FREEPORT – Six Freeport High School students will gather at the Freeport Community Library this week to be judged on their performances in a competition called “Poetry Out Loud,” with the winner moving on to the Maine Southern Regional Final, scheduled for Feb. 6 at Biddeford City Theater. The state final is Feb. 26 at the Waterville Opera House.

The national Poetry Out Loud champion wins a $20,000 scholarship.

Simon Skold, an educational technician and substitute teacher at Freeport High, has directed the in-school training for the event, set for Thursday, Jan. 15, at 6:30 p.m., with lunch-time and after-school practices since early December. Skold, who also works in the school’s drama program, said that Assistant Principal Ann Marie Barter and English teacher Lisa Blier brought the Poetry Out Loud program to his attention.

“The students were encouraged to work on their poems on break,” Skold said. “It’s really a performance piece – tone and dramatic appropriation. It conveys meaning and feeling, and mood as well.”

Molly Ramirez, Josef Biberstein, Devon Wilbanks, Shamen Harnden, Gabby Bousquet and Dakota Rumery are the participating Freeport High students.

Biberstein said he became interested in poetry after beginning to read plays and sonnets by Shakespeare in middle school at North Yarmouth Academy.

“At the time,” Biberstein said, “we were taking a break from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to read some of Shakespeare’s poems, and several of them struck me as quite profound and meaningful to everyday life, even in the 21st century. Soon after that, our English class had a chance to participate in a poetry recitation competition at the high school and I was chosen to represent our grade. The poem I chose to recite, ‘The Private of the Buffs,’ again resonated with me personally.”

Following that competition, Biberstein made a habit of browsing poems to find ones that he found interesting or particularly meaningful.

“I think that this is what I like most about poetry – not every poem has meaning for everybody, but, if you search, you will find some poems that inspire you as an individual,” he said.

Biberstein said he likes the Poetry Out Loud competition mostly “for what it is: an opportunity for youth to get together and share poetry with others through recitation. I also like that it provides an opportunity to do this on a national level. After watching some of the previous national competitors recite, I have come to realize what the Poetry Out Loud competition has done to bring out extremely talented readers of poetry and to help them share their talent, something I’m sure many others are grateful for, as well.”

His favorite poet at the moment is Robert Frost, but that could change at any time, Biberstein said. On Thursday, he will recite “Cartoon Physics Part 1,” by Nick Flynn and “Richard Cory,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Skold said that Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry-recitation competition. Students in classrooms around the country memorize poems from an anthology, and each school decides a winner in competitions such as Thursday’s at the Freeport Community Library. The national competition, April 28-30, will be held in Washington, D.C.

From a field of some 375,000 students nationwide, Langston Ward, a senior at Mead High School in Spokane, Wash., won the title last year. His school received a $500 stipend for poetry books.

“It’s a pretty big deal,” Skold said. “What we’ve been doing is that first level.”

Three of the four judges in Thursday’s competition will concentrate on performance, and the other on accuracy, Skold said. The library space is perfect, he said.

“It’s a nice, intimate space in the library,” he said. “There will be a student who will be chosen to move on.”

Simon Skold, faculty adviser for Freeport High School students in the Poetry Out Loud competition, works with student Gabby Bousquet on her piece last week. The first round of competition is Thursday at the Freeport Community Library.