Bringing Words to Life: Reflecting on "Read Across Punahou" and Hawaii's Poetry Out Loud Contest

Have celebrated two literary successes in the past four days.  

On Friday, March 1, 2013, to commemorate Dr. Seuss' birthday, Punahou celebrated "Read Across America" day, featuring faculty, staff, and student readers all day in Cooke Library.  Was delighted to find out that 5 out of the 8 featured student readers were alumni of my Speech: Art of the Spoken Word class, sharing their original work with the larger community.  Unfortunately, due to teaching and other schedule conflicts, I could only attend 2 of the presentations, but what delightful presentations they were!  My student Kayla '13 presented, from heart, a 10 minute Original Oratory piece about the perils of reality TV, a script she'd first started in Art of the Spoken Word.  Her presentation was superb: dynamic, humorous, and audience-engaging, delivered clearly and expressively, and it was wonderful to see how much the piece had evolved since last December.  Yesterday, Kayla emailed me to thank me for assisting her with her Oratory.  Read Across America had been a dry-run for a speech tournament the following day, and at said tournament, she earned first place in the Original Oratory category, thus triple-qualifying for the Hawai`i State Speech and Debate Tournament.

The second success came yesterday, when Emma '16, was named State Champion at the Hawai`i Poetry Out Loud State Competition, held at Tenney Theatre, St. Andrew's Cathedral.  She recited John Berryman's "Dream Song 14", ee cummings' "i carry your heart with me (i carry it in]", and Emily Dickinson's "Much Madness Is Divinest Sense." Emma won $200 and an all-expense paid trip to Washington, D.C., where the National Competition will take place on April 28-30, 2013. In addition, Punahou was awarded $500 for the purchase of poetry books.  The competition was quite stiff, comprising mostly juniors and seniors, several veteran competitors, as well as ones who'd been clearly coached, and many students chose to tackle longer, more sophisticated poems. Emma's performance stood out, however, for several reasons, namely her ability to intelligently think her way through the sequence of thoughts in each poem, and her unaffected, honest performance.


While obviously the external victories are sweet, both of these events reminded me of the larger value of literature and the arts in education, namely

• Arts can serve as a medium for self-expression, allowing one to share one's thoughts with a broader audience.  It can act as an impetus for change, helping move, inspire, and persuade listeners.
• In both these cases, a real purpose and a real audience helped spur genuine engagement and motivation. 
• Literature helps us develop empathy and compassion, helping us understand our world and others, by enabling us to view things via others' perspectives and experiencing viewpoints which may be vastly different from ours.  I'd be curious whether any neuroscience research has been done on the performing of literature, and whether bringing words to life strengthens that salutory aspect of learning.  Actors and poetry reciters, in order to be effective, must be able to imagine themselves fully as someone else, and believably embody that person, channeling his/her world view, foibles, and overall personality.  If empathy and compassion arise by being able to understand others, might voicing and/or acting out literature, both literally and figuratively, transform us and expand our capacity for feeling?  Obviously, if performers are skilled, they also provide opportunities for their audience members to share that "virtual" experience and fully engage in the world of the story, play, or poem.