CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Landon Stanley, a freshman at Marshalltown High School, is the Poetry Out Loud state champion. In the photo, Stanley performs at the Marshalltown Performing Arts Center in the MHS Poetry Out Loud competition last fall.

For the second year in a row, a Marshalltown High School (MHS) student has won the Poetry Out Loud state finals, with freshman Landon Stanley being announced the winner by the Iowa Arts Council on Tuesday for his recitations of “Broken Promises” by David Kirby, “A Graveyard” by Marianne Moore and “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad.”

Stanley was the top scoring out of the 18 students who moved on from the state semifinals last fall, which means he will be headed to the national semifinals where he will be competing against students from all 50 states and surrounding U.S. territories. Stanley admits the idea is still a bit strange to him.

“(Winning) feels really weird actually because I wasn’t expecting it, especially since I’m a freshman,” Stanley said. “It’s definitely something people usually work at for a few years.”

In contrast to the MHS contest last fall — where the competing students performed at the Marshalltown Performing Arts Center in person — the state competition was conducted virtually. Stanley recorded his poem recitations, submitted the videos for review and hoped for the best.

“It was very nerve wracking because performing to an audience and performing to a camera are two completely different things. I also wasn’t aware of how many people were going to be entering the competition. I wasn’t aware of how many entries there were, so that was another oddity,” he said.

Performing at state was the culmination of a long preparation process that started before the individual school competitions. Choosing the poems to recite and memorizing them was just the beginning, as learning how to perform them was even more challenging.

Stanley and his Extended Learning Program (XLP) teacher, Susan Fritzell, along with his Poetry Out Loud coach, Gary Zmolek, started working on different ways to focus on the wording and the structure of the poems.

“We started off by doing dry reads of the poem, kind of getting a sense of the words, the language and the vocabulary,” Stanley said. “Then, we really narrowed in on different things such as punctuation and other things like the adjectives and the onamonapia and we used a lot of that to kind of guide where we would go with our interpretations of it, but a lot of it was personal.”

Now, with the national semifinals on the horizon, Stanley has more preparation ahead. Even though the competition will remain virtual, the difficulty level will be increasing. Recitations can only be recorded once, whereas in the state competition, they could be recorded multiple times before submitting.

“I’m really just going back through at home and just reciting the poems and making sure I have every single word nailed down and I’m really preparing for that one take,” Stanley said.

Stanley has been interested in public speaking for a long time, and if it wasn’t for his middle school XLP teacher, Ann Jackson, who noted his knack for public speaking while he was in her class, he may not have chosen to compete in Poetry Out Loud.

“Poetry Out Loud wasn’t necessarily a thing that interested me because I wasn’t a big poetry person,” he said. “When I was in eighth grade, she had suggested that I’d probably do good at it so I was like, ‘Why not give it a shot?'”

The decision has paid off, and Stanley is excited to compete and watch the performances of the students he’s up against from around the country. All national semifinal submissions will be compiled into one video to be streamed on May 1, and the top nine competitors from the semifinals will be chosen as national finalists.

——

Contact Susanna Meyer at 641-753-6611 or

smeyer@timesrepublican.com.