- [Narrator] Poetry Out Loud is made possible by The Armature, Northeast Educational Intermediate Unit 19, Lackawanna County Arts and Culture, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

(uplifting instrumental music) - Good evening and welcome to the Poetry Out Loud regional competition.

I'm your host, Alissa Swarts, director of Education at WVIA.

Poetry Out Loud is a national program from which high school students learn about great poetry through memorization and recitation.

One of the students here tonight will advance to the state competition in Harrisburg, and perhaps to the national finals in Washington DC where they will compete for a grand prize scholarship.

Thank you to all participating teachers throughout Northeast Pennsylvania for holding the in-school competitions and generating enthusiasm in your students.

Our six regional contestants are already winners representing their own high schools.

They'll compete in three rounds.

Tonight's top three finalists will receive free tuition to the Lyceum School of the Arts.

In this competition, students will be judged on physical presence and posture, voice projection and articulation, appropriate gestures that enhance the recitation, level of difficulty and evidence of understanding.

Please welcome our judges who are giving their time and talents so generously today.

Chris Esteves, former Poetry Out Loud state champion and PCA rostered artist, Dellana Diovisalvo, executive director of the Tunkhannock Public Library and PCA rostered artist, Conor McGuigan, actor, writer, and PCA rostered artist.

Judging accuracy is Dawn Leas.

Dawn is a poet, writing coach, editor, and PCA rostered artist.

Our prompter tonight is Alicia Grega.

Alicia is a playwright, poet, PCA rostered artist, and an educator at Wilkes University, Lackawanna College, and the University of Cincinnati.

Keeping tally is Stefanie Colarusso.

Stefanie is an art educator and PCA rostered artist.

Now it is my pleasure to introduce our first student, Christina Chrin from MMI Preparatory School.

- "Beautiful Wreckage" by W.D.

Ehrhart.

What if I didn't shoot the old lady running away from our patrol, or the old man in the back of the head, or the boy in the marketplace?

What if the boy, but he didn't have a grenade and the woman in Hue didn't lie in the rain in a mortar pit was seven Marines just for food.

Gaffney didn't get hit in the knee.

Ames didn't die in the river.

Ski didn't die in a medevac chopper between Con Thien and Da Nang.

In Vietnamese, Con Thien means place of angels.

But what if it really was instead of the place of rotting sandbags, incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud, what if the angels were Ames and Ski, or the lady, the man and the boy, and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud and healed his shattered knee?

What if none of it happened the way I said?

Would it all be a lie?

Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful?

Would the dead rise up and walk?

- Our next student is Francesca Huffman from Maria Kalpus Academy.

- "Ashes of Life" by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike.

Eat I must and sleep I will.

And would that night we're here, but ah, to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike.

Would that it were day again with twilight near.

Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do.

This or that or what you will is all the same to me, but all the things that I begin, I leave before I'm through.

There's little use in anything as far as I can see.

Love has gone and left me and the neighbors knock and borrow, and life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse.

And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

There's this little street and this little house.

- Next is Christian Wheeler from Riverside Junior Senior High School.

- "Football" by Louis Jenkins.

I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back.

I've got protection.

I've got a receiver open downfield.

What the hell is this?

This isn't a football, it's a shoe.

A man's brown leather Oxford.

A cousin to a football, maybe.

The same skin but not the same.

A thing made for the earth, not the air.

I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I understand also that one often has to make do with what one has.

I have eaten pancakes, for instance, with that clear corn syrup on them because there was no maple syrup, and they weren't very good.

Well, well anyways, this is different.

My man downfield is waving his arms.

One has certain responsibilities, one has to make choices.

This isn't right and I'm not going to throw it.

- Sulette Lange from Hazelton Area Arts and Humanities Academy.

- "We Are Not Responsible" by Harryette Mullen.

We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.

We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.

We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.

In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.

Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.

If you cannot understand English, you'll be moved out of the way.

