5 Poets: Youth Speaks Participants Speak Up

By Suzy Khimm, WireTap. Posted September 4, 2001.

	"When I perform poetry, I can’t really see anybody. I feel like I’m on top of this huge mountain, screaming at the top of my lungs, my heart tearing open..."

Charlie Bethel remembers the final night of the 2001 Youth National Poetry Slam in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That weekend, 3500 people turned out to watch twenty-five youth teams, and a thousand of them are in the audience for the finals, booing loudly. “The judges were so bad and inconsistent, the scores might have come from Jupiter,” says the nineteen-year-old Bethel. “The kids didn’t care who won -- it wasn’t the point. So they never tallied the scores up. And the winners were never announced.” But, he says, it was a great experience anyway.

I was interested in Charlie’s story because just a week earlier I had attended the adult National Poetry Slam in Seattle. Sure, there had been lots of love and great poetry in Seattle. But even as a spectator, I had sensed petty internal politics -- the inevitable effect, perhaps, of putting any large group of adults together. (At the 2000 adult nationals, for instance, a team was disqualified for planting judges in the audience.)

The lack of politics in the youth poetry circuit is what drew me to start attending open mics and slams this summer in San Francisco. It wasn’t long before I discovered Youth Speaks. At the open mics they host, the outpouring of support and love seems unconditional -- the more anxious and inexperienced the reader, the more wild the applause and cheering of the audience tends to become.

One of the first organizations in the country to support spoken word and slam poetry for youth, Youth Speaks, was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area. The group organized the first teenage poetry slam in 1996; in 1999, the organization expanded to New York, where it currently runs programs in all five boroughs. A long-time performance poet, Bethel was a member of the New York team at the Youth Nationals last April. He is also one of the young poets whose talent blew me away at the open mic I attended in late July. I interviewed five young Youth Speaks poets this summer. Rather than water down their voices, I’ve presented their interviews oral-history style -- to let their words speak for themselves.

AYOKA STEWART, 16, served on the Youth Speaks advisory board and completed an internship with the organization last summer.

"I’ve been writing since I’ve known how to write. I started writing poetry during my sophomore year, but I’ve always written creative fiction about the things going on around me. I find it harder to write about things I haven’t experienced, which I’ve struggled to work on over the past two years. I also don’t write really aggressive pieces. Most of them are really emotional and kind of floaty.

Workshops really help to keep me going. A lot of times, when you’re just at home, you can’t really get it together, or you just end up writing about the same thing. Aya de Leon [a Bay Area slam poet and performer] gave me a little challenge. She wants me to write a piece that starts off, “I am the dopest emcee ever.” I have part of it done already, but I have a feeling it’s going to take a long time. Performing is fun, but personally, I don’t really care about the competition aspect of slam poetry. I prefer to emcee [i.e., host the event] or be a featured reader rather than compete to feel better than other people. It not that I don’t like performing, but emceeing and featuring allows me to showcase other people. I’ve been doing it for so long, so I really want other people to get on the mic.

From what I’ve heard, adult slams are a lot more competitive, and the poetry is not as good. Though this year, a lot of poets really wanted to make the team -- you could feel it in the air. It made it less enjoyable. At the 2000 finals, we had so much fun. We were sitting right in front of the mic; when poets got off the stage, we’d jump up and gave them a hug. In 2001, though, the stage was separated from the audience. The poets were backstage, instead of in the

	"I don’t always bring my parents to open mics. Because sometimes they hear things in my poetry, get scared, and want to have “talks” with me afterwards."

audience. It felt more formal, like a concert. But it was still a really positive event. I get constant support from my family, but I don’t always bring my parents to open mics. Because sometimes they hear things in my poetry, get scared, and want to have “talks” with me afterwards. If I know they’re going to be there, I don’t read certain things. I want to be able to have the freedom to read what I want to read. Youth Speaks is very free-speech oriented. When we visit certain schools, they don’t like us to use profanity or sexual content in the poems we perform; some times, we’ve had to edit our poems on the spot.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »