By Chloe Futrell, Features Editor
On Thursday (Jan. 11) at 6 p.m., First Flight and Manteo high school students will take the stage of the old Manteo courthouse to recite poems in front of the judges in Dare County’s Poetry Out Loud competition.
In December, juniors Abby Smith and Charlotte Tyson, plus freshman Ivanna Gonzalez-Sanchez, placed in the school competition. Smith came in first, Tyson took second and Gonzalez-Sanchez was third. They’ll compete against three Manteo students for the right to advance to the state POL competition in Greensboro on March 3. Because so many Dare County students participate in Poetry Out Loud, the district gets to send its top three performers to the state final. There, one student will go to the national competition.
At Thursday’s event, FFHS students will have collaborative projects completed by the English 3, photography and art classes displayed, while music will be provided by an ensemble from MHS. The Dare County Arts Council Building is located at 300 Queen Elizabeth Avenue near Downtown Books, which provided gift certificates to each school’s top finisher.
Each student will be required to recite two poems. One must be under 25 lines and pre-19th century.
“It is a requirement of the competition,” Tyson said. “It is to show that you can create dramatic effect without a super long poem. You don’t need 100 lines to give a good performance.”
This will be Tyson’s second year in the competition, her first time being her freshman year – like Gonzalez-Sanchez.
In November, Gonzalez-Sanchez was just like many freshman English students, preparing her first poem – “I am offering this poem” by Jimmy Santiago Baca – to perform in front of her classmates.
“I never planned it,” Gonzalez- Sanchez said. “The day before we had a competition in our classroom. I was learning my first poem in like 15 minutes.”
After she won her class competition, it was time to finally take her poems to the stage in the FFHS auditorium against other classroom winners.
“I was nervous,” Gonzalez- Sanchez said. “When I sweat my palms get really cold instead of hot and moist, and so I put them behind my back, so the audience wouldn’t know how nervous I was.”
Gonzalez-Sanchez eventually swallowed her anxiety, and the next thing she knew she was off to the district competition. But what got Gonzalez- Sanchez this far was not only her memorization of lines, but they way she related to the poem.
“The second poem I chose, I could really Identify with it,” Gonzalez-Sanchez said. ”Which is the whole point of it, so you can show your audience you know what you are saying and you can relate to it on another level.”
For Gonzalez-Sanchez, this competition was a first, but for Smith and Tyson it is all too familiar.
“Freshman year I got to the school competition, so I didn’t expect to go much farther, so it’s a bit of a surprise,” Smith said.
Aside from the excitement from moving further in the competition, Smith also finds a new side of herself when performing.
“I feel like it’s a way to branch out into an activity that I most likely wouldn’t have tried before,” Smith said.
As these three competitors prepare for their big performance Thursday night, battling butterflies is not in the equation – at least not for Tyson.
“Getting nervous is unnecessary,” Tyson said.
Junior Chloe Futrell can be reached at Futrellch1114@daretolearn.org.
