MARSHALL - The lecture hall was hushed, with just spot lighting and a microphone stand waiting at the front of the room. Sam Weston, a high school student at Lakeview School, stepped up to the mic, paused briefly, and began.
"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe," he said. Weston continued on until he had finished reciting "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll, while judges in the audience noted down their rankings.
Memorizing and reciting poetry might not be a classroom staple like it once was, but for the high school students competing at Poetry Out Loud regionals at the Southwest Minnesota State University campus on Saturday, it didn't matter. The finalists from Lakeview and Adrian High School said it was the being in the event that got them excited about poetry and performing it.
"When you have a poem you can really get into, it's easy to remember," said Adrian student Natalie Cook.
Lakeview student Kari Louwagie said she first tried Poetry Out Loud last year because her school was looking for participants. It turned out to be a good fit, she said. "I'm really into writing and poetry."
Poetry Out Loud is a national recitation contest, where students are judged on their performance and dramatization of selected poems. The Minnesota State Arts Board has sponsored competitions across the state for the past four years, said Amy Frimpong, senior program officer of the State Arts Board. More than 50 schools compete in nine regions statewide, Frimpong said.
Competition Saturday was limited to just four students, as several of the six schools originally scheduled to attend were not able to make the trip to Marshall. However, it didn't have any effect on the students' performances.
The students said they each picked two poems to recite from a collection of suggested poems. The trick was to find a poem you liked a lot.
"I really just went through and found ones that I liked," said Louwagie. Her favorites were a poem by Emily Dickinson and "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" by James Weldon Johnson.
Alissa Sauer, a junior at Adrian High School, said she went back to some favorite poets for her performance pieces.
"When I was in (Poetry Out Loud) in ninth grade, I did a poem by Ted Kooser and a poem by Billy Collins, and really loved it," Sauer said. "So this year, I went through the poems list and found more by them."
The competition wasn't just about memory, however. The students had to lend some emotion and physical presence to their poems.
Weston said pronouncing the made-up language in "Jabberwocky" didn't necessarily make it harder to perform.
"It's not hard," Weston said. "Actually, the hard part was 'gyre' and 'gimble.'" Weston said Lewis Carroll had written that the words could be pronounced with either a 'g' sound or a 'j' sound. It was up to the reader to choose which.
"I decided to do one each way," Weston said.
All four students also said they became interested in speech through Poetry Out Loud.
Kirstin Cronn-Mills and Denice Evers, two of the judges at the regionals, said it was exciting to see what the students had prepared.
"Poetry is becoming kind of a lost art, at least the recitation of it," Cronn-Mills said.
"I remember when I was in school, we would memorize poems," Evers said, but it's not as common anymore.
The judges awarded Sauer and Cook first and second place, and Weston and Louwagie won third and fourth place, respectively. Sauer and Cook will be moving on to the Minnesota state competition in St. Paul March 8.
