Competition Poetry brings together seventeen poetry interpretation pieces and program builders (with poems and program segments competitors can assemble into a complete performance for rounds).
A sample of what's included: A speaker chases fame with total confidence, then turns around to ask why a country is so hungry to watch its idols burn in (IN)FAMOUS. A daughter watching her mother lose her hair to chemo turns her anger on the pink ribbons meant to be helping in Rethinking Pink. Arthur's forgotten stepsister finally tells her own story across centuries of names and disguises in The Life and Times of Morgan Le Faye. The collection is strong in literary merit without sacrificing performability; these are poems that shine when read aloud.
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Format: Poetry Interpretation and Poetry Program Builder pieces
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Cast: 1 performer
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Subject matter includes: Identity, family, grief, community, love, life, and the community
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Content: Mostly "clean." All of our scripts are appropriate for high school performers, with any mature themes flagged in the description file.
Every piece is NSDA-eligible, copyrighted, and ISBN-registered. Buying the collection gives your team a full library of ready-to-perform poetry programs for seasons to come. Looking to give your kids a leg up in oral interpretation and supplemental rounds? Lean on our 20 years of experience publishing poetry and prose that wins judges' favor and audience approval.
(IN)FAMOUS
A speaker chases fame with total confidence, then turns around and asks why an entire country is so hungry to watch its idols burn.
• Format: Poetry Program Builder
• Cast: 1 performer, gender flexible
The program opens on a young voice counting down to stardom with giddy, specific images of magazine covers and paparazzi chases, refusing to picture any other future for itself. The second piece turns that ambition sinister, casting fame as a siren's call that possesses a body until it moves and thinks like something inhuman, ending as a graceless asteroid mistaking its own collision for a shooting star.
The final piece pulls all the way back to indict the audience itself, tracing decades of manufactured celebrity from Marilyn Monroe and Elvis through Britney, Whitney, and Amy Winehouse, and naming the public's appetite as the real force behind every one of those collapses. It moves from personal hunger to collective hunger and back, building its case entirely out of real, named public figures rather than abstraction.
Being That Guy — Tony Damico
A hopelessly awkward guy tries on every romantic cliché he can think of before admitting he's really just a corn chip in disguise.
• Playwright: Tony Damico
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, male voice
The program moves through four connected pieces that each stage a different failed attempt at romantic bravado: a nervous, self-interrupting kiss poem that keeps undercutting its own sappy metaphors, a comic send-up of the "nice guy" trope stacked with references from Pee-Wee Herman to Rambo, a hesitant love poem about two guarded people circling each other, and finally a party story where he chokes on his own self-description and settles for comparing himself to a nacho cheese Dorito. The pieces share a running joke about wanting to sound impressive and landing flat instead, and the comedy never talks the real nervousness underneath it out of the room.
Burned Out — Julia Neva
A relentless daily grind gives way to a dancer's ruined body, and then to an entire high school buckling under the same exhaustion.
• Playwright: Julia Neva
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, gender flexible
The program opens with a stripped-down, almost telegraphic list of one overloaded day — snooze, class, work, repeat — building its rhythm purely through repetition. The second piece shifts to a dancer mourning a body that quit before her heart or mind could, contrasting a lifetime of total devotion to dance against someone else's casual claim of "burning out," and daring that person to explain what real burnout actually costs.
The final piece widens to an entire school, opening with one veteran teacher who walks out mid-class and never returns, then following how the word "burnout" spreads through the staff until the whole community is forced to relearn what it actually means. It moves outward from routine, to individual collapse, to collective reckoning, without losing its plainspoken tone at any stage.
An Electron Tragedy — Jesse Gall
A girl falls for the boy who teaches her that touch, biologically speaking, doesn't really exist — and then leaves her holding onto the metaphor anyway.
• Playwright: Jesse Gall
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, female voice
Built around the repeated refrain "the man of my dreams in my freshman biology class," the poem moves chronologically from the first spark of attraction, through a relationship that deepens into real intimacy, to his sudden departure and his clinical explanation that two people's electrons never actually touch, only repel close enough to feel like something. From there it tracks her withdrawal from him in language borrowed straight from addiction, before she reclaims the same science-class metaphor for herself, deciding that the feeling was worth having even if the science says it wasn't real. The poem never breaks its classroom conceit, using it instead to carry the whole arc from infatuation to heartbreak to acceptance.
The Godself Series — Bonny McDonald
A performer builds their own private religion out of daily choices, community, and the constant work of becoming a better version of themselves.
• Playwright: Bonny McDonald
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, gender flexible
Framed by a hip-hop lyric about letting your "godself" loose, the program opens with a brief meditation on humanity's self-centered relationship to the earth before launching into a breathless, rapid-fire catalog of the speaker's values and contradictions — veganism, protest, bike commuting, self-forgiveness — delivered in one unbroken rush of rhyme and slang. It shifts into a quieter, prayer-like refrain asking for help becoming that better self, then into an extended "warrior" persona piece that builds real solemnity before deliberately puncturing itself with a fart joke.
