Michigan Humanities is thrilled to celebrate 20 years of Poetry Out Loud (POL) in our state and across the nation. In recognition of this milestone, we’ve invited Michigan POL alumni to share their stories and insight into their experience with the program.
Our next featured POL alumna is Kelly Stec, the school champion for Roosevelt High School – Wyandotte from 2009–11. Kelly was active in POL for three years, and currently lives in Wyandotte.
Where are you now in your professional and/or educational career?
I have spent most of my career in the government and nonprofit sectors with a focus on work around public health, sexual and gender-based violence prevention, and early education, but my favorite job I currently do is serving Wyandotte as a council member!
What do you remember most vividly about your Poetry Out Loud experience?
I think once a poem makes a home in your heart, there’s a visceral piece of it that always lives with you. For me, the two I come back to most often are “Carmel Point” and “The Hospital Window.” There’s something about the impermanence of everything that really gets to me.
I’ll also never forget the feeling of sitting at State Finals and getting to meet people from other high schools, and hear what made homes in their hearts. Embarrassingly, the only poetry performance I actually remember was my very first audition for the school competition, where I flubbed a line and said “Can I start over? I’m going to start over.” I’m grateful that Rob Keast and Warren Baker, the teachers running the program, even let me go on to the school competition that year.
How does Poetry Out Loud continue to impact your life or professional/educational growth?
I don’t think I’d be the person I am without POL! Poetry is so great for building our empathy muscles—such short windows packed with insight into other worlds, and everyone reads their own lives and perspectives into them. I think it’s a beautiful testament to diversity of thought and the human experience. Keeping the sense of empathy and curiosity Poetry Out Loud helped foster in me has been so key to working in political spaces and reminding people that we can both celebrate our differences and find a lot of commonality with our fellow human beings.
What advice would you share with a student or teacher considering Poetry Out Loud?
Go for it!!! For teachers, this will create an opportunity to connect with students and the things they care about, worry about, dream about for their futures. For students, we live in a world that makes it hard, at times, to see past our own lives and worries. Poetry can be such an amazing tool to counter that and help you build real connections with other people, and there’s just no better way to experience it than learning new poems for yourself and hearing your fellow students perform theirs.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or Michigan Humanities.