Abigail “Abby” Drumm holds the trophy she won after the AHS senior become the 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Out Loud (POL) champion. With her is AHS English teacher Rachel Patterson who organizes the AHS POL contest that Drumm won three times.
Reminder Publishing submitted photo
AGAWAM — Abigail “Abby” Drumm made poetic history this year at Agawam High School. In February, she was the first student to win the school’s annual Poetry Out Loud contest for three consecutive years and then in March became the Massachusetts POL champion.
As the state winner, Drumm got an all expenses paid trip to Washington, D.C. in May to compete in the national POL competition — the first AHS student to achieve this honor.
Drumm said during her three years of competing, she was always happy to make it a bit further each time. After winning the school competition for the second time in 2024, she won the regional competition in Springfield and competed at the state level.
This year, Drumm scored a trifecta, winning not only the school competition but also as the regional and state competitions. More 17,000 other Massachusetts students had hoped to become the state champion when they started the POL competition in their high school classrooms.
“It felt incredible to finally win at the state level, since it seemed that my hard work had finally paid off,” she said. Drumm added that she never got comfortable with the state competition, since it’s a different group each year.
It’s been an amazing journey for the AHS senior who preferred music over poetry until the 10th grade. Since poetry lyrics lack any music, Drumm did not have much interest in poetry until her English teacher, Rachel Patterson — who organizes the school’s POL competition — showed her some Shakespearean sonnets. That quickly changed Drumm’s perspective on poetry.
“Since I love Shakespeare, they made me more open minded about poetry. Once I started reading the sonnets, I couldn’t stop,” said Drumm who graduates June 14 and will attend the University of Hartford in the fall as a music education major. “I think poetry will help me analyze the lyrics of choral pieces, which will ultimately improve my musicality when singing or teaching the piece.”
Drumm said this year’s state competition was the one contest that made her nervous. “I felt the pressure to go further than I had the previous year, while the national competition was more of a celebration of poetry for everything that it is in my life.”
Since she had competed at the state level before, she was familiar with the whole experience. “There was less uncertainty in regards to how the competition works,” said Drumm, the only student from Western Massachusetts to win the state competition in nearly a decade.
The 18-year-old said the national poetry competition was “definitely higher stakes” than either the high school or state competitions. She was not only competing for the title but also for the $20,000 prize that goes with it. Drumm said the biggest difference at the national level is that everyone who is competing “lives and breathes” poetry.
Her experience competing in the school contest for three years also helped Drumm prepare for the state and national competitions. “I used mostly the same poems in the state and national competitions. It also helped me get used to reciting on stage, since that was my first real experience with the spoken word.”
When Drumm learned that she had been selected to go first in the national competition, she said it made her “a bit nervous” to be the one to kick it off.
“I was more excited than stressed, since I’ve been performing my whole life. I tried to focus on enjoying being surrounded by poetry instead of stressing about winning, I tried to approach it with a ‘kick it off with a bang’ attitude, which kept my feelings under control,” she said.
She added that another difference at the national competition is that all the contestants are rooting for each other and are intensely listening to all the recitations. “It’s really inspiring to see,” said Drumm, who placed in the top 24 among the 55 competitors.
“I pretty much prepared the same way regardless of the competition — I would always paraphrase so that I knew what the poem was really trying to say, then chose my gestures, volume, etc. from there. I try not to be too rehearsed so it still feels authentic when I recite it.”
Drumm said she was very proud to represent Agawam in Boston — one of three students from the western part of the state — as well as in D.C. “Since I was the first student from AHS to compete at the national level, my family, friends and teachers were very excited for me. I was lucky to have my family and Ms. Patterson to support me in Boston — they were all there that day to cheer me on and see me win.”
Poetry Out Loud is a national recitation contest that celebrates the power of the spoken word and a mastery of public speaking skills while cultivating self-confidence and an appreciation of students’ literary heritage as they take poetry from the page to the stage. Its competitions have inspired hundreds of thousands of high school students to discover and appreciate both classic and contemporary poetry.
