Yohanna Endashaw, a rising junior at Niles West High School from Morton Grove, sees poetry as a way to “talk about the things you’re facing — the stories you need to get out.”
That love of reading and reciting poetry led to her winning top honors as the Illinois Poetry Out Loud champion this spring
Poetry Out Loud is a poetry recitation contest for high schoolers organized by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. The competition begins at the school level and has regional and state levels before culminating at the national finals, which took place last month.
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Endashaw, an aspiring neuroscientist, prepared for the competition between volleyball and basketball practices, and homeroom mentorship, and literacy center tutoring, and debate and playing viola in the school orchestra. She spoke to Pioneer Press with a canvas tote bag with “POETRY” printed on it crumpled at her feet as she discussed the three works she recited in Springfield.
The poems are Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song,” Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” and Tiana Clark’s “My therapist wants to know about my relationship to work.”
All three pieces are meaningful to Endashaw in different ways, she said. She finds humor in Atwood’s narration of a bored siren, forever perched on a rock in the epic poem “The Odyssey.”
“One of the parts of ‘Siren Song’ goes, ‘the song that causes men to leap overboard in squadrons, even though they see the beached skulls,'” Endashaw said. “I find it funny because it’s just sort of making fun of men for being stupid.”
“My Therapist Wants to Know About My Relationship to Work” is the poem she practiced the most in the lead-up to the national competition. Its length makes consistent delivery a challenge, she said.
“Because it’s long, I sort of do it differently every time,” she said. “There’s so many different varying emotions in that poem.”
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Then there’s Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” which is imprinted on the base of the Statue of Liberty and carries a personal significance for Endashaw.
“I appreciate the opportunity to be able to tell someone’s story on the stage, especially when I relate to that story,” she said. “It was a story my parents could relate to. My mom won the green card lottery and she came here with my dad from Ethiopia in 1999.”
She used “The New Colossus” to explain how a successful recitation is akin to “being a vessel for the poem… Especially at the end, where you’re being very welcoming, like a beacon of hope for people who are arriving in America as immigrants.”
She sees reading, reciting and writing poetry as a way for people to think and make art about “the things we face, the struggles that we come to in life [that] can be so overwhelming to the point where it seems unlivable, or impossible to handle.”
Poetry has been part of Endashaw’s life since she was in Ms. Jennifer Drodz-Nolan’s 4th grade class at Park View Elementary in Morton Grove.
Drodz-Nolan, who taught Endashaw in both 4th and 5th grade, remembered her deliveries of poems like Marilyn Singer’s reversible poem “The Doubtful Duckling” alongside a friend.
“[Endashaw] was already very fascinated by the ability of a poet to use language in such a creative way,” Drodz-Nolan said. “As a young child, she was already very good at interpreting language and manipulating it to get her point across.”
Drodz-Nolan said she hasn’t seen Endashaw in some time, but remembered that “even early on, she had a writers’ voice. And she has obviously just developed it more and more as time has gone on.”
The pandemic offered an opportunity for Endashaw to further develop that voice as she began writing her own poetry, with an emphasis on free verse composition.
When she’s preparing for a recitation, the poems take about a week to memorize, she estimated. But “learning how to perform that poem with dramatic appropriateness and physical presence” takes longer.
At the state competition, English teacher and coach Sally Graham said Endashaw had practiced in the hallway until the last moment before her turn onstage.
“When she was called as the winner of the State of Illinois, we could not stop smiling,” Graham said in an email to Pioneer Press.
Endashaw said an impactful recitation is not quite monologuing and not quite acting.
“It’s more about internalizing the poem and being a vessel for the poem,” she said.
Well-recited poetry, she said, is a vehicle for connection: “an amazing venue to hear other people’s stories and learn about other people’s situations.”
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Though she didn’t take home the top prize at the national competition, Endashaw said she plans to compete again next year and would use her experience this year to strengthen her delivery and impact in future recitations.
“I want to find poems that connect to me more personally so I feel like I’m speaking for myself when I [recite] those poems in the future,” she said.
For the moment, she isn’t working on any new poems to recite. Instead, she’s writing her own.