Ivy Hatter may not be preparing herself for a career as a poet, but she certainly has a grip on why the medium is important for young people such as herself.
“Most young people don’t read poetry,” Hatter said. “This is a way to get them exposed to something they may not know they could love so much. It really exposes a lot of students to something that could mean a lot to them.”
The 17-year-old Pioneer Valley High School student is a recent participant and winner in the annual Poetry Out Loud competition. Poetry Out Loud is a national event with schoolwide, regional, and state qualifiers. The events have gained traction with youth and now boast more than 3.6 million student participants. Winners at the state level who advance to nationals get $200 and a paid trip to Washington, D.C.
In addition to the personal awards, Poetry Out Loud winners can earn cash awards from their schools, which go to the purchase of poetry books. It’s also a way to get young students involved in poetry and public speaking.
Hatter won her school and regional Santa Barbara County competition reciting W.D. Snodgrass’ “A Locked House.” Orcutt Academy High School student Allanah Dizayee won honorable mention at the regional event. Hatter went on to compete in Sacremento, where Lily Bogas of Marin County took first prize, and Penny DellaPelle of SLO County won runner-up.
But all the awards and accolades start with memorizing a poem to read and taking the step to enter, as Hatter explained.
“I heard about Poetry Out Loud through my school,” she said. “I competed [in 2018] and went to county but didn’t win. This year I decided I wanted to try it again.”
For her 2019 try, Hatter selected the poem by W.D. Snodgrass, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who died in 2009. Snodgrass attended the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1946 and studied under legendary American poet Robert Lowell. Snodgrass went through a series of four marriages, three of them ending in divorce, which led to the inspiration behind “A Locked House.” The first stanza paints a troublesome picture of what may come:
As we drove back, crossing the hill,
The house still
Hidden in the trees, I always thought—
A fool’s fear—that it might have caught
Fire, someone could have broken in.
As if things must have been
Too good here. Still, we always found
It locked tight, safe and sound.
The locked house in Snodgrass’ poem is a metaphor for a failed relationship. For a 17-year-old such as Hatter, the specifics of the subject matter may not have been immediately relatable, but she understood the devastation behind the poet’s words.
“I spent time looking at a lot of poems,” Hatter said. “‘A Locked House’ was more modern, which I liked. It was about a marriage that didn’t work. I really loved the language of it … . I’ve never dealt with divorce or anything, but something just drew me to it.”
A seasoned school theater performer, Hatter said she wasn’t nervous about the reading at all. She said she enjoys poetry, but her real passion is theater. She is involved in Pioneer Valley’s drama program, which is currently working on a production of Guys and Dolls.
While the talented young performer is eyeing a career in environmental science, she said she still hopes to continue with theater in the long run.
“It’s a way to express myself more freely than you can in the sciences and maths,” Hatter said. “You put on a whole different persona. It’s a way to escape what you’re dealing with now and become something else.”
The next stop for Hatter and runner-up Dizayee is on April 9 at Santa Maria’s Betteravia Government Center, where they will accept the National Poetry Month Resolution put forth by the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors.
As she plans for future schooling and preps for a possible career tackling climate change and more, Hatter said she will keep an interest in theater and the arts. She also encouraged other young people to try their hand at getting onstage, no matter how daunting it may seem.
“Even if you don’t think you’d be into it, always try,” Hatter said. “You never really know what might happen.”
Arts and Lifestyle Writer Rebecca Rose is very loud. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 28 – Apr 4, 2019.
