Poetry Out Loud 2022

Hi everybody! Today’s blog is going to be entirely about my first poetry out loud experience. I haven’t presented either of my poems yet, I’ll be doing them next block but until that happens, I can still tell you about the process of preparing for the competition. So, I had about a month to memorize them, but I was so focused on my writing that sometimes I forgot about them. I hate having a long amount of time to accomplish things because I’ll usually do them right away and turn them in early, but this isn’t something I could turn in, so I just ended up forgetting about it for about 2 weeks. After those 2 weeks we got reminded about poetry out loud and I started back studying my poems, but it may have been a little too late. I learned the poems but I’m not at all proud of the way that I performed them I think I got so much into the performance that I wasn’t focusing on my lines, but that’s okay. I did it for the experience and because it was mandatory. There’s always next year and then I’ll know what to expect. The Poetry Out loud website has great poems but some of them are very old so they can require a lot of analysis to understand. I believe you must be able to understand a poem before you can recite it. It took me a very long time to understand my poems, because poems are a very subjective form of writing and can be perceived in so many ways. I performed “No I wasn’t meant to love and be loved”, by Mirza Asdullah Khan Ghalib, and I also performed “If time is queer/and memory is trans/and my hands hurt in the cold/then”, by Raquel Salas Rivera. They are both very well written poems with strong themes and lessons, but they are also packed with emotion like sewer rats in New York. I am not an emotional person so getting into the feeling and trying to express it during my performance was kind of difficult. I could feel the emotion through the poem, but I was trying to decide on the best way to portray it. I ended up best expressing the emotion by putting myself into the poem and acting as if I was the speaker in the poem. However, I am more than glad that this is over, and I would do it agree but I would do it so much differently. 

So that’s all for this week’s blog! Thanks for reading. 

Author: Aleria Holmes

Aleria Holmes I'm a Senior Literary Student at MSA with a passion for writing much stronger than a hobby. After high school I plan to attend Columbia University to major in Creative Writing (screenwriting specifically) and minor in Psychology. I love what I do and I hope to make a career out of it someday. View all posts by Aleria Holmes