The bustling energy that typically marks morning meeting in the Antilles Upper School Library – where some 150 students gather before starting their academic day – fell hushed on Friday morning. Students fixed their attention on the commanding performance of 16-year-old Shantelle Eddy.
The Eudora Kean High School junior was asked to share with Antilles School students her poetry recitation skills, which have positioned her as the U.S. Virgin Islands representative in the national Poetry Out Loud contest. She knocked it out of the park.
Eddy held the students rapt during a flawless recitation of Margaret Walker’s “For My People,” a lengthy 10-stanza poem about slavery. Her second reading, the famed Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” brought visible reaction from Antilles juniors, who recently studied it in English class.
“We read it before,” said Antilles junior Danna Singh. “But you could really understand it more, because you could feel it. She did a wonderful job.”
Classmate Ernest Phillips confessed he’s not a poetry lover and “Ozymandias” didn’t impress him much in class. But when he heard Shantelle recite it, it was different.
“When she did it, it had a lot of passion and she made it sound a lot better,” he said.
Poetry Out Loud was created by the National Endowment for the Arts and is administered in partnership with state arts agencies in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Last year, more than 300,000 students across the country participated in the contest.
Competition begins in the fall at the classroom level, then the school level and finally results in statewide competitions where one student from each state (or the equivalent) is selected to go to Washington, D.C., for finals, held this year on April 27.
Eddy, who aspires to a career in advertising, says she’s not a poetry writer, but she loves to recite it, and thanks to her coach and Eudora Kean English Department Chair Melissa Bump, she learned to actually feel it as well.
“Ms. Bump used to say, ‘You have to think about it,” Eddy explained. “So for two hours one day she made me think about what (‘For My People’) means, and after that, all this emotion came rushing out.”
This will be the third year since the competition’s inception in 2006 that the Virgin Islands has competed. In the territory’s first-ever try, Charlotte Amalie High School’s Shawntay Henry, then a 16-year-old sophomore, emerged as the national champion, bringing home a purse of $20,000.
