The final rounds of the 2010 Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Competition are just around the corner: on April 26 & 27 in Washington D.C.'s Lisner Auditorium, 53 students from the nearly 325,000 who began this year's competition will compete for the title of Poetry Out Loud National Champion and $50,000 in awards. As state champions gear up for their trip to Washington, Poetry Daily asked former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, under whose tenure POL arose from modest pilot programs in Washington and Chicago to become the national phenomenon it is today, to share his own POL experiences.

Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. A native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent, Gioia received a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He has published three full-length collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon, which won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.

As Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia succeeded in garnering bi-partisan support in the United States Congress for the mission of the Arts Endowment, as well as in strengthening the national consensus in favor of public funding for the arts and arts education. While in office, he created the largest literary programs in the history of the federal government, including The Big Read, Shakespeare in American Communities, and Poetry Out Loud. Other programs during his tenure included Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, NEA Jazz Masters, American Masterpieces, and two critical studies, Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence. Gioia left his position as Chairman on January 22, 2009.

We talked with Dana Gioia via e-mail:

Poetry Daily: The 2010 Poetry Out Loud National Finals—the first since you stepped down from the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts—are almost upon us. Nearly 325,000 high school students entered the competition this year. Did you imagine this level of participation when the Endowment and The Poetry Foundation first talked about starting Poetry Out Loud?

Dana Gioia: We always figured that the program would be popular once it got going, but 325,000 kids is a huge number, especially considering that the program still lacks funding to reach every school in most states. This popularity shows that people like poetry when it is engagingly presented.

PD: Much has been said about the resurgence in recent years of poetry as an oral art form, influenced by a variety of perceived factors. What part did all this play in the getting POL started, if any?

DG: Poetry Out Loud was started with the conviction that poetry has the broadest appeal and greatest emotional force when it is heard. Many people find it difficult to read poems on the page, but nearly everyone likes hearing a good poem read well. I suspect that one difficulty people often have in reading a poem on the page is that they don't know how to "hear" it there—without a voice giving them the tone and pacing. Surely, this accessibility is one reason why poetry readings are so popular.    

PD: Competition is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about poetry, yet it is at the heart of Poetry Out Loud. Participants are not just performing. They’re also competing. Was this part of the conception from the beginning? What place is there for competition in the arts?

DG: Yes, the program was always seen as a competition—just like sports, debates, or spelling bees. Competition adds a special energy to a public event, and it also helps focus talent.The Greeks did almost all of their cultural activities in competition, including poetry and drama, because they believed it fostered excellence.  Competition also brings a special attention from the audience—just look at the involvement and intensity people bring to sporting events. We did not predict that aspect of the Poetry Out Loud, but it was apparent from the first time we held a public event. The audience displayed an intensity of attention that is very rare at ordinary poetry readings.

Some arts education specialists in the State Arts Agencies initially objected to the competitive element. They maintained that kids don't enjoy doing things in competition. We insisted that it was essential to the concept, and they reluctantly allowed a test—some of them predicting doom. Now that nearly a million students have participated over the past five years, I think we can conclude that kids don't mind artistic competitions. Look at the appeal of shows like American Idol among this age group.    

PD: Similarly, memorization seems long since to have gone out of vogue generally as a learning tool, though poets have continue to extol the virtues of memorization. This too is required of POL participants. What is the value of memorization in all this?

DG: Memorization went out of vogue in English classes, but kids still memorized rock and rap lyrics. The advantages of memorizing great poetry seem pretty obvious. It allows one to master and possess great language expressing powerful emotions, ideas, and situations. Memorizing and reciting also helps develop the student's powers of expression and gives experience in public speaking.

When the program started, I told the organizers that it wouldn't necessarily be the "A" students in English who won the competitions. It would be students who had gifts that the analysis-heavy literature curriculum did not recognize—the intuitive thinkers and physical kids, such as athletes, dancers, musicians, and theater kids. It might also invite the class clowns to participate. By giving them this program it would give them a role in the class they previously lacked. This has certainly been the case. Poetry Out Loud provides an entry into poetry and literature through performance. This has broadened the audience for the art.

PD: You must have been in the audience for numerous POL events in the past few years. Have performances changed over time as schools, teachers, students, and judges have gained experience in the program?

