Students often study famous poets and their work. While stacks of poetry books waited in the front of classrooms, APS hosted its first Virtual District-Wide Poetry Slam on April 15, 2022, to give students the opportunity to further explore, learn and share poetry.

While this year the event was virtual each student that signed up got the opportunity to present their own original poem on a zoom broadcast.

“I noticed that there were not any types of programs district-wide that reflected the work of middle and high school students,” APS Media Specialist at-large for grades 6-12, Bridget Leverette said. “I know that we have a lot of different students that have a lot of different talents like singing, rapping, writing poems, writing songs and music. We wanted to reflect that and because April is poetry month we wanted to have a culminating activity for the month of April to show our interest in poetry.”

Since this is the first Virtual District-Wide Poetry Slam APS has had, it will be a new way to expose students to the culture of poetry.

“We want to just get started with a soft start and then next year, if we get a good turnout this year with our middle and high school students, we will take it to another level and have it face-to-face and then maybe going on to a state-wide competition,” Leverette said. “This year is just for fun. To get students acclimated into sharing their poetry with students across the district and being comfortable with speaking in front of an audience.”

Brian Montero, Midtown’s media specialist, was one of the staff at the school who had been encouraging students to participate in the poetry slam. He thinks that being able to express oneself through poetry is an important part of understanding one another.

“I think poetry expresses universal and deeper thought that once you decode, you understand what the author is talking about,” Montero said. “Their life experiences become not the same as yours but both you and the writer are communicating on a soul level.”

Junior at Midtown Zion Byrd was one of the participants in the poetry slam this year. Byrd has been writing poetry from a young age and feels it has helped her express her emotion during hard times in her life.

“Ever since I was younger my coping mechanism with anything hard in life was just to write,” Byrd said. “I found it easier to write about things that were happening in the moment. Just creating it into poetry.”

Midtown English teacher Susan Barber helps with the reading and writing center. She typically helps promote contests to motivate people to participate. Barber encouraged her students to participate in the poetry slam as she also sees poetry as an essential part of communication.

“Poetry is protest a lot of times, especially in today’s climate, and I think that students really resonate with that,” Barber said. “I think poetry just has this way of stepping into spaces that we don’t know how to put words into ourselves and it fills that void for us.”

Although there are artistic opportunities such as the theater coffee houses that are incorporated throughout the school year, the new aspect of having a poetry slam creates an opportunity for students to have an experience that might not be familiar to them.

“I hope that for some that are listening to the poems that it would just give them a chance to try and seek out poetry,” Leverette said. “Those that are performing it, maybe it can boost a career that they may not have ever thought of, or it would encourage them to write more poetry and share it with others.”

Byrd is able to communicate herself through poetry in a way that she feels is less common for black women. Her poem was inspired by her feelings of being overwhelmed by all that’s happening in the world. She hopes they will continue the poetry slam for future years and would encourage others to participate next year as she thinks it’s important for students to express themselves.

“I think it’s a really good idea for students to express themselves and the main reason why I chose to do it this year was to bring something different to the table,” Byrd said. “I feel like for black women and black girls especially have a certain genre of something we’re supposed to write about. We’re supposed to write about us being strong black women, but I want to show the vulnerability of us as well.”

While Barber enjoys teaching students about poetry, she hopes they are able to take away the meaning of being understood from the poetry slam if they participated this year or in the future.

“I hope that they take away that their voice matters and that they have a place to exercise their voice and showcase their voice,” Barber said. “Just a different avenue for that.”