In Today’s News

Gardiner High School POL

Photo by Joe Phelan, Portland Press Herald

In the Maine Sunday Telegram a wonderful story about Gabrielle Cooper, a senior who has participated in the Poetry Out Loud program for four years. She represents Gardiner High School later on today at the Waterville Opera House for the Maine State POL Finals. It is a great opportunity to see and hear ten Maine high school students reciting poetry. The program starts at 3:00 and I hope to see you there!

Read all about Gabrielle at THIS LINK.

The ten students participating and their grades and schools are listed below.

Northern Maine Regional Champions

Natalie Lisnet, Grade 12, Bangor High School

Kate Hodgson, Grade 12, Camden Hills Regional High School

Emma Beyor, Grade 12, Erskine Academy

Gabrielle Cooper, Grade 12, Gardiner Area High School

Antyna Gould, Grade 12, Medomak Valley High School

Southern Maine Regional Champions

Amran Mahamed, Grade 11, Deering High School

Jordan Bryant, Grade 10, Greely High School

Sabrina Small, Grade 12, Maine Coast Waldorf School

Skyler Vaughn, Grade 12, The Maine Girls’ Academy

Arielle Leeman, Grade 12, Morse High School

Poetry Out Loud is organized nationally by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation and administered at the state level by the Maine Arts Commission. It begins in Maine’s schools where school champions are selected to compete in two regional finals at which ten students are ultimately selected to recite at the state finals. One student, the state champion, moves on from the state finals to represent Maine at the national finals in Washington D.C., where students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico will compete for a total of $50,000 in awards and school stipends for the purchase of poetry books.

For more information on the program please CLICK HERE.

 

 

Songs that Survived the Holocaust

Just after the war – 1946

A group of young Holocaust survivors at a home in Hampshire, England, in late 1945. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images.

In July 1946 an American psychology professor named David Boder traveled to Western Europe to interview refugees and Holocaust survivors. After the war the prisoners who had been freed had no home to go to so they became refugees. Boder’s goals were to record how “living through something like the Holocaust changes someone’s personality”. In addition, he wanted to “preserve these people’s oral histories.” Along with talking with them he recorded the songs that they had written during their time in the concentration camps. He was hoping that their voices would help Americans accept Jewish immigrants.

At the time Boder traveled he took along a state-of-the-art wire voice recorder and 200 spools of steel wire tape. Some of the songs have been housed since 1967 at the University of Akron in Ohio. Recently they decided to digitize the songs which took more than a year since getting them off the spools was not an easy task.

The discovery of these songs have been shared with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Henonville songs, which had been thought to be lost, were in fact found and you can listen to some of the selections by CLICKING HERE. The Henonville songs were named after the refugee camp in France where they were recorded.