I'm posting a few days late, (a lot of days late) but it does serve me one advantage: I have seen the first round of Poetry Out Loud in action. Reciting poetry for your peers isn't exactly easy. Besides all the memorizing, being put on the spot in front of everyone is especially difficult when you don't have experience with it. True characters come out. You have your lightning readers- the ones who vomit their words in a last ditch effort to be done with it once and for all. You have your pondering poets, who take a few breaks in between to give deep thought to what they are doing, and probably to recall a few lines ( I am one of these) and then you have your serious poets. The ones who honor the true art of the thing by reciting it the way the poet wrote it, by being able to enunciate the feelings felt by the poet at the time of the poem's creation. But it's nerve-wracking. Not easy. Not easy at all.
