Joy Carino, a junior at Mississippi School for Math and Science, has won the statewide Poetry Out Loud competition and will continue to the national competition in Washington, D.C., next month.
This will be the second year in a row in which the Starkville teen represents Mississippi in the national poetry recitation competition, which takes place April 28-29.
Poetry Out Loud is a competition in which students choose a handful of poems from a list of about 600 and recite those poems from memory, following the recitation with a presentation explaining the poems’ meaning. Carino first participated in the schoolwide competition at MSMS, then in a regional district competition and finally against eight other district finalists at the state level.
The poems Carino chose are “In School-days” by John Greenleaf Whittier, “It Isn’t Me” by James Lasdun and “To David About His Education” by Howard Nemerov. She prepared for her performance with help from MSMS English and journalism teacher Jack Carter. Carino picked the poems and practiced them for Carter, who gave suggestions.
“Joy’s long suit is that she can take a difficult poem and make it understandable,” Carter said. “One of the reasons she’s doing so well in competition is the poems she has chosen are complicated.”
Carino said she was proud to be moving on to the national competition, particularly because she won $500 for MSMS, which Carino said has been extremely supportive of her.
‘Poetry can be fun’
Carino first became interested in poetry as a freshman at Starkville High School. The students in her class were all required to pick one poem and recite it for the class. That was when Carino began to think of poetry as “cool.”
“I feel like poetry (is) really important to the culture,” Carino said. “Because there are things that you can say in speeches … but there’s somewhat more that you can say with music and poetry, and some of those things need to be said sometimes. It’s cool how that works out sometimes. Even if it’s shorter than a speech, it still gets the point across.
“And then poetry can also just be for fun,” she added.
Fun seems to be the allure of the competition in Washington, D.C., for Carino, who says the event does not really feel like a competition. Instead, she’s merely having fun with the other poetry-lovers she meets. She is looking forward to seeing friends she made last year again.
“My favorite part of D.C. was just meeting people from all over the country who love poetry as much as you do and listen to them do their own poetry,” she said. “It’s just meeting other people and experiencing it together.”
Carino also said she wanted to improve over her performance in 2014.
“I feel like this year I have a better handle on how to present,” she said. “I feel more comfortable with it this year than I did last year.”
Carino added that performing for Poetry Out Loud is different than other types of presentations and public speaking.
“I feel like this is not as nerve-racking as other things, like debate or acting in a play or making a speech, because it’s just a poem and you can’t mess it up too much,” Carino said. “You can have fun with it. You have freedom to do anything with it as long as it sort of makes sense. And if it doesn’t make sense to others, it’s O.K. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a poem. Poems are important and cool like that.”
Carter agreed that poetry recitation competitions are different than debates or speeches.
“(The students) are not allowed to dramatize (the poem]),” he said. “It’s actually based upon voice and enunciation and expression and understanding of the words of the poem itself … it actually counts off if you get too theatrical with it. So it makes for a pretty remarkable thing to actually listen to.”
“You say it and you say it appropriately,” Carino said. “You speed up sometimes or you slow down. You sound happy or you sound sad or pensive or thoughtful or anything. There’s a lot of ways you can go with one poem.”
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