Try to Remember the Entire Poem

“Don’t get too close to the mike or you pop,” one 15-year-old contender tells another. “Try not to be robotic.”

Three hundred and twenty-three high school competitors have been winnowed down to these seven finalists and one alternate for the state of Iowa’s inaugural Poetry Out Loud competition. Before the event they are meeting with Vince Gotera, a 53-year-old poet from Cedar Falls, for a recitation workshop. The finalists gather in the Hoyt-Sherman place, an 1877 mansion-turned-museum, in what was once a formal dining room. There’s china in the china cabinet. Acorns carved in hardwood trim. A crystal bowl of unreal fruit around which the students sit up straight. Two girls wear thespian black. One boy wears a gold chain; another wears a tie. “I bet there are secret passages in here,” a girl in cat’s-eye frames suggests.

Gotera reminds them of the judges’ criteria—from volume and inflection to posture, accuracy, and evidence of understanding. They trade advice.

“Don’t let the rhyming control you.” “Adrenaline causes you to speed.” In a crowded theater, “people suck up the sound.” Three boys, five girls. Four raise their hands to say they act; five are in speech and debate. Megan hates podiums. Jennifer finds them helpful, “so if your legs shake, no one can see.” Trembling, tripping, rapid-onset amnesia or aphasia—there are fears. “You need to be careful about walking up there. . . . People aren’t going to laugh at you, or even gasp [if you fall], but it’ll mess your head up.”

“You need to activate your core muscles,” Gotera says, standing to flex.

Each chose work they love. Megan’s mother fed her words, both of them memorizing all 60 lines of Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie” in a week. Ashley read her poems into a tape recorder, then played them back again.

Unable to practice in the noise of his home, Joshua had a friend bat stanzas with him at school. He prides himself on his J-ROTC leadership, but when poetry was assigned, he was taken in by “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” as he’s “kind of a sucker for romances and stuff.” He’s read “Basic Training,” by William Ford, one of the contest judges, and says that was good too. “Anyone that’s been to [military] summer camp can absolutely relate to that . . . so a lot of poems do relate to real life,” he says.

All of the students had let their poem become as familiar as ad copy, our vernacular; had let the words tinge their palate and work as a charm—absorbed, become kinetic. Grant read “Casey at the Bat,” a poem he will recite, in a picture book when he was little. Others feel that they’ve happened upon a secret room and a new tongue.

“The poem I’ve got is really old,” one explains.

“Frost isn’t that old,” Gotera replies.

The group moves to the auditorium, which is like an opera house—tricked out in gilt and rose, with runners and a balcony. Friends of the competitors drink lemonade in plush seats. Teachers wave. The space is ennobling, as is the work. Before the competition begins, a girl with sparkles on her skirt whispers lines from Wilfred Owento her mother:

Men marched asleep. Most had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Someone yells “Fourth wall!” when, after adjusting the microphone stand, a man jumps off the stage.

There will be two rounds. Each student has memorized a third, “reserve” poem in case of a tie. Anita Walker, director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, congratulates the students before they compete. This is a historic event, she says. “Can you imagine being the first student finalist in the first-ever spelling bee?”

Can you imagine what it would be like if more people knew Marlowe’sshepherd’s lines?

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove

We hear them. We hear couplets about a spider ravishing a fly. We hear the landscape of Iowa described as “in its working clothes.” We hear shouts of “Stee-rike!” and “Gas!,” of Stonewall Jackson and famished rebel hordes, as each student takes the bare black stage.

In a polka-dotted scarf, with a strong stance, Jill Jones woos with Billy Collins’s “Litany.” In round two, she scans the audience for Yeats’s rough beast, slouching, and the air for “indignant desert birds,” letting her ds thud and arms ease as “the darkness drops again.”

This all makes for an unusual event in America today, though recitations are a human and historic commonplace. I think of my grandmother’s stories of how some neighborhood kids were forbidden to play at her house because my great-grandmother had a habit of piling them on her bed in the dark and reciting “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “Little Orphan Annie,” with terrifying voices and contortions, or a poem about a girl who fell into ill repute: “She Is More to be Pitied than Censured.”

I think of recordings I’ve heard—Robert Hayden, plaintive; Richard Wilbur, enunciating as though a choir director had told him he swallowed ts; Gwendolyn Brooks’s wheeling-and-dealing enjambment; Marianne Moore sounding insistent, with nougat or melt in the middle of her syllables.

After the last recitation, we are urged to “call, write, or e-mail our legislator” to provide financial support for the state poet laureate, who has to pay—for Pete’s sake—for his gas.

Jill Jones is announced as runner-up, and Ashley Baccam wins. Ashley is thrilled. She takes her big foam-board check and tears up, turning her long black ponytails to the audience. Her school will get new poetry books. She’ll get to fly in a plane for the second time. This May, in D.C., she’ll try the hip swing she perfected for Amy Uyematsu’s “Deliberate,” and the cadence she likes best for E.E. Cummings.