Rooker Wins State Poetry CompetitionZack Rooker won the state Poetry Out Loud competition Saturday to advance to national competition in Washington, D.C., in April.
Rooker, the son of Dick and Nancy Rooker, is a junior at Warsaw Community High School.
Thursday afternoon, Zack said Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry recitation contest where students across the country choose poems from the POL website to present and interpret.
To advance to state competition, Rooker competed at the school level. After placing first, he competed at the state level Saturday at the Indianapolis-Marion Central Library.
He was just one of 13 contestants at the state competition. In each of the three different rounds, Rooker recited a different poem.
In round one, he presented Edgar Allen Poe's "A Dream Within A Dream". For round two, he recited "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold.
After the first two rounds, the top five, including Rooker, were called back for the third round. He recited "A Psalm of Life" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
With his recitations, Rooker was chosen as Indiana's 2011 Poetry Out Loud state winner. A student can only place first at the state level once.
For winning, he received a trophy, $200 in cash, $500 for Warsaw Community High School to buy poetry books, and an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington for his chaperone and himself.
National finals are April 27-29 at the Lincoln Theatre. Fifty-three students will compete for the national championship.
An opening banquet will be held the first day.
The second day, semi-final rounds will occur all day, with competitors split into three groups. The top three students in each group move on to the final round on the third day.
During the final round, the chosen nine will compete, Rooker said. First place wins $20,000; second place gets $10,000; and third receives $5,000. Everyone in the top nine is guaranteed a $1,000 prize.
The National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation, along with state agencies, sponsor the annual competition.
Rooker said he will recite the same poems at nationals that he presented at the state level.
"I kind of chose them as a collective three," he said. "All of them deal with dreams and looking out at the world in a certain way. Where they split is their viewpoint."
Poe's poem deals with Poe's sorrow he felt his whole life. The pain comes through, said Rooker, and the poem says life is no more real than a dream.
In Arnold's, the poet sees a world that is beautiful and full of joy, but then the poet hears the true undertone of pain and suffering that has been the case through the centuries, Rooker said.
Finally, he said, Longfellow's "Psalms" gives the viewpoint that life is real and earnest and it rejects Poe's notions of life. The poem says people need to live life and be good examples to those who follow in their footsteps.
For the competition, Rooker said, contestants can't be in costume and can't dramatically act it out. He said he always wears a suit, though there is no dress code but competitors are expected to dress nice.
For the state level, he worked with Danielle Robertson to bring out inflection and minor gestures, as well as trying to understand what the poets were trying to say in each poem.
"She's had a background in film and in dramatic interpretations like this," Rooker said of Robertson. "She was able to guide me in looking at the poet's intensity at certain points and apply that to presenting the poem."
Rooker said he still works on the poems at least two hours every week to prepare for nationals.
"It's a very intense competition at the national level, so I'll be working very hard to try and win," Rooker said.
For more information about Poetry Out Loud, visit its website at http://www.poetryoutloud.org/
