Poetry Out Loud Opens New Dimensions for Ohio's State Champion
After a powerful performance at the state finals, Caira Lee will represent Ohio in the national Poetry Out Loud finals on April 29. The Shaker Heights High School junior, an aspiring poet, showed impressive insight in her interpretation, says state coordinator Chiquita Mullins-Lee.
Caira Lee's powerful performances of William Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud, Eavan Boland's And Soul and Thomas McGrath's Celebration for June 24 express a great deal about the extraordinary promise of this year's Poetry Out Loud state champion. Those culminating moments are only part of the story though. The Shaker Heights High School junior's preparations for Poetry Out Loud in the months preceding the state finals further underscore her talents. When she describes those preparations, she also illustrates the impact the Poetry Out Loud program can have on a student's relationship with the art of poetry.
Heightened Appreciation
Lee says a love of words drew her to poetry initially. "Reading books like The Kite Runner," she says, "I saw how if you formulate words with the right verb and the right adjective and the right number of syllables, you can portray what the soul is feeling. It's kind of like how musicians feel about music. Feelings can't talk but we can get really close with poetry."
That strong appreciation for language undoubtedly grew deeper during Lee's Poetry Out Loud preparations. She says she found in Wordsworth the idea that "you have to pull from beauty and not just listen and see and acknowledge but make it a part of yourself." The ideas of "synchronicity and continuity" she found in Boland's poem resonated with her own beliefs about reality, as did the statement of love's power that shines through McGrath's account of a lonely life transfigured.
Deeper Understanding
Caira Lee
The Boland and McGrath poems were among the most difficult in the Poetry Out Loud anthology both because of their structure and because of their subject matter, according to Ohio's Poetry Out Loud coordinator Chiquita Mullins-Lee. "Caira chose poems dealing with concepts and emotions that require mature understanding," Mullins-Lee reflected, "and she was able to show insight into what the poet was expressing. She showed a great deal of passion in her facial expressions and gestures without losing the natural, conversational style of her recitation."
Lee says she carefully analyzed, read and reread the poems many times, as well as researched them and looked up unfamiliar words. "But I knew I only had one chance to recite the poems for the judges and make them understand what I understood through research," she says. "I had to have faith that through my inflection and gestures they would understand."
New Inspiration
Lee writes poems and performs her own work in local poetry slams, and her passion for the spontaneity and improvisation of that tradition has not diminished since her success in Poetry Out Loud. She hopes not only to become the nation's 2011 Poetry Out Loud champion but also to compete in Brave New Voices, a national poetry slam to be held this summer. In that very different competition, she thinks her newfound comfort with Wordsworth may embolden her to experiment with incorporating more "old English" into her poetry. More importantly though, the young poet's immersion in Poetry Out Loud has reminded her of why she writes: "Sometimes as slam poets, we get wrapped up in what will make the crowd go wild, or what will be controversial or what will get scores, and we forget it's about the art," she says. "By reading and rereading these poems and all that I got out of them, they made me re-realize that it's my obligation to write the truth and write beautiful things."
This article was published in April 2011
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