee. Our mission emphasizes creativity through the writing process. What does recitation have to do with writing poems? To answer, I’d borrow Jackmon’s logic and say that many times we try to write poetry without speaking it or hearing it. POL, as I saw it, was the first step to a greater intimacy with the poems we modeled for students. The difference between reading a poem out loud and speaking a poem from memory is the difference between a menu and a meal (besides, CPITS members had been recommending the organization get involved with the Poetry Foundation in whatever it decided to do with the Lily bequeathment, and POL was it).

            During the first two years of POL in California—first as a pilot in Sacramento County and second in 9 counties—further possibilities have begun to take shape. POL promises to go beyond being a national recitation contest to become a dynamic part of a revised and reinvigorated language arts curriculum that includes creative writing, what I like to think of as “Poetry Out Loud Plus.”

            Students themselves are already adding to POL. According to Dan Stone, the NEA’s National Initiatives director, last year students at the national championship organized a performance of original poems, so the NEA made the night of original poems part of this year’s schedule. So if students are moving POL toward creative writing already, how can CPITS make recitation a fundamental part of our residency?

            To demonstrate how reading poems by experienced poets inspires new poems, I’ll recite “Autumn Comes to Martin’s Ferry” by James Wright and then perform my own poem “Long Pass.” I’ve also paired Robert Hayden’s “Those Sunday Mornings” with my poem “Ice Drum.” It’s as if the poems have conversations.

            California State poet laureate Al Young says he supports Poetry Out Loud because “Each sounded interpretation peels away the textual skin to bring a new poem to light.” When a student chooses a poem to recite, that choice is often a critical act that reveals something about the student’s aesthetic. The choices made during performance are interpretive acts. “We could have ten students reciting Langston Hughes’ ‘Weary Blues,’” Young said at Poetry Out Loud event in Oceanside, “and each one would be different because each person is a little bit different from the other.” Robert Pinsky talks about how the human body is the perfect instrument for the reproduction of poetry, not the book.

            While books hold a poem fixed, performance has a flow that can be dangerous if you like the fluid world to stay put. For the past two years, I’ve checked the final Poetry Out Loud performances for accuracy. Both years, lines in the final round were different from their published version. In one case, a student inverted a rhyme and none of the judges noticed. Sometimes a mistake stands out. I happened to be sitting next to Susan Sibbet as she judged the 2007 Poetry Out Loud competition in Sacramento. “Oh good,” she whispered to me as a student announced what she was going to recite. “That’s my favorite poem,” Sibbet told me. And the student did a great job until fumbling a line near the end. Afterward, I said that it was too bad the student had messed up the line. “Not really,” Sibbet said. “That’s the weakest line in the poem." I looked at the line and there was no imagery and the syntax was pure Guantanamo Bay. Later, another student dropped an entire line without affecting the flow of the poem's syntax. Again, it was a weak line. Even though I deducted points for inaccuracy, the other judges scored the student in the top five that day. Certainly differences between Shakespeare's folios & quartos show that performance revised his plays, so we shouldn’t be surprised when performance revises the poems from Poetry Out Loud.

            These inadvertent revisions seemed to be examples of the imagination over-ruling the memory, which might not help during a Poetry Out Loud contest, but would certainly help young poets compose their own poems. 

            So although it might seem like reverse engineering, if students become aware of how creativity happens during a poetry performance, then CPITS is meeting its mission.

This essay appeared originally in the anthology My Song Is the Light.