Underwood students take poetry to big stage

By Lauren Radomski (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, February 22, 2008

Between her classes at Underwood Public School and her part-time gas station job, 17-year-old Stephanie Hagen makes time for poetry.

“I love poetry,” said the Underwood junior. “I’ve written poetry since seventh grade.”

On Saturday, Hagen will exhibit that passion for poetry as she competes against other area students in a recitation contest called Poetry Out Loud. In its third year in Minnesota, this national arts education program uses memorization, performance and competition to teach high school students about great poetry. Schools send their best competitors to regional events like the one at MSCTC-Fergus Falls Saturday, with the best of the best moving on to state and national contests.

Poetry Out Loud is in its first year in Underwood thanks to Deb Darchuk, a high school language arts teacher and retired speech coach. As part of her trimester-long poetry class last fall, Darchuk required her class of 20-some juniors and seniors to study and memorize two poems. Students chose from nearly 500 classic and contemporary poems provided by Poetry Out Loud.

“The memorization was a difficult thing but everybody did pretty darn well,” Darchuk said. “They practiced with each other a lot. They had a partner and they gave suggestions to each other.”

By December, the students were ready to perform. A panel of certified speech judges from Underwood scored the students on their performances and selected two to move on to Saturday’s competition: Hagen and fellow junior Monika Pachel.

Since then, Hagen has met with Darchuk once a week to perfect her first two poems and begin learning a third poem of her choice for the competition. This third poem, “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward” by Anne Sexton, was performed by last year’s national winner.

The key to portraying the feeling of a poem is finding its meaning, Hagen said, and no two people interpret a poem in quite the same way.

“That’s probably the coolest thing about poetry — each person has a different reading (from) another person,” she said.

And not everyone can elicit emotion from written words.

“(Stephanie) is able to express her feelings well,” Darchuk said. “Some people can’t do that.”

The regional Poetry Out Loud Lake Regional Competition is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday in room 450 at MSCTC-Fergus Falls. The competition, which will include students from Underwood, Moorhead and Morris, is free and open to the public.