It closes on a long, specific litany of everyone and everything the speaker actually believes in, from named friends and mentors down to worms and okra, ending on a declaration of self-reliance. The piece moves between manifesto, prayer, and gratitude list without ever taking its own reverence too seriously for long.
Hiding Behind the Humor — Courtney Wright, Christopher Ellis and Jonnie Ray Delta
A comedian who can't stop cracking jokes even at his brother's hospital bedside finally lets slip that the humor was never really about being funny.
• Playwright: Courtney Wright, Christopher Ellis and Jonnie Ray Delta
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, gender flexible
The program opens with a defiant, profanity-laced defense of dark comedy aimed at anyone who gets offended, before landing in a real hospital room where the speaker jokes through a childhood drinking story to cut through his family's fear, right up until his injured brother needs a joke just to feel normal again. The jester piece reframes that same coping mechanism as an entire identity, following someone pushed into comedy since childhood because it was the only way people ever responded to him, now terrified that one bad joke could cost him everything.
The final piece turns the same deflection toward a relationship, leaning on pop-culture one-liners to avoid saying anything real until the mask finally starts to slip. Assembled from three different writers under one theme, the program moves consistently toward the same reveal, that the jokes are covering for something the speaker is too scared to say directly.
In All Directions — Nancy Harper
A homemade time machine sets up a conversation with an eighty-year-old future self — and a reckoning with how carelessly we discard the people we call old.
• Playwright: Nancy Harper
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, gender flexible
The poem opens with a whimsical device, a rickety time machine, to stage a conversation between the speaker as a child and their aging future self, using it to expose how differently we treat the same fear of death at ten versus eighty. It moves through a sharp riff on tired pop-culture stereotypes of the elderly before dropping into a specific, quieter memory of a birthday dinner interrupted by a father's medical collapse and a mother's strangely flat response.
From there it widens into a broader indictment of how families warehouse aging relatives and treat retirement as an expiration date, before circling back to insist that beginnings and endings deserve the same regard. The poem keeps swinging between broad satire and specific memory, letting the two tones argue with each other instead of settling into one.
The Life and Times of Morgan Le Faye — Saeed Jones
Arthur's forgotten stepsister finally gets to tell her own story, through centuries of names, deaths, and disguises.
• Playwright: Saeed Jones
• Format: Poetry Interpretation Program Builder
• Cast: 1 performer, female voice
The first piece has Morgan speak directly to Arthur, teasing him about the childhood they shared before their names and reputations hardened into legend, comparing their identities to stones worn smooth by moving water. The second piece pulls back centuries further, into a stranger past life where Morgan became literal landscape, a hill mourned on by grieving women for three hundred years before choosing to become something that could sing again.
The final piece surveys her long history of reinvention, cycling through sorceress, hag, and priestess, dying and returning again and again, and ends with her shedding one identity like a dropped dress and walking away renewed. The three pieces move backward and forward through her history rather than in strict order, building a portrait of a woman whose only constant is change.
Past the Profundity — Stephanie Patterson
A poet answers another poet's arrogant manifesto by cataloguing everyone poetry actually belongs to, then turns the same argument on her own family.
• Playwright: Stephanie Patterson
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, gender flexible
The program opens as a direct rebuttal to a poet who declared that apolitical poetry is a waste of time, building a list of who poetry really serves — teenage poets soaked in angst, aging beat poets, street poets, and an old man secretly writing love poems for a wife whose memory is fading — and landing on the claim that a poem doesn't need to overthrow the world to matter, just to change one mind. The second piece narrows sharply to a single image: an elderly widower lost in a cereal aisle, still mourning a wife who once shared his mornings.
The final piece follows a visit home for a mother's birthday dinner, moving through family small talk, grandparents casually discussing their own burial plots, and a father's undisclosed heart condition, before the speaker breaks down picturing the funeral to come. It moves from public argument to private grief without ever losing its eye for small, specific detail.
Proud to be a B — Juniper Mariat
A woman reclaims the insult men throw at outspoken women, and dares them to come up with something better.
• Playwright: Juniper Mariat
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, female voice
The poem opens by naming the exact moment a woman gets punished with a slur for simply standing up for herself, then runs through the excuses used to dismiss her — hysterical, PMSing, delicate — before flipping each one into a badge of toughness, comparing herself to rawhide, a battleship, and heavy metal. It challenges anyone determined to call her a "b-word" to at least be more creative about it, offering up a list of alternatives, before closing on the claim that no amount of intimidation can crack a woman's resolve and reclaiming the original word outright. Built almost entirely from stacked, escalating comparisons, it gathers real momentum toward its final, unapologetic line.
Rethinking Pink — Julia Neva
A daughter watching her mother lose her hair to chemo turns her anger on the pink ribbons meant to be helping.
• Playwright: Julia Neva
• Format: Poetry Program Builder
• Cast: 1 performer, female voice
The program opens with a daughter accompanying her mother to a lumpectomy, cataloguing rows of wig names and the surreal, "foreign and artificial" feeling of watching a parent's identity strip away alongside her hair, before landing on the fear of losing her mother outright. It pivots sharply into satire with a bake-sale organizer's rallying speech, mocking how breast cancer awareness gets flattened into pink cupcakes and ribbon-wrapped merchandise sold as "fighting" the disease.