In the events of a loss, you'd better look out for yourself.

Your insurance was canceled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims.

Our handlers lost your luggage and we are unable to find the key to your legal case.

You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.

You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.

It's not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.

It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.

Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.

You have no rights we are bound to respect.

Please remain calm or we can't be held responsible for what happens to you.

- Welcome Lalina VanGorden from Wallenpaupack Area High School.

- "The Wish, By a Young Lady" by Laetita Pilkington.

I ask not wit, nor beauty do I crave, nor wealth, nor pompous titles wish to have; but since 'tis doomed through all degrees of life, whether a daughter, sister, or a wife, that females should the stronger males obey, and yield implicit to their lordly sway.

Since this I say is every woman's fate, give me a mind to suit my slavish state.

- And lastly is Gideon Clausson from North Pocono High School.

- "How To Write A Poem" by Laura Hershey.

Don't be brilliant.

Don't use words for their own sake, or to show how clever you are, how thoroughly you have subjugated them to your will, the words.

Don't try to write a poem as good as your favorite poet.

Don't even try to write a good poem.

Just peel back the folds over your heart and shine into it.

The strongest light that streams from your eyes or somewhere else.

Whatever begins bubbling forth from there, whatever sound or smell or color swells up, makes your throat fill with unsaid tears.

Whatever threatens to ignite your hair, your eyelashes, if you get too close, write that.

Suck it in and quickly shape it with your tongue before you grow too afraid of it and it gets away.

Don't think about writing a good poem or a great poem or the poem to end all poems.

Write the poem you need to hear.

Write the poem you need.

- And now on to round two.

Once again, welcome Christina Chrin from MMI Preparatory School.

- "Breakfast" by Mary Lamb.

A dinner party, coffee, tea, sandwich, or supper, all may be in their way pleasant, but to me, not one of these deserves the praise that welcomer of newborn days, a breakfast merits.

Ever giving cheerful notice we are living another day refreshed by sleep when it's festival we keep.

Now although I would not slight those kindly words we use, goodnight, yet parting words are words of sorrow and may not vie with sweet good morrow with which again our friends, we greet when in the breakfast room we meet at the social table round, listening to the lively sound of those notes, which never tire of urn, or kettle on the fire.

Sleepy Robert never hears, or urn or kettle.

He appears when all have finished, one by one dropping off and breakfast done.

Yet has he too his own pleasure, his breakfast hour's his hour of leisure and left alone he reads or muses, or else in idle mood he uses to sit and watch the venturous fly where the sugar's piled high, clambering o'er the lumps so white, rocky cliffs of sweet delight.

- Next up is Christian Wheeler from Riverside Junior Senior High School.

- "Corn Maze" by David Barber.

Here is where you can get nowhere faster than ever as you go under deeper and deeper.

In the fertile smother of another acre like any other, you can't peer over and then another.

And everywhere you veer or hare, there you are, farther and farther afield than before.

But on you blunder in the verdant meander, as if the answer to looking for cover were to bewilder.

Your inner minotaur and near and far were neither here nor there and where you are is where you were.

- Sulette Lange from Hazelton Area Arts and Humanities Academy.

- "Respectability" by Tina Boyer Brown.

We ask our children to act calm, nervous, whatever innocent looks like when some cop shows his badge, pulls his gun, slows his car.

We beg kids to say soft yes sirs.

We beg kids to get on the hood of that car, empty their pockets, shut up, put your hands behind your head.

No is an existential threat.

No is an existential threat.

No is an existential threat.

No is an existential threat.

Never is an existential threat.

Never is an existential threat.

Never is an existential threat.

Never is an existential threat.

We dare ask for humility in the face of this oppression?

