(This week, the Monitor will publish a series of stories exploring how students of all ages are staying engaged with the community while learning from home.)
The opportunity to recite poetry live in the legislative chambers of the New Hampshire State House was a dream for Sydney Kilgore.
After winning the Concord High School Poetry Out Loud competition in mid-February, the junior spent weeks rehearsing for the statewide finals in March, making sure she performed each of her poems with the right tone, emotion and diction.
Then COVID-19 hit.
The in-person statewide competition at the State House on March 13 was canceled, and Kilgore wasn’t sure if she’d be able to compete at all. Many states canceled their Poetry Out Loud competitions.
The judges presented New Hampshire competitors with a new challenge: sending in recorded videos of them reciting the three poems they had planned to perform at the State House.
She recorded herself reciting “The End of Science Fiction” by Lisel Mueller, “The Bookshelf of the God of Infinite Space” by Jeffery Skinner and “The Conqueror Worm” by Edgar Allan Poe.
In each video, Kilgore speaks silkily and clearly, pausing, using hand motions or raising her voice at points for impact.
In early April, she got an email from the judges telling her that she had won.
“I definitely remember dancing around the house a bit,” she said. “I was thrilled. It definitely wasn’t what I expected: winning, or winning in this way. I was grateful to be able to compete at all.”
Poetry Out Loud is a national competition that invites high school students to display their public speaking skills, build self-confidence and learn about literary history, according to the Poetry Foundation website.
Students are tasked with choosing from an anthology of poems and performing them from memory in front of an audience. Students first compete at the classroom level in English classes, then at the school level, followed by regional and statewide competitions.
There is usually a nationwide competition during April vacation for winners from 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
Because of COVID-19, Poetry Out Loud will not host its national competition in Washington, D.C., this year.
Kilgore first competed in the Concord High School competition last year. She said her background in theater and love of being on stage drew her interest. She didn’t know much about poetry at that point.
“Last year, I was still more of a theater kid, so when I went into the competition, I was focused on choosing a poem based on what I thought would be the best vessel for me to give a performance, like a monologue, for example. It wasn’t because I had an explicit interest in poetry,” she said. “But this year, I’ve grown to appreciate poetry more.”
Over the last year, Kilgore said, she has developed a deep connection with poetry, which she thinks helped improve her performance in the competition.
“When I was choosing my poems, I was more thinking, ‘Which ones do I have an emotional connection with?’ ” she said. “From there, it’s just a matter of trying to convey, through recitation, whatever emotion that poem made me feel.”
Kilgore said she thinks a lot of kids in her generation aren’t used to the type of analysis that’s required in poetry.
“I’m more used to TV shows and movies and books and novels when I watch or read through, and it’s for a plot. If I don’t get it the first time through, I get frustrated,” she said. “It’s more a special medium where you have to settle in with it, read it more than once and really take the time to dig deep and find out what it’s saying.”
Kilgore is an emerging writer herself. She said she’s still searching for her own voice in writing but that she enjoys the styles of surrealism and magical realism. Last May, she attended the Vermont Young Writers Conference and signed up for a poetry class, which inspired her.
Kilgore said learning to recite poems by memory has made her a better writer. When she was working on memorizing her poems for the competition, she practiced by typing out the poems on her laptop over and over again. She not only made sure that she got the words right, but also the form.
“I would memorize every single piece of punctuation and line break even though those things wouldn’t necessarily come across in a verbal performance. I still thought it was important to know where everything was. In poetry, every single thing in there is there for a reason,” she said. “I wanted to get specific and understand why everything was the way it was.”
Kilgore said it was disappointing that her friends and family were not able to watch her perform at the State House. More disappointing is not being able to go to Washington, D.C., in April to compete in the national competition.
Kilgore’s mother, Kimberly Piper-Stoddard, an English teacher for inmates at the state prison in Concord who was named 2020’s New Hampshire Teacher of the Year, was also set to travel to D.C. that week for a teaching event. It was something she and Kilgore planned to do together.
However, more than anything, Kilgore said she is grateful for the experience.
Only a junior, she also has the option of trying out for Poetry Out Loud again next year.
“I think I’ll try again,” she said. “We’ll see.”
The National Endowment for the Arts and Poetry Foundation will honor the 2020 student champions by sharing videos on YouTube of recitations by state champions, as well as students who advanced to the state finals in states that were unable to hold a competition. Kilgore’s recitation of “The Conqueror Worm” by Edgar Allan Poe was among the videos shared last week and is available here.