This year’s Poetry Out Loud controversy
Photo of Emily Fordham at Poetry Out Loud (courtesy of California Arts Council)
By Isa Dajalos, Staff Writer
Since 2005, the Poetry Out Loud (POL) competition has served as a platform for high school students across the country to find their voice with a mission to “improve public speaking skills, build confidence, and teach about history and contemporary life through the lens of poetry,” according to the Poetry Foundation’s website. However, the 2024-2025 school year was the Poetry Foundation’s final year co-heading the program with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Upon the Poetry Foundation stepping down from leadership, the POL competition has made some major changes to their rules and anthology of poems.
With 2026 being the 250th anniversary of the United States as an independent nation, the POL competition decided to center the entire competition around American history. And while that mission statement in itself sounds great on paper, the way that they went about it is fairly questionable given the current political climate in the country. For the 2025-2026 competition, the NEA stripped down the usual 12,000 poem anthology to just 400 poems. The updated selection is meant to direct focus toward “poems that celebrate the rich tapestry of American history and culture,” according to the NEA’s website. In cutting down the poem anthology to American-focused works, they have not only excluded works by non-American poets, but also removed any poems that are not in the public domain. This means any works published after 1931, almost an entire century’s worth of poems, have been removed.
Due to these vast alterations in the rulebook, Maria Carrillo High School decided against holding their annual intramural POL competition. Typically, English teachers have students recite a chosen poem at the classroom level, then send the best students from there to the school-wide competition. From there, students enter the county competition and so forth. In recent years, MCHS has sent winners to the county POL competition. In fact, last year the county level winner, current junior Emily Fordham, was from Carrillo. So, the changes to this year’s competition were so problematic that the incentive to send the many talented students was outweighed by how strongly our school disagrees with the new initiative.
In spite of these changes, our very own Puma, Fordham, held down the competition. Fordham recently won the Sonoma County POL competition on Feb. 6 after competing independently, with her strong performance mirroring her county level feat last year.
This go-around, Fordham decided on poems to recite based on how well they “fit her voice” and “what they bring forth”; she also cited the variation between poems as a “big thing.” Her three selected poems this year are Julia Ward Howe’s “An Apology,” "Why We Oppose Pockets for Women” by Alice Duer Miller, and “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg. Although all the more modern works were gutted from POL’s anthology, Fordham chose works by poets that were “advocates of their own time periods” and that she personally interpreted in a modern context. For example, Julia Ward Howe and Alice Duer Miller were both influential feminist writers that advocated for women’s suffrage in the early 18th century; Howe famously co-founded the American Women Suffrage Association while Miller’s piece satirically lists common reasons pockets were denied from women’s clothing. Lastly, Sandburg’s poem on Chicago is a defense against the stereotype of the city being wicked and dangerous, instead celebrating its bustling culture.
Despite the restrictions, the pieces Fordham chose to recite can be interpreted in the context of current sociopolitical relations. Pieces that on a small scale fight against the injustices of a time-specific group can today push back against the harmful narratives of targeted minorities, like immigrants in America. Fordham’s selection of poems remind us that when rights and privileges are deprived from minorities, the reasoning is often almost laughably illogical. Her poem choices also remind us to look past the stereotypes perpetuated by the media and see the real people who are just like us. Choosing poems that argue for the deserved rights of a minority group and defend against harmful stereotypes makes clear her stance on the horrifying acts by immigration agents this past couple months. In fact, Fordham doubled down on this stance, stating that she plans to use her recitation time to protest ICE if she makes it to the national level. Regarding the large changes to the competition this year, the poet has stated she is “opposed to the changes this year entirely.” She has echoed similar sentiments of the MCHS English department that POL’s version of celebrating American culture does not align with what “America truly represents.”
Though it will never be clear if the decision to change the anthology for this year’s poetry contest were intended to meticulously slash the options down to majority white and male poets, or if it was truly a misguided attempt to celebrate a select part of American history, the reduction in diversity–of both topics and poets–reflects a shift in attitude toward inclusivity and diversity. This is a shift that has been seeping into American society under the majority conservative Supreme Court’s decision to strike down DEI in 2023 and Trump’s staunch opposition to anything related to DEI since the start of his presidency, despite the fact that what has made this country so successful has been diversity. For this reason, it is extremely important that people with the opportunity to use their voice, like Fordham, make their stance heard. Not only to simply make a statement of their own beliefs, but to show others that we are allowed to resist.