URBANA — For the second straight year, Kareem Sayegh will represent Uni at the Poetry Out Loud Eastern Illinois regional competition.

The senior won Uni's schoolwide contest this week with his recitation of Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California." The contest, which required students to deliver a poem from memory, was held Tuesday and Wednesday during lunch in Room 106S.

"The performance went pretty well," he said. "It was a little bit scary. For me the first performance is always the scariest one because I don't really know how it's going to turn out and I don't know how people are receiving it. And when I'm saying the poem I don't really know what people think of it; I don't know how well I'm doing. But I always get pretty into it, and I really like the poem this time, so it was pretty natural."

Poetry Out Loud, which celebrates the art of the spoken word, is sponsored nationally by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sophomore Claire Liu won second place for her rendition of E.E. Cummings' "i carry your heart with me (i carry it in." As runner-up, she also advances to the regional competition, which will take place 9:30 a.m. Feb. 7 at the Champaign Public Library.

"It was actually really fun," Liu said. "I was expecting to be a lot more nervous than I was. It was easier to perform in front of people that I knew, and teachers that I knew as well."

Senior Lor Sligar came in third place and will stand as an alternate in the event that Sayegh or Liu cannot compete. Sligar recited "In A Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke.

"It was nice to hear other people reciting poems," Sligar said. "I was really nervous and so I messed up the first line, but then I started over, so it was OK — but it was still really nerve-wracking."

The winner of the regional contest, sponsored by the 40 North/88 West arts organization, will advance to the March 10 state finals in Springfield.

The state winner will receive $200 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for the April 26-28 national finals. The national winner will receive a $20,000 scholarship.

Last year, Sayegh won the regional title with his versions of Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" and Aphra Behn's "Love Armed." At the state finals, Sayegh added a third poem to his list, Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," and finished in the top five.

For regionals, Sayegh and Liu will have to recite a second poem in addition to the one they did at the Uni contest.

"I'm looking for one with a different kind of tone," Liu said. "The one I did [at Uni] was very light and easy to read, so I'm going to try to find something longer or darker."

In all, nine students competed this year, up 50 percent from last year, when six students recited.

"This year I felt like kids knew about the contest, we had more participants, and people were well prepared," said English executive teacher Elizabeth Majerus, who judged the contest along with colleagues Steve Rayburn and Rosemary Laughlin. "It makes me very excited about the contest in future years. We had several freshman and sophomore competitors, and I'm hoping that they will be competing again."

Students were judged based on seven criteria: physical presence, voice and articulation, appropriateness of dramatization, level of difficulty, evidence of understanding, overall performance, and accuracy. English teacher Adele Mazurek-Suslick served as accuracy judge and prompter.

According to Majerus, Sayegh won over the judges with his interpretive abilities.

"Kareem really stood out because of his confidence, his ease, the fact that he seemed really intimate with the poem — he really seemed to have a relationship with the poem, an interpretation of the poem that went a little deeper than the average reciter," she said. "And he was obviously very taken with his poem, which really came across."

The judges had a much more difficult time choosing between Liu and Sligar.

"They both had different strengths," Majerus said. "Claire had a lovely physical presence and just a very musical presentation and conveyed the sort of light, whimsical simplicity of her poem very well. Lor's poem was more difficult, more complex, and I think Lor dealt with that difficulty very well. Her level of confidence, given the complexity of her poem, was great. …

"It was a very close call. The two of them were tied with one judge, then another judge had Claire in the lead and another judge had Lor in the lead, so we really had to get down to the absolute last numbers of our judging sheets to figure out who was going to get second and third place."

For Sayegh, winning the Uni contest means he's still in the running for a trip to Washington.

"I'm very excited to go to regionals again," he said. "This is exciting for me because I didn't win at state last year, something that I hope to do this year, and I hope to go to nationals … that's my goal."

At A Glance: Uni's Poetry Out Loud Contest

Students are listed in the order in which they recited:

• Freshman Charlie Bullock: "Preludes" by T.S. Eliot
• Junior Elizabeth Russell: "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich
• Freshman Christopher Nguyen: "I Am!" by John Clare
• Senior Kareem Sayegh: "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg
• Freshman Rosa Druker: "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke
• Sophomore Claire Liu: "i carry your heart with me (i carry it in" by E.E. Cummings
• Senior Lor Sligar: "In a Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke
• Sophomore Katy Metcalf: "So This Is Nebraska" by Ted Kooser
• Senior Hannah Leskosky: "One Perfect Rose" by Dorothy Parker