Maybe, says Shuqiao Song, it was a T.S. Eliot poem. Maybe it was her English teacher. Maybe it was the competition. Whatever it was, Song, now a Lincoln East High School senior, discovered poetry.

BY MARGARET REIST | Lincoln Journal Star

"April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain."

— T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

Maybe, says Shuqiao Song, it was T.S. Eliot, that first line of his "The Waste Land" so powerful she had to put the book down, only to come back later and consume the whole poem, word by word.

"It was so wonderful," she said, "so provocative."

Maybe it was her advanced placement English class taught by someone who didn't tell her what to learn, but acted as a guide, leading her on a tour of the English language and all its intricacies.

Certainly part of it was the competition, pushing her to spend hours and hours with the greats — Coleridge, Eliot, Plath, Keats — so the East High School junior could do them justice when she stood on the stage.

Whatever it was, Song, now a senior, discovered poetry. She learned she had a passion for it, for those classic works where peeling away the layers reveals intricacies and connections and beauty.

"I'd never really noticed before," she said.

Her passion carried her to Washington, D.C., where she competed in a national "Poetry Out Loud" contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation.

"The most important thing I learned from this experience is that poetry is all about the beauty of language," she said.

Song heard about the contest in her English class, where her teacher, Anne Cognard, offered to work with any interested students.

 It was a pilot project, an attempt to brush off a well-worn literary practice called poetry recitation and bring it back to a new generation. Song decided to enter.

Cognard helped her prepare as she practiced over two or three months — an hour a day after school, every day.

"Line by line by line, she wanted to know every single word and every nuance of every single word," Cognard said of Song. "She asked for that. She insisted on that knowledge of what the potential was for not only the poet's original writing, but the language and experience of that writing."

Song had competed on the speech team, but always persuasive speaking, never dramatic interpretaion. She'd never thought of herself as a performer.

But this was different, a chance to use her voice to bring the poems to life.

To do that, she and Cognard talked about the poets, about their lives. They talked about diction and emphasis and interpretation, Song's scribbled notes on the pages nearly swallowed up the poems.

"When I'm reading this poetry, it just feels so good on your tongue," she said. "It's like pulling silk from your throat."

Last spring, after winning both local and state contests, she went to Washington, D.C., to compete with students from across the country.

She was nervous, but less because of the competition than because she wanted to do the recitation right.

"They (the poems) deserve to be read and read well," she said. "I wanted to do them justice."

The judges didn't pick Song as one of the finalists, but competition organizers were impressed enough to select her as one of six students in the nation to recite her poetry this fall at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

The national experiences changed her.

Cognard believes Song discovered that art is an integral and essential part of life, that you need the everyday experience of living and you need art as an expression of yourself.

"That's what she came to realize," Cognard said. "That those together are what make life whole."

And Song came to realize it not because of some natural inclination towards English, but because she is a dedicated spirit, Cognard said.

"She's such a dedicated soul to doing the best she can with whatever is placed before her," Cognard said.

Song, an only child, comes from a family that stresses math and science. Her father is an engineer, her mother a computer programmer.

But Song doesn't see math and science separated from her joy of poetry. Now she sees connections everywhere, such as a Sylvia Plath poem and advanced chemistry.

In "Fever 103°," Plath uses the word "acetylene."

Song knew, from the dictionary, that the word means "odorless, colorless gas."

But in her chemistry class, she learned the gas is used in welding because it creates an intense, burning flame.

And so, Plath’s words — “ â€- Does not my heat astound you. And my light â€- the beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I am a pure acetylene Virgin â€-” — took on a whole new meaning.

Song said she still may end up in a profession connected to the sciences, but there will always be poetry.

"Definitely, this is something that will stay with me forever," she said.

Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.