Teen's passion for poetry shows in his words and deeds

Vinh Hua -- kinetic and intense and talking almost as fast as the ideas bouncing in his head -- uses both hands to grasp a visitor's hand in greeting. But when Hua stands in the corner of a conference room in Boston Latin School's library to recite a poem by Allen Ginsberg about following Walt Whitman through the aisles of a California supermarket, body and voice slow.

Hua closes his eyes and gathers his breath, and then, eyes fixed on his audience of one, he begins, using the rise and fall of sound, gesture, and facial expression, to create Ginsberg's scene of ''wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! -- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?"

Thus, Hua, an 18-year-old Latin School senior, reenacts the performance that won him the championship of the state's first Poetry Out Loud competition last month and a berth in the first national contest in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

He's a spoken-word fanatic, a hip-hop fan who puts poems on his iPod and who memorized Illinois Senator Barack Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention speech for a school declamation contest that he won. He writes and performs his own poems as well as those of others. He's a self-described ''pocket intellectual" with ''bad library fees" who just finished reading John Locke's ''The Second Treatise on Civil Government" for fun because ''without the Enlightenment thinkers we wouldn't have the conception of natural rights." He's the son of Vietnamese refugees and a lifelong Dorchester resident, who once interned with the economic development group Viet AID and dreams of becoming a community organizer.

Hua traces his passion for poetry to a meeting of the Coalition for Asian Pacific American Youth three years ago that featured two performance poets. One, Giles Li, became Hua's mentor; the other, Bao Phi, a Vietnamese-American poet from Minnesota, became his favorite poet.

''I just fell in love. I found identity with them," Hua recalls. ''I followed Giles around like a little puppy dog. I read more and read more and fell in love with it. I really believe poetry is where you can find so much human emotion, so much truth. We all feel the same emotions. Poets manage to capture the essence of the complexities of those emotions."

Li, who also founded the Boston Progress Arts Collective, a network of local Asian-American artists, remembers Hua's emerging thirst for poetry. ''He asked me who he should read. He and I would analyze poetry. I'd give him assignments, and he would do it all. His growth as a writer is pretty impressive," Li says. ''He's still an 18-year-old high school senior. He's still learning and has a lot of room to grow."

In his poems, Hua writes of a nation's capital that's a ''shining beacon of ideals enshrined and forgotten," of ''fathers' voices, as rough and smoky and sorrowful as the history of Vietnam."

For the two other poems he performs in Poetry Out Loud, he chooses ''Alabanza," Martin Espada's tribute to the restaurant workers at Windows on the World killed in the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and Li-Young Lee's ''Little Father," which juxtaposes the death of a father with the birth of a son. ''They're about hope and connection and love," Hua says.

In the fall, Hua will head to Eugene Lang College at the New School in New York City, where he plans to focus on poetry and urban studies. He wants to learn Mandarin and French and how to read Vietnamese, which he speaks. He hopes to go to law school. ''I'm trying to expand my mind as much as possible," Hua says. ''Knowledge is power."

Meanwhile, Hua prepares to travel to Washington for Tuesday's competition. Poetry Out Loud, a project of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, will award $50,000 in scholarships and school stipends, including $20,000 for the national champion.

Hua's parents and sister will be in the audience. Other than witnessing him practicing in front of the mirror at home, this will be the first time they see him perform in public.

''They're not helicopter parents," Hua says. ''Hopefully I don't get knocked out in the first round. I'd feel bad. They flew down to see me."