In poetry, he feels power of words

Saturday, April 22, 2006 | 7:26 a.m.

Gibran Baydoun is feeling the words course through his veins. It's 9:30 on a Wednesday morning in a fluorescent-lit classroom where a teacher watches. The only others in the room are two students who study quietly.

Baydoun stands straight. His long narrow arms drop to the sides of his slender frame, relaxed. Occasionally he'll raise his hand - a slight gesture to add emphasis.

But mostly it's the inflections in his voice, the expressions of his face and the knowing motion of his head that convey the emotion and meaning of words of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a 19th-century poet born to former slaves.

"I know why the caged bird beats his wing/Till its blood is red on the cruel bars," he recites with emotion. "For he must fly back to his perch and cling/When he fain would be on the bough a-swing ..."

Today the senior at Green Valley High School will represent Clark County at the Governor's Mansion in Carson City as a state finalist in Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation project launched this year. Baydoun has been studying the poems closely with his English teacher Jason Kerns. The winner of the state competition heads to the national finals in May in Washington.

The program was created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. According to the NEA, an estimated 100,000 students are participating in the program.

"It's an incredibly exciting program," said Susan Boskoff, executive director of the Nevada Arts Council. "I am of the age where we had to memorize and recite poems in elementary school and in junior high."

Poetry Out Loud, she said, "is a way for the teachers to bring the study of poets and poetry back into the classroom and engage the students in an activity that is an equalizer. Every time you provide an opportunity for a student of this age to explore another facet of their personality, the stronger the teaching element.

"This is another way to tap someone on the shoulder and say, 'Don't forget this is part of your life, part of your history,' " Boskoff said.

The program was designed to bring aspects of slam poetry and spoken word - two types of poetry performance - into the classroom, while rekindling an interest in an art form that has escaped the mainstream in recent years. Each student selected two poems from a provided anthology that includes a range of works from Sylvia Plath to Walt Whitman.

After finishing "Sympathy," a poem on the injustice of black slavery in America, Baydoun paused, then said, "I love that one. That's my favorite. It speaks so much to me, especially being African-American.

"I wanted to recite a poem that meant something," he said. "If I'm going to say something I want to say something that actually matters."

Baydoun also selected Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

In the case of a tie, he will recite Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise."

"With that, I think I have the hardest role to play because I have to be a black woman," Baydoun said.

But he absorbs and becomes the character in each poem, be it on slavery or death, which goes a long way in the competition. Students are judged on volume, speed, inflection, posture, presence, evidence of understanding, pronunciation and gesturing.

"Gibran was Mr. Slick," said Dayvid Figler, local writer, attorney and Nevada Public Radio commentator, who was a judge at the county competition. "He's very stylized. He had good command of the text and his own voice. He just blew me away."

Figler said the students who were most successful at recitation were the ones who were able to translate the literature into their own voice.

"There were five that were really doing some good stuff. They were really connecting with their work," he said.

Baydoun says his family has always had a love for literature and a love for poetry. He moved to Las Vegas from Oakland, Calif., and briefly dipped into acting (from kindergarten to third grade), which he said he was really passionate about, but grew out of that and chose to refocus his talents on academics.

A student body treasurer at his school, a volunteer for the Democratic Party and a Nevada delegate to the American Legion's Boys Nation, a weeklong government program in Washington, Baydoun's lifelong goal is to represent Nevada in the U.S. Senate. He's headed for the University of Michigan next year to study political science.

Regarding the poetry, he laughed and said, "None of my friends would do this. They're athletes, cheerleaders, on the student council. But I have a great love of arts and literature."