Flathead junior earns trip to national poetry competition

Poetry Out Loud state champion Anna Hedinger recalled the first time she stepped onto the stage to do a microphone check before giving her winning poetry recitations.

Under bright spotlights, she looked out at an auditorium that would soon be full. The thought was terrifying for the Flathead High School junior.

“I admit to having stage fright. Quite a lot of it. Not crippling stage fright, but I’ve never been comfortable and never wanted to give anything out loud, on purpose, even in front of my class,” Hedinger said smiling while sitting on a stool in her English classroom Wednesday.

Before winning state she had to advance from the school and regional level. To prepare, she rehearsed a few times in front of others, but primarily relied on intuition and a voice recording she made of herself to guide her cadence and inflection.

“I had to find out and struggle through what sounded good to me,” Hedinger said. Having competed before in speech and debate in original oratory, she knew how hard it would be to memorize the poems.

Although she had always been interested in poetry, Hedinger said it is the first time she’s competed in Poetry Out Loud.

“I never knew if I was good or not,” Hedinger said. “It wasn’t until people came up to me and told me about how it affected them that I realized that I was having an impact or getting noticed in some way.”

The cumulative scores of her recitation of three poems at the Montana Poetry Out Loud competition on March 3 in Helena earned her the first-place finish out of 20 competitors. The last time Flathead had a Poetry Out Loud state winner was 2007.

The state win comes with an all-expenses paid trip for Hedinger to compete nationally in Washington D.C. in April. She also was awarded $200, and $500 for her school to purchase poetry materials.

“I think she won because she has incredible poise and she just displayed a wonderful depth of understanding of her selections,” said Alison Kreiss, Flathead’s Poetry Out Loud coordinator and Hedinger’s English teacher.

“She’s very thoughtful about the poems she chose and she intentionally had her poems in conversation and contrast with each other. It was a very skillful arrangement of her selections.”

Competitors were given an online anthology to select poems from. The only requirements are that one poem must be 25 lines or fewer and another must be pre-20th century.

Hedinger’s poem selection included: “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation” by Natalie Diaz, “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy” by Margaret Atwood and “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The poems by Diaz and Atwood are empowering, Hedinger said, and have a straight-forward meaning she could more easily convey than the poem by Manley Hopkins.

“They’re both passionate poems and the final one was more solemn. ‘Spring in Fall’ is a wonderful poem about loss and grief.”

Although it was challenging to convey the third poem’s meaning through recitation, it showed the judges her versatility.

In selecting from among hundreds of poems, Hedinger started in alphabetical order and chose not to use a provided randomizer.

“I wanted to explore all of them. I took a long time flipping through pages and pages of poems and looking at titles and seeing if they interested me,” she said.

The first two selections by Diaz and Atwood she read caught her eye. As she continued to go through the anthology, she kept returning to them and ultimately chose them because of how they complemented each other and the messages.

She had held on to a list of other poems she wanted to recite and hasn’t decided if she wants to change the poems up for nationals.

“The ones that brought me really far were the initial two, so I think I kind of owe the poems to recite them at nationals.”

Competitors are judged on physical presence and dramatic appropriateness as well as accuracy and evidence of understanding. Competitors are advised to let the words do the work rather than accents, dramatic gestures or emoting, according to Poetry Out Loud.

Expression comes through in pitch, volume, rhythm, pace and proper pronunciation.

“Poetry is an emotional experience,” Kreiss said, a gift the speaker gives to an audience.

The national Poetry Out Loud competition will be held April 23-25 at The George Washington University. The winner will receive a $20,000 award. Semifinals and finals will be webcast live. For a schedule visit http://www.poetryoutloud.org/competition/national-finals.

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.