The final piece follows a classroom scene where a boy's novelty bracelet triggers the speaker's frustration with how cutely the disease gets marketed, before she names the real, unglamorous losses inside her own family. The program moves from grief to satire and back to grief, using that whiplash to make its point about performative awareness versus real support.
Take 43 — Collin Aldridge
A hotshot Hollywood director keeps reshooting the "morning after" scene of his own life until he can't tell where the movie ends and the loneliness begins.
• Playwright: Collin Aldridge
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, male voice
The poem opens by walking through the director's mansion and career like an opening tracking shot, establishing his ego, his taste for grit and profanity, and his contempt for TV censorship, before revealing that his own formula for a hit — believability, entertainment, relatability — has quietly stopped applying to his own life. It replays the same morning-after scene take after take, with the woman beside him vanishing every time he blinks, escalating from swagger into real panic as the takes climb past forty.
It closes on the first take where the fantasy actually holds, leaving him staring at the one outcome his own script couldn't manufacture. Structured explicitly like film-set shorthand — scene directions, "cut," climbing take numbers — the device tracks a man's ego breaking down in real time.
Tension at Home — Saeed Jones
A man traces his family's fractures and his own accent back to where they started, and finds he can't fully erase either one.
• Playwright: Saeed Jones
• Format: Poetry Program Builder
• Cast: 1 performer, male voice
The first piece builds the speaker's origin story out of broken images — burnt letters, divorce papers, a father who leaves the same day he's asked to be one — braided together with mythology and the literal meaning of his own name, happy and fortunate, which he isn't sure he believes. The second piece narrows to a single afternoon after a breakup, staged as a surreal, overflowing feast where every plate holds a memory and the speaker is the only guest seated at the table.
The final piece follows him leaving the South and trying to scrub his accent and drawl out of his mouth in the North, only to find it keeps resurfacing anyway, especially after a drink. Across all three, the poems keep circling back to things that refuse to be erased no matter how hard he tries.
Until We Meet Again — Shane Cole
At a beloved grandfather's funeral, a distracting playlist and a stubborn, knowing smirk push the speaker toward something they weren't expecting to find that day.
• Playwright: Shane Cole
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, gender flexible
The poem moves through the practical, exhausting choreography of a funeral day — choosing a casket, gathering flowers with cousins, feeding a houseful of relatives — while returning again and again to one detail the speaker can't let go of, a calm smirk on the grandfather's face that feels like an unfinished message. That tension resolves through an unlikely device, a shuffled playlist where song after song seems to answer the same question, followed by a dream where the grandfather appears at peace and finally speaks plainly. It moves from grief-numbed ritual through distraction to a specific, personal answer, using music as the thread that carries the whole piece.
What Do You See When You See Me? — Julia Neva
A girl who once played at being invisible for fun grows up to find she's become invisible for real, and spends the rest of the piece trying to be seen again.
• Playwright: Julia Neva
• Format: Poetry Program Builder
• Cast: 1 performer, female voice
The program opens with a childhood game in which the speaker "turns invisible" for fun, sneaking past siblings and eavesdropping on gossip, before that same trick curdles into something involuntary at school, where classmates look straight through her and she has to relearn how to get noticed at all. The second piece moves into a relationship where a partner constantly measures her against another woman, forcing her to reshape herself point by point, before she reclaims her own worth once he's gone.
The final piece widens into a broader complaint about a culture glued to its phones and missing the people right in front of it, landing on a direct plea to look up and actually pay attention. It moves from a personal, almost playful memory to a specific romantic wound to a wider social observation, tying all three back to the same question of who actually gets seen.
What You See Ain't What You Get — Tiembé Maboola
A string of encounters across one lifetime, from a childhood collision on the monkey bars to a stranger singing on a street corner, chips away at how little we actually see when we look at another person.
• Playwright: Tiembé Maboola
• Format: Program Oral Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, gender flexible
The program opens by refusing to be won over by surface-level attraction, insisting that real connection means seeing past first impressions to the messier truth underneath. The middle piece then moves chronologically through ages eight to twenty, tracking how race and difference get noticed, weaponized, and finally confronted head-on in a college classroom argument over an all-white reading list.
The final piece follows the speaker after being fired, encountering a street singer who reframes loss entirely and lands the piece's clearest idea: that everyone needs something to sing about. It moves from abstract argument to lived chronology to a single defining encounter, arriving at the same conclusion each time, that judging by appearance misses the point.
Women and Scars — Deb Royce
A woman watches another woman with acid burns shopping for groceries and realizes she envies her.
• Playwright: Deb Royce
• Format: Poetry Interpretation
• Cast: 1 performer, female voice
The poem starts as an act of looking: the speaker studies a stranger's face, half unmarked and half scarred by acid, and names plainly where that kind of violence against women comes from and why. From there it widens out into everything else done to women under the same logic, before turning back on the speaker herself, who admits the thing she can't quite say out loud, that she envies a pain other people can actually see. Built from hard, stacked images rather than a linear story, it asks for control, stillness, and the nerve to sit inside discomfort.