HOUGHTON — Adeline Frazier has advanced to the state Poetry Out Loud competition three times in a row, including a top-four finish in 2020.

But this year still marks a first: competing in person. The 2020 competition was scheduled to be in person, but was moved online because of COVID. Poetry Out Loud repeated the online format last year.

This year’s competition takes place March 3-4 at the Crown Plaza in Lansing.

“It’s so much harder online,” Frazier said. “It’s so much better to be on stage, at the present competition performing in front of people. I like being able to connect with the audience.”

Frazier, an 11th-grader at Houghton High School, prepared three poems to recite at State. To fulfill the requirement of a poem 20 lines or fewer, she chose “In a Dark Time” by Theodore Roethke. Her pre-20th century poem is Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm.” A favorite of hers from last year, Frazier checked with Houghton English teacher Julie Antilla to see if she could perform it again.

“And ‘In a Dark Time,’ it’s got a theatrical element that I really like,” Frazier said. “I like poems that are more interesting to perform.”

More than 16,000 schools nationwide participate in the program, which started in 2005. Students are judged on physical presence, voice and articulation, dramatic appropriateness, evidence of understanding and overall performance.

Frazier’s theater background helps with the memorization. To get the poems down, she walks around and recites the poems until she knows them by heart.

Three years of Poetry Out Loud looks good on resumes, both for plays and for college, Frazier said. And now, she’ll finally get all the trappings of the state contest.

“I’m just really excited to be able to meet the other competitors,” she said. “I haven’t gotten to do that yet. They also have classes for creative writing and poetry, and I think that would be really fun.”