On Friday morning, Convent and Stuart Hall High School’s English department hosted the annual “Poetry Contestival,” named by English teacher Julia Arce. The event consisted of several students’ poems read aloud, followed by awards given by the teachers of each grade from both Convent and Stuart Hall divisions.
The students who read their poems at the start of the assembly were not required to win any awards before presenting their poems. The students included: freshmen Beatrice Yung and Giovanna Venegas, sophomore Grayson Hall and seniors Mateo DeLa’O, Josh Tin and Margaux Tellini (reading a poem by senior Caitlin Lane).
“I really love this tradition –- I was actually really excited for it this year,” sophomore Trinity Joa said. “This year I actually submitted my own and I was very excited to see and hear the poems that would win,”
The poems sent to the guest judge are selected from all of the poems entered by any of the high school students. The board of English teachers then review all the poems anonymously and select three top winners from each grade from each division.
“I think that it’s a great idea to judge the poems when they are anonymous,” freshman Anika Agarwal said. “It helps keep judging fair, and really gives poems their time to shine without any external factors,”
In addition, each year, the teachers invite a guest poet to whom they submit the top winners from each grade of both Convent and Stuart Hall. The invitee then looks through the poems anonymously and decides on all-school winners. This year’s “guest” is middle-school English teacher Daniel Fishman.
Poems submitted were of all kinds of topics: some were prompted by teachers’ assignments in English classes, while others were written in students’ free time. For example, some sophomore poems were based on events in one of the class readings, The Crucible, according to Joa.
“I really like the poetry prompts that we’re given,” Joa said. “Poetry was one of my favorite units from last year, but now that I’m a sophomore we haven’t had that much time to incorporate poetry into our curriculum.”
