The method of learning by doing is certainly true of poetry. After all, one can learn a lot about becoming a great poet by immersing oneself in the great poetic works and performing them for an audience.

That is the basic premise of Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest founded by California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia which teaches poetry to high schoolers through memorization and recitation. The competitions begin at the local level, then move on to the county competitions, the state competitions and finally the National Finals in Washington, D.C.

Benicia High School and Liberty High School have participated for a number of years and had some success, including in 2012 when Austin Carr made it to the state finals. This is the first year students will be advised by Benicia High English teacher Michele Lesko, who has a lot of experience in the field. She is the founding editor of IthacaLit.com, a quarterly online journal that publishes poetry and visual art. Additionally, Lesko herself is a professional writer whose poems and short stories have appeared in journals, and one of them won a Reader’s Choice Award from Pedestal Magazine. She also has taught creative writing and incorporates poetry as part of her English curriculum.

Lesko believes that having a forum for students to perform poetry will make them better poets.

“I really believe in project-based learning,” she said. “This sort of thing makes it real world rather than ‘Oh, I have an assignment, I give it back to you, I have a grade and then it’s gone and doesn’t seem to mean anything.’ This gives meaning to what students are working on in school.”

Although students will not be performing original poems for the competition, Lesko still believes they can learn a lot just by declaiming them.

“One of the Common Core standards is for kids to learn public speaking,” she said. “Memorizing poetry is proven to be one of the best ways to learn about writing poetry because you learn cadence and rhythm and metric order through memorizing poetry. It make it more authentic if they compete or recite in front of people. It makes it an authentic practice rather than giving an assignment to just memorize a poem.”

All the poems are accessible at PoetryOutLoud.org. Students have the opportunity to perform works by modern poets as well as literary greats like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe and even some of William Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Meetings at Benicia High have been held in Lesko’s room, where students are given time to learn how to navigate the website and flesh out the poems they plan on memorizing. Dan Ryken of Capitol Toastmasters has come in to provide coaching, and assistance has also been provided by Benicia Poet Laureate Johanna Ely. Lesko said she has already seen some students exude promise.

“We have a couple solid contenders,” she said. “We’ll probably bring more than enough kids to the competition locally, but we know that we can only bring two to the county level. We’re pretty sure we’ll have somebody from here going to the county level.”

The national prize for the competition is $20,000. At the local level, Lesko says the competition is a good gateway to the Joel Fallon Scholarship, named after Benicia’s first poet laureate and granted to poetically inclined students from BHS and Liberty upon graduation.

The Benicia Poetry Out Loud competition will be held from 2 to 4 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 28 in the Dona Benicia Room of the Benicia Public Library, located at 150 East L St. For more information, contact Ryken at dbr94510@gmail.com. For more information on the overall competition, visit PoetryOutLoud.org.

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