Poetry

Hey there, MTKitty fans (or random passerbyers on the internet. That’s cool.)! This is one of those I-need-to-do-my-homework-but-don’t-wanna-so-I’m-blogging-things. I need to write a paper on the training of astronauts, then do my regular homework. It’s getting late. I went to the library after school, then took a really long nap. Now that I think about it, I should have gotten astronaut books from the library.

So, recently, I entered a poetry competition, but here’s the catch: It was a competition for FOREIGN LANGUAGE poetry. It was really cool, too. Apparently, there are people out there that speak Modern AND Ancient Greek well enough to recite poetry. There was also an ASL chapter, which I thought was interesting.

I had to memorize two poems in Spanish to get in. The first was for the schoolwide competition (which I won), and the second was for the actual, official competition. The first was an anonymous love poem, and the second was “Apegado A Mí by Gabriela Mistral.” I’ll upload them if I get the chance.

The competition was this really long, boring event that somehow took five hours, even though everyone recited at the same time in hour-long groups. My group had the maximum of fifteen kids. It was scary how good some of them were, but others went overboard.

The funny thing is, no one knew how the competition would turn out. Seven students came from my school (including myself), and we were all told different things by our teachers. Mine told me the judges didn’t want weird gestures or theatrical stuff– just plain old recitals. Some others were told minor movements were okay, and others were told to shout and be wild. Same for other schools. The degrees of acting varied a lot.

In the end, I was bored senseless and didn’t win anything.

The weird thing, though, is that out of the seven students from my school, four were for Italian, and three were for Spanish (including me). All four Italians won either first, second, or third, but none of the Spanish kids won anything. Coincidence? I think the system is rigged! Maybe our school should start offering more interesting languages, so we can win by default. Only one kid signed up for Polish, and, naturally, won.

I started memorizing my first poem in December. The competition was in late April. I had to give up one lunch a week (not the food, just the period) to go rehearse with my Spanish teacher. I was so sick of reciting by then, and maybe that’s why I didn’t win.

Here’s the one way this competition may have benefited me in any way: I can now seduce someone with a Spanish love poem!

Whoot! Ciao!

Poem 1

Poem 2

Sorry about the pictures. I just took shots of the poems with my webcam.