We have no idea what the threat feels like, but we know Breonna, Rekia, Sandra, Nia, Bettie, Yvette, Miriam, Shereese, Ahmaud, Trayvon, Eric, Laquan, Michael, Philando, Stephon, Alton, Amadou, Akai, Quintonio, Rumai, John, Jordan, Jonathan, Reynaldo, Kendrec, Ramarley, Kenneth, Robert, Walter, Terence, Freddie, Samuel, George, Tamir, and more and more and more.

There's no open risk declaring our innocence that will confer peace where innocence need.

Our children stand in front of doors, pages, words, in the streets.

They shut down, they shut down, they shut down the forces that burn against them.

- Lalina VanGorden from Wallenpaupack Area High School.

- "Truth is I Would Like to Escape Myself" by Nour Al Ghraowl.

Truth is I would like to escape myself, detach my body from my skin, peel it layer by layer to uncover beneath the surface of petals and thorns piled up year after year, who I am and who I want to be.

I want to be the flower that grows in dirt.

The feather that flies free between the cracks of fences.

A wise woman once told me, don't worry about you.

Worry about who you could be.

I want to be the woman who sits at a desk and writes pieces of oceans, rivers, on a white space in a place where imagination has no border.

- And Gideon Clausson from North Pocono High School.

- "Summer" by Chen Chen.

You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.

Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel size lint roller, just in case.

Level of splendiferous in your outfit, 200.

Types of invisible pain stemming from adolescent disasters in classrooms, locker rooms, and quite often, Toyota Camrys, at least 10,000.

You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.

Reporters and fathers call your generation the worst, which really means queer kids who could go online and learn that queer doesn't have to mean disaster or dead.

Instead, queer means splendiferously, you.

And you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, and honeydew.

Your powers are great, and growing.

One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the breath.

The next day you will tell your father you were wrong to say that I had to change.

To make me promise I would.

To make me promise and promise.

- And now for our final round, we begin with Christina Chrin from MMI Preparatory School.

- "Confessions" by Robert Browning.

What is he buzzing in my ears?

Now that I come to die, do I view the world as a vale of tears?

Ah, reverend sir, not I.

What I viewed there once, what I view again where the physic bottles stand on the table's edge is a suburb lane with a wall to my bedside hand.

That lane sloped much as the bottles do from a house you could describe o'er the garden wall.

Is the curtain blue or green to a healthy eye?

To mine, it serves for the old June weather, blue above lane and wall and that farthest bottle labeled ether is the house o'ertopping all.

At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, there watched for me, one June, a girl.

I know sir, it's improper.

My poor mind's out of tune.

Only there was a way, you crept close by the side to dodge eyes in the house, two eyes except.

They styled their house the lodge.

What right had a lounger up their lane, but by creeping very close with the good walls help, their eyes might strain and stretch themselves to Oes, yet never catch her and me together.

As she left the attic, there by the rim of the bottle labeled ether and stole from stair to stair and stood by the rose-wreathed gate.

Alas, we loved, sir, used to meet.

How sad and bad and mad it was.

But then, how it was sweet.

- Welcome back Francesca Huffman from Maria Kalpus Academy.

- "Epitaph" by Katherine Philips.

On her son HP at St. Syth's Church where her body also lies interred.

What on Earth deserves our trust?

Youth and beauty both are dust.

Long we gathering are with pain, what one moment calls again.

Seven years childless marriage past.

A son, a son is born at last.

So exactly lim'd and fair, full of good spirits, meen and air as a long life promised, yet in less than six weeks, dead.

Too promising, too great a mind in so small room to be confined.

Therefore as fit in heaven to dwell, he quickly broke the prison shell.

So the subtle alchemist can't with Hermes seal, resist the powerful spirits subtler flight, but t'will bid him long good night.

And so the sun if it arise half so glorious as his eyes.

Like this infant takes a shrowd, buried in a morning cloud.

- And next, Christian Wheeler from Riverside Junior Senior High School.

- "The American Soldier" by Philip Freneau.

A picture from the life to serve with love and shed your blood.

Approved may be above, but here below, example show 'tis dangerous to be good.

