Recent Battle Ground Academy graduate Kendall Grimes started poetry recitation to find some connection to an unfamiliar school where she was one of a few Black students.
And she had a knack for it. She won the state Poetry Out Loud competition as a freshman. She’s won every year since, except the year that COVID cancelled.
Her teacher thinks she would have won then too.
“Every time she says that, I’m like, ‘Don’t say that!'” Grimes says, not wanting to jinx her chances.
The state titles mean entry to the national competition. She was runner-up last year — just missing the $20,000 prize. On Sunday afternoon in a virtual event, she learns if she’s the national champ out of nine finalists.
In middle school, Grimes got into spoken word poetry, which she wrote. Poetry Out Loud is about recitation.
“These kind of are my words. I do feel this. And I support everything I’m doing and saying right now, and I want to be able to help someone else experience that too,” she says.
The competitors perform three poems. At least one has to be pre-20th century. Throwbacks don’t bother Grimes, who embraces the challenge in getting the audience to feel the meaning despite unfamiliar words and imagery. This year, she’s using John Donne’s “The Sun Rising.”
“For some reason, I love the poems the most that are by like the old, dead white men,” she says. “I just love a good love poem.”
Her more contemporary works this year are “Object Lesson” by Claire Schwartz and “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde.
First place or last, Grimes says poetry performance has been a guiding force through high school, helping make her way to Yale University this fall (though she plans to major in chemistry en route to becoming a dentist).
She says she’s learned how to “cast a spell with words,” as she put it in her TEDx talk from April, achieving instant connection not just with the words she says but with the silence between them. “We can learn to look between the lines, between the words, to find ways to connect with one another.”
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