Most late Wednesday afternoons, I do not walk into The Actors’ Gang’ enclave for the County finals of the High School Poetry Out Loud competition.
This was splendid correctional therapy for someone who thinks that athletes are the first, second and third most significant heroes on campus.
High school poets don’t tackle hardly anybody.
And, better, they don’t have to be built like the side of a tall building or run faster than a suspected bank robber whose pants cuffs are afire.
Studying the 10 girls and one boy qualifiers — there must be a gender-related story in there — was the difference between listening to the radio and watching television.
Television is intense. You hunch forward, tighten your skin and bones, and you comprehensively concentrate.
Radio relaxes you — you are digesting and processing the conversation while you sort the laundry, count your gold coins, take a bath, paint the house.
Poetry Out Loud was radio, delightfully.
Nevertheless, I hunched forward, analyzing each student — 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th graders — from shoes to forehead. Each one lent her or his delivery interpretation to a classic poem.
I would like to see a star athlete emulate these talents. He can grunt, he can strike and he can fly. But can he interpret?
Let’s identify the best teenage interpreters of poetry in Los Angeles.
They tested in alphabetical order.
1. Giana Marini, 11th grader, Alhambra High.
2. Susan Aparicio, 9th grader, El Rancho High.
3. Sophia Breanna Brady, 12th grader, Glendale Hoover High.
4. Paige Pelonis, 12th grader, Long Beach Millikan.
5. Brittany Sass, 12th grader, International Poly High, under the auspices of the County Office of Education.
6. Norma Espinoza, 12th grader, Granada Hills Charter High.
7. Maggie Gao, 12th grader, Montebello High.
8. Yaneli Soriano, 10th grader, Marshall Fundamental School, Pasadena.
9. Victoria Lopez, 12th grader, Garey High, Pomona.
10. Madeleine Lessard, 11th grader, St. Monica Academy.
11. Josh Clark, 12th grader, Saugus High.
Each was asked to expressively recite/interpret a poem.
Try mastering that feat before a bleachers full of people — several of whom are rooting for you, the rest hoping that if a meteor tumbles from the sky in the coming 20 seconds, it avoids everyone but you.
The contestants’ choice of poems spanned the culture, from Allen Ginsburg to the more classically acceptable James Whitcomb Riley, e.e. cummings, Lewis Carroll, Poe, G.K. Chesterton, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost.
In separate rounds, each interpreted two poems.
All 11 were in commanding charge of their chosen poems.
To artfully correlate their gestures, their inflections, their separate, sometimes nuanced, bodily movements was as aesthetically pleasurable as observing a symphony orchestra at its peak.
Ms. Brady, crowned the champion in early evening, is a tall girl, much taller than her rivals — the kind of girl who used to be called gawky. Ms. Brady immediately killed that suspicion as she flowed to the stage, glided behind the microphone and began reciting Anne Bradstreet’s “Before the Birth of One of Her Children.”
Ms. Brady so completely encapsulated her entire self into the role of interpreter that I was whisked away to exclusively ponder her words, a principle purpose of serious poetry.
To slightly varying degrees, this happened with contestant after contestant. Not a single weak link appeared. No one muffed her words. No one suffered the most remote lapse.
These were Carnegie Hall-worthy performances.
You could have blindly drawn the winner’s name and been correct.
My sketchy notes on Ms. Pelonis, the runnerup, say “uses face and hands only…excellent.”
Ms. Brady and Ms. Pelonis will travel to Sacramento, March 20-21, for the state finals.
