This week on Minnesota Native News, we’re showcasing Isabella Callery, the Minnesota High School senior who recently won a national poetry recitation competition, Poetry Out Loud. She talks about the experience, shows off her poetry skills, and explains the importance of her connections to indigenous poets. Here’s reporter Cole Premo.
Transcript
That’s Isabella Callery at the Poetry Out Loud national competition, held in early May in Washington D.C. She was reciting Charles Lamb’s “Thoughtless Cruelty”, one of three poems she performed in the competition.
Callery, a senior at Arcadia Charter School in Northfield, Minnesota, made it to nationals for the first time this year. But she’s made it to the state finals every year since she was a freshman. And it’s a pretty big deal.
(07:47)
CALLERY:“From the state competition, they’ll choose one person that will go on to nationals. And so nationals, there's 53 people, one from each of the 50 states and then Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and district of Columbia. And we performed there and they lower us to nine and then to the top three.”
It’s a poetry recitation competition that requires weeks of memorization.. and a compelling performance.
Speaker 1: (09:55)
CALLERY: I think if it lets them acting and more of just like how can I take this meaning and convey that the best I can with my face, body and inflection
This year, more so than other years, she says she had deeper relationship with her poems. Of the three poems she featured for her recitations, two are from indigenous poets.
(03:56)
CALLERY: I was able to find two women, native artists that I really connected to like their words and their story and the things they were saying. Um, so those poems, I just had a really deep connection to the first time reading them.
Callery, who is anishinabe of White Earth, says she wasn’t raised with indigenous culture growing up, but is now reclaiming her native heritage. These poems have helped her in her process.
Here she is..
(04:20)
CALLERY: so the first poem is perhaps the world ends here by Joy Harjo and it's about how life centers around the kitchen table, how we give birth by the table and we prepare parents for burial there. And we eat there, we gossip there, we just sit with our family and like all these things that does revolve around the kitchen table. And I feel like that's very true. And then the second poem is a really long title. It's called ABC dairy. And requiring further examination of Anglican Sarah fem subjugation of a wild Indian reservation by Natalie Diaz. Um, and, uh, that poem is a really beautifully written poem I connected with at the most. Um, it's about how do you as a native person tried to forgive Christianity and the live with the things that you can still see Christianity doing to our culture. Um, and the ways that it's pushing us back and like reinforcing the fact that native people aren't equal in that way. And I feel like that's a conversation I've had with myself a lot of times. So that was just a really important poem to me.
Isabella Callery very graciously recited part of that last poem.
(06:44)
CALLERY: Like I said, no Indian I've ever heard of has ever been or seen an angel maybe in a Christmas pageant or something. Nazarene church holds one every December organized by pastor John's wife. It's no wonder pastor John's son is the angel. Everyone knows angels are white.
As for the first poem we heard her reciting, she said one had to be pre-20th century.
(08:52)
CALLERY: So Charles Lamb was my pre 20th century author and that poem is just about not killing bugs. It's the whole thing about it. I'm like, this sounds like it's just like, oh. So I would just really like, I don't kill any bugs. I'm a total wimp. I don't even come mosquitoes. Um, so I think that palm just fun for me to do and to think about and it kind of has that same my thing of that same idea of just respecting the earth and respecting animals as being equal.
But let’s get back to the contest!
[SOUND OF CALLERY WINNING, Kinda long… pretty good celebration sound]
Callery talks about the moment she learned she’s a national champion.
(10:17)
CALLERY: I had a total anxiety shutdown and just kind of got on stage and shutdown. So that's what, that's what happens when we see pictures of you up there. It's, you shut it down completely. Yeah. I like donate for, I don't really remember it. I like blacked out.
As for what the the future holds for Isabella Callery, well, that $20,000 grand prize is going toward her college in Wisconsin.
(12:51)
CALLERY: So I'm going to Beloit this fall and I'm planning on doing something with sociology, psychology, public health. I've been doing social work for a long time now, so I want to continue doing that cause that's what I really like doing. And why is that? Um, I think it's just like being able to connect with people who are going through really hard times and like having people who have connected with me at really hard times and just knowing like how helpful that is and how life changing it can be.
A while her focus in college education isn’t spoken word or poetry, it remains a big part of her life. She plans on getting more into that community.
(14:05)
CALLERY: I just think that you have to find something you can connect to no matter what it is and that finding people who have a similar background to you and like understand your way of thinking and going about the world is super important no matter how you find that. And for me it was her poetry, but it can be through art or any other kind of thing in the entire world.
Callery also runs her own native beading business, BellasBeading, on Instagram.
I’m Cole Premo.