It's Drama Out Loud, too

Tonight Bobo helped judge the E. Wash. regionals of Poetry Out Loud, which is about four years old and NEA-sponsored and much like the National Spelling Bee, only with high school students reciting and enacting poems (two each, choosing from hundreds in a standardized list ranging over the centuries). A couple of kids from East Valley and Mead high schools sweated through their nerves and made it to the state finals in Olympia next month.

The theater connection? First, kudos to the students and to their teachers, who prodded them into doing a pretty scary thing -- get up in front of strangers and recite a poem by Wilfrid Owen or Gwendolyn Brooks or Stephen Crane, Ben Jonson, Siegfried Sassoon, Edna St. Vincent Millay ...

And nearly all those students come from English classes. Which is great. But there were at least a half-dozen high schools from around here that weren't represented at all and should be, and should/could be represented by their best students in theater. The rules spell out subtle differences between enacting the poem's actions and being the poem's meaning (?), but my point is that more kids (period) and more students from drama should strongly consider participating next year. Visit http://www.poetryoutloud.org/.

[ art: from mercatornet.com, Francis Philips, 9 Jan 09, "Battered by bleak midwinter blues? Try poetry" ]