DG: The performances tend to fall into two groups—the actors and the speakers. Both approaches are valid, but they are quite different. The actors emote, gesture, strut, and fret their pieces. Sometimes it is a bit too much. Sometimes it works beautifully. The speakers work mostly with the language. They shade and color every word to bring across their emotional effects.

PD: Do any particular memories of individual performances come to mind?

DG: Do I remember particular performances? Absolutely! Some of these kids are unforgettable. Our first winner Jackson Hille was an understated and subtle "speaker" in his approach. He did a satire by Jonathan Swift that would have sunk most performers, and he made each cruelly funny line resonant with moral intelligence.  He also did Tony Hoagland's "Beauty" so well that the next year thousands of kids simply had to do it, too. It was a veritable "Beauty" tsunami! Shawntay Henry came on stage as the longshot from the U.S. Virgin Islands, which had just been let into the competition. As soon as she recited Robert Hayden's "Frederick Douglas" in the quarter finals, I knew she would win the competition. She took this rhetorically complicated poem and spoke it as if it was rising from her heart in a moment of passionate inspiration.

And then there are the kids who didn't win. There was a fellow named, I think, Chris Estevez from Pennsylvania who recited Rhina Espaillat's "Bilingual/Bilingüe" who just broke my heart. He managed to put a lifetime of experience in being raised among immigrants in that single recitation.

I liked these state champions so much that we began inviting them every year to the NEA pavilion at the National Book Festival. It gave us the pleasure of hearing them again and allowed us to share the program with a new audience—as well as recognize the state winners for their achievements. The Poetry Out Loud kids proved to be an instant success. The pavilion fills up with people standing year after year. Only the Poet Laureate draws an equal crowd. This audience reaction proves—to repeat myself—that people love good poetry when it is well presented. It also suggests that the poetry world is missing a bet by focusing mostly on programs of poets reading their own work. There are many other formats out there that would build the audience for poetry.

PD: Frequently in newspaper articles about local and regional POL events, students report that poetry was not exactly central to their lives prior to entering POL. What value is added by POL to the experience and study of poetry for students who choose to participate? When students leave the competition and high school, does poetry go with them in some new sense, do you think? What do POL "alumni" report?

DG: Many students have told me that the experience of memorizing and reciting poetry has changed their lives in meaningful ways. That may not be true for all 325,000 of this year's contestants, but I suspect that there are tens of thousands of teenagers who have now begun a lifetime engagement with poetry.

PD: "Celebrities" of all kinds seem to have rallied to the POL banner—I'm thinking of Tyne Daly, Garrison Keillor, Natalie Merchant, Alfre Woodard, Chris Sarandon, to name a few. Should this be surprising?

DG: We took special pains to enlist celebrities in Poetry Out Loud. It not only gave the program a visibility and credibility, it also demonstrated that many people, including many famous people, love poetry. The media would lead us to believe that no one cares about poetry except poets. We showed that wasn't true.

PD: Do you memorize and recite poetry out loud yourself—apart, that is, from the readings you do of your own poems and books? When and to whom do you declaim when you declaim? What was the first poem you can remember memorizing? Working on anything at the moment?

DG: My mother, who was a Mexican-American woman born in terrible poverty, knew many poems by heart. She often recited them to me. I grew up with poetry as one of life's ordinary pleasures. I began memorizing poems that I liked at an early age just as I memorized song lyrics and piano pieces. Memory is, after all, the mother of the Muses.

I don't own a car in Washington, D.C. I walk miles each day. As odd as it sounds, I often like to recite poems to myself, especially on a beautiful morning when I'm walking by myself to the Metro. I say poems the way that other people talk on their cellphone. It adds a small pleasure to the moment.

I'm not sure what the first poem I memorized was—probably something by Poe or Kipling, two of my mother's favorites. I am always memorizing new things. (At my age you need to memorize new things to make up for the ones you are forgetting.) The last poem I memorized was probably "Trees" by Philip Larkin, though I found myself relearning Edith Sitwell's weird and wonderful "Scottish Rhapsody" which I had learned years ago.

My challenge is not to become too much dumber each day. There is no way I can keep up with these kids.