Kobe Bekoe, 1st place winner of the English Division, reciting "I Lost My Talk" by Rita Joe. Photo by Angelina Lopresti.
On Friday, December 5th, students at St. Joe's competed in the annual school-wide Poetry in Voice competition. Each student who qualified had to memorize and recite a poem in their English class, and they were the top three reciters in their respective classes. For the school division, they had to memorize and recite a second poem in front of a panel of 6 judges—which included local poet Vanessa Shields.
The competition was held in the cafetorium during periods 1 and 2, and classes were welcome to come and watch. There were three different streams students could compete in—English, French and bilingual. The best student from each stream moves onto the online semi-finals. The top three from each stream received Chapters gift card as a prize.
From the semi-finals, the top 24 students from across Canada travel to Montréal for the National Finals. A champion is announced in each stream and the top 9 reciters win 25,000 dollars in prizes for themselves and their school libraries. Also, the top three poems from each stream will compete as a team. These three people will go up individually, and their scores will be combined. The team will be competing against other teams from other schools. The top three teams will win cash prizes.
In every competition the students are scored on accuracy, physical appearance, evidence of understanding, interpretation, overall presentation and voice and articulation, and the maximum amount of points you can receive is 41.
Due to time constraints, the judges had to cut the second round short and only have the top 8 students from the first round recite their second poem. This was expected due to the high number of students. The winners of the English stream was Kobe Bekoe, with Jennifer Costea placing second, and Grade 9 student Keagan Yap placing third! The winner of the French stream was Larissa Dushime, and the winner of the bilingual stream was Taylor McQueen. All of these students are advancing to the online semi-finals, with their videos due on March 8th. The winners will be announced on March 21.
Congratulations to all who participated, and good luck to those who advanced to the next level of competition!