Poetry Out Loud Assembly in the Upper School

On Tuesday, January 5, Ben Millspaugh won Waynflete’s 2016 Poetry Out Loud competition. Maya Schair-Rigoletti was the runner-up. Ben will represent Waynflete at the regional finals on February 10 at City Hall Theater in Biddeford.

For those of you unfamiliar with POL, it is a nation-wide competition that celebrates poetry in its original form: recitation. Students across the country read and analyze poems from a POL anthology, and then select poems to memorize and recite. They then compete in classroom and school-wide events to determine a school representative. All Waynflete 9th graders compete at the class level. The participants in the US assembly were all classroom champs. Regional and state finals lead to a national competition.

In this year’s school-wide Poetry Out Loud assembly, seven 9th grade students completed two rounds of recitations before a panel of three outside judges. This year’s judges included actor and director Michael Howard and two Maine poets, Linda Aldrich and Gary Lawless.

The seven participating finalists and their poems are:

Tzevi Aho

•             “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy
•             “Concord Hymn” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Bryce Brittingham

•  “The Maldive Shark” by Herman Melville
•   “There are Birds Here” by Jamaal May

Maya Delong

• “Sleeping Sister of A Farther Sky” by Karen Volkman
•  “Carmel Highlands” by Janet Loxley Lewis

Charlotte Joseph

• ‘The Echo” by Christina Rosetti
•  “Mingus at the Showplace” by William Matthews

Ben Millspaugh.

•  “Gravelly Run” by A. R. Ammons
•   “Youth” by James Wright

Maya Schair-Rigoletti

• “Not Guilty” by David Rivard
• “Monstance Man” by Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Max Soley

• “The Kiss” by Robert Graves
•  “The Craftsman” by Marcus B. Christian

Congratulations to Ben and Maya and all of these students for their hard work and wonderful recitations.