Lord Oxford.

Deep in a vale, a stranger now to arms.

Too poor to shine in courts, too proud to beg.

He who once warred on Saratoga's plains sits musing o'er his scars and wooden leg.

Remembering still the toil of former days, to other hands he sees his earnings paid.

They share the due reward.

He feeds on praise lost in the abyss of want, misfortune's shade.

Far, far from domes where splendid tapers glare, 'tis his from dear bought peace, no wealth to win.

Removed alike from courtly, cringing 'squires, the great-man's levee, and the proud man's grin.

Sold are those arms, which once on Britons blazed when, flushed with conquest, to the charge they came.

That power repelled, and freedoms fabric raised, she leaves her soldier, famine and a name.

- And now, Sulette Lange from Hazelton Area Arts and Humanities Academy.

- "Thoughtless Cruelty" by Charles Lamb.

There, Robert, you have killed that fly.

And should you thousand ages try the life you've taken to supply, you could not do it.

You surely must have been devoid of thought and sense to have destroyed a thing, which no way you annoyed.

You'll one day rue it.

Twas but a fly perhaps you'll say, that's born in April, dies in May.

That does, but just learn to display his wings one minute and in the next is vanished quite.

A bird devours it in his flight or come a cold blast in the night.

There's no breath in it.

The bird but seeks his proper food.

And Providence, whose power endu'd that fly with life when it thinks good, may justly take it.

But you have no excuses for it.

A life by nature made so short.

Less reason is that you for sport should shorter make it.

A fly, a little thing you rate.

But Robert, do not estimate a creature's pain by small or great.

The greatest being can have, but fibers, nerves, and flesh and these the smallest ones possess although their frame and structure less escape our seeing.

- Welcome back, Lalina VanGorden from Wallenpaupack Area High School.

- "What the Oracle Said" by Shara McCallum.

You will leave your home.

Nothing will hold you.

You will wear dresses of gold, skins of silver, copper, and bronze.

The sky above you will shift in meaning each time you think you understand.

You will spend a lifetime chipping away at layers of flesh, the shadow of your scales will always remain.

You'll be marked by sulfur and salt.

You'll bathe endlessly in clear streams and fail to rid yourself of that scent.

Your feet will never be your own.

Stone will be your path.

Storms will follow in your wake, destroying all those who take you in.

You will desert your children, kill your lovers and devour their flesh.

You will love no one but the wind and ache of your bones.

Neither will love you in return.

With age, your hair will grow matted and dull.

Your skin will gape and hang in long folds.

Your eyes will cease to shine, but nothing will be enough.

The sea will never take you back.

- And last tonight, we welcome Gideon Clausson from North Pocono High School.

- "April Midnight" by Arthur Symons.

Side by side through the streets at midnight, roaming together through the tumultuous night of London in the miraculous April weather.

Roaming together under the gaslight, days work over.

How the spring calls to us here in the city.

Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover.

How the cool wind blows fresh in our faces, cleansing, entrancing, after the heat and the fumes and the footlights where you dance and I watch your dancing.

Good it is to be here together.

Good to be roaming, even in London, even at midnight, lover like in a lover's gloaming.

You the dancer and I the dreamer, children together, wandering lost in the night of London, in the miraculous April weather.

- The judges have tallied the scores.

And now for the winners and the recipients of free tuition to the Lyceum School of the Arts.

In third place, Christina Chrin.

The Poetry Out Loud runner up is Gideon Clausson.

And our winner for the Poetry Out Loud regional competition and advancing to the state competition in Harrisburg is Sullete Lange.

Congratulations to our winners and to all of the contestants for such a wonderful job.

I'm Alissa Swarts, director of Education at WVIA.

Thank you for watching and have a good night.

(uplifting instrumental music) - [Narrator] Poetry Out Loud was made possible by The Armature, Northeast Educational Intermediate Unit 19, Lackawanna County Arts and Culture, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.