On Feb. 20 New Trier’s Poetry Club will be participating in the world’s largest poetry slam; Louder Than A Bomb 2014: Freedom in Education, hosted by Young Chicago Authors and Columbia College.
Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB) is having its 14th annual poetry slam next Saturday, and this year has a twist. This year LTAB, as stated on the Young Chicago Authors (YCA) website (youngchicagoauthors.org), plans to speak out against the Board of Education’s decision to close over fifty Chicago Public Schools.
LTAB is a poetry slam where students from about a hundred schools across the Chicagoland area go up against one another with original poems. According to their website, LTAB acts as “a platform for students to share their stories and find the power in their own voice.” This poetry community has used competition to unite different schools. The competitions teach students to support their peers when they perform and that “the point is not the point, the point is the poetry.”
New Trier Poetry Club senior member Julia Pappageorge stated, “While it is a competition, it is really nothing like a competition at all.” She explained how the entire community of LTAB is so supportive that it never really feels as though it is teams going up against each other.
“Even if people aren’t on your team, everybody is clapping and snapping,” Pappageorge continued. “It really is so much of bringing groups of people together and at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter who won because you got to experience something unique to LTAB.”
At LTAB people from suburbs across the Chicagoland area join together to participate in this unique act of poetry. Pappageorge explained how the last few years she found herself sitting next to kids from towns she had never heard of before performing and how the profound activity of poetry brought them all together.
Fellow senior Poetry Club member Anna Parsons explained that if a poem was given lower points than it deserved during the actual performance at LTAB, the audience would start saying “listen to the poem” and then repeat, “the point is not the point, the point is the poetry.”
Poetry Club started writing poems for LTAB at the start of January and has just finished editing them. This past week the team has gone through each poem and recited them aloud and silently, for a lot of slam poetry is based on memorization.
Club sponsor and English Teacher John O’Connor, explained how although the performance of the poet is important, the real essence and writing of the poem is what really makes the poem. He said, “The writing should suggest performance styles and gestures.”
O’Connor said he is nervous about the group performance, wherein four poets are featured to perform the poem, because the writers are continuing to go back and make little edits.
Despite LTAB contributing this particular festival to education in Chicago, O’Connor explained that New Trier would not have any poems featured on this particular social subject. Instead, New Trier will feature poems about gender, race, sexual orientation, and developmental disabilities.
“There were a hundred schools participating last year and maybe half of them were Chicago Public Schools. I don’t think any of our poems touch on it. I protested with my family last spring break and [NT Art Department member Tom Lau] is a product of the public schools so I believe in them. It’s just not a big focus for us; we are covering a huge range of social issues,” O’Connor stated.
This will be the sixth year New Trier has participated in LTAB and nerves are still present in the poets. New Trier placed second in one of the semi finals last year and was within the top ten overall, and hopes to get that far again this year. Their top rivals – Lake Forest, Highland Park, and Skokie – are also in LTAB, but with the independent poets featuring seniors Alisa Bajramovic and Anna Parsons, New Trier has high hopes for traveling further into the competition.
“It’s really the best thing around; I wish everyone could be a part of it,” said O’Connor. “It’s a sensationally supportive community. There’s a hundred schools and a thousand people and it’s a chance for high school students to meet kids they normally wouldn’t have the chance to meet. Our school system is constructed in a way that guarantees that they will never meet, which is a real shame.”