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Light Rain Mepham senior crowned NY’s poetry king
Mepham High School senior Steven Tsai was recently crowned New York state champion in the Poetry Out Loud competition, a national contest that encourages high school students to learn about great poetry through memorization, performance and competition.
The 18-year-old Bellmore resident beat out thousands of other competitors from across the state, and will now participate in the national finals in Washington, D.C. at the end of April.
"I'm both nervous and excited,” said Tsai. “I'm representing New York state now. It's an honor."
The competition, presented in partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, requires high school students to recite poetry in front of a panel of judges, who evaluate them based on their eloquence and recitation.
Tsai had had previous success in the competition. He finished third in the school-wide competition as a freshman, and as a sophomore he won the school-wide competition but did not place in the regionals.
This year’s competition began last October at Mepham High School, when Tsai won a classroom competition to advance to the school-wide competition. Each competitor was given an anthology of poetry to choose from, and Tsai chose “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne.
After claiming first place in that competition, Tsai moved on to the regional competition at the Herricks Community Center in New Hyde Park a month later. For that competition, he needed to learn a second poem, and he chose “La Figlia Che Piange” by T.S. Eliot.
About 30 kids from high schools across Long Island participated in the tournament, and Tsai finished in first place, advancing to the state championships in Albany.
Tsai was among 15 competitors in the state competition. He recited the same two poems, and was selected by the judges to compete among the top five. For this stage of the competition, he had to recite a new poem. "After I moved on, based on the way they were scoring it, and based on the way they were interpreting my recitations, I thought maybe I had a chance,” he said.
