Juneau high schooler to compete in national poetry recitation competition
- Ellie Ruel
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Cassie Lumba headed to Poetry Out Loud semifinals at end of the month
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé senior Cassie Lumba will head to Washington, D.C., in a few weeks to compete against about 50 other finalists from the other states and territories in the national Poetry Out Loud competition after winning the regional semifinals in March in Juneau. National finals and semifinals are scheduled April 27-29.
“I think it's an amazing way to end my senior year here because it just feels big and the last of that,” Lumba said. “I really get to do something fun and then once I'm back, things wrap up really quick.”
Lumba’s love of poetry began in the fifth grade, after seeing books in the library and being recommended the prose poetry and free verse book “Forget Me Not” by Ellie Terry.
“I think that's where it really started,” she said. “At the time, I didn't know that poetry could be in that novel format, and I didn't know that poetry didn't have to be so nuclear, and instead it could be truly a form of expression.”
Lumba said she began writing poetry in middle school as a way to express and share her thoughts.
“I loved having a diary and such, and so poetry was just another way for me to sort out my emotions and to put it into something that is an art form in a way,” Lumba said.
She started doing Poetry Out Loud as a freshman at the now-defunct Thunder Mountain High School. The program was revived by the English department after the consolidation of high schools two years ago. Students memorize and recite both traditional and contemporary poems selected from an anthology, picking three pieces for competitions.
“My first two years, it was purely just for fun and to try something new,” Lumba said. “I wasn't really great at public speaking or anything like that so it was a very new thing for me, but by the time I got to my junior year, it seemed more like something I truly enjoyed and that I really wanted to do. It wasn't just for fun, but instead to share a piece of myself.”
The theme for this year’s national contest is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States. While this limited the poem anthology, narrowing the selections from about 1,200 works to just 300 in the public domain, Lumba noted competitors had more flexibility in genres. For nationals, she chose to recite two poems she had recited at regionals: “O Me! O Life!” by Walt Whitman, Lumba’s favorite poem, and “Longings” from Nelly Rathbone Bright.
Whitman’s initial line starts with “O life of the questions of these recurring.”
“In my mind, it was framed around a person who was lost and a person who didn't understand the meaning of going on when things were so tough,” she said. “I've gone through so many things in my life where I've experienced the same thing, I've experienced the same thoughts where things just seem so monotonous and tedious, and I really question the point of continuing in this sort of repetition, especially when there's so many things going on around us that make everything seem more daunting, whether it's politics or even just going through things at school.”
The new poem Lumba selected for nationals is “Poetry” by Marianne Moore.
“That one just discusses the meaning of poetry and why we should enjoy it,” she said. “I think I wanted to get in tune with the audience and instead of discussing certain topics going on in America, I really wanted to focus on the emotions of it.”
While she plans to pursue a biology degree at the University of Alaska Anchorage after graduating, Lumba said she wanted to continue exploring self- expression through writing.
“I'm really interested in the dental field, but despite that I still want to take creative writing classes and such because, even though I am really focused on a healthcare-oriented field or career, I'm still really interested in honing and developing my writing skills,” she said. “I don't want to move past this sense of me connecting with myself through writing.”
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
