Mark Bauerlein of Brainstorm, the blogging team of The Chronicle [of Higher Education] Review, has an article about Poetry Out Loud, a national competition of poetry recitation by high-school students in the US. In his article, one can find links to an audio file (on the NPR site) of the performance of the 2008 winning reciter, Shawntay Henry, reading Robert E. Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass.”
Noting the high level of student participation, Bauerlein comments that the “numbers are proof that poetry can become a popular activity for adolescents if educators and organizers cast it right.” One of the keys to Poetry Out Loud’s popularity, according to Bauerlein, is
recitation. Students pick from a list of poems and recite them from memory. They can’t pick their own work (a restriction that earned some criticism in the planning stages), and if they miss a word or forget a line, they lose. “Rote memorization” is a bad term in education circles…, but without it, none of the drama and emotion would follow.
The Poetry Out Loud website has audio files of a modest number of mostly well-known poems, recited by Angela Lansbury, Anthony Hopkins and others (“Audio Guide“) and 5 videos of contestants reciting (“Videos“).
Of particular interest is the “Evaluation Criteria,” which includes Physical Presence, Voice and Articulation, Appropriateness of Dramatization, Level of Difficulty, and Evidence of Understanding. What is interesting is that the advice given about these criteria is almost indistinguishable from the admonitions of elocution manuals at the turn of the last century that were reacting against what they regarded as the highly artificial conventions of Victorian recitation. Especially striking are warnings against histrionics (“Above all, recitation is about conveying a poem’s sense with one’s voice. It is not theatrical enactment”) and the belief that the ideal reciter is merely a conduit of meaning that connects a poet to an audience: “You are the vessel of your poem. Have confidence that your poem is strong enough to communicate its sounds and messages without a physical illustration. In other words, let the words of the poem do the work.”
Mark S. Morrisson (see “The Pure Voice of Poetry” post) discusses the early twentieth-century reaction against Victorian recitation practices: “The prevalent critique of the artificiality of gesture and vocalization of Victorian elocution in favor of something more ‘natural’ developed, in manuals specifically aimed at verse recitation, into the understanding that reading aloud helped to elucidate the true meaning of the poem, allowing a ’surrender’ to the personality of the poet or even to the poem itself” (64).
Curious that we should still be reacting against artificiality in recitation…. But, how does one read ‘naturally’ a poem like “Ode on the Death of Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes,” a bathetic eulogy by Thomas Gray (1716-1771) and one of the poems to be found on the Poetry Out Loud website?:
’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
(Click here for the rest of the poem)
(Thanks to Marian Wilson Kimber for informing me about Poetry Out Loud)
