Swindon Festival Literature Youth Poetry Slam

Swindon Festival Literature
6th Youth Poetry Slam
Josie Williams, Community Arts Development Officer explains....

The sixth Swindon Festival of Literature Youth Poetry Slam exceeded all expectations. This year saw more boys taking part and the standard across the board was extremely high. All students with the help of their teachers spent their free time fine tuning their performance ready for the Grand Slam at the Art Centre in Old Town, Swindon Saturday May 8th.

The Youth Slam was conceived by festival director Matt Holland and myself. This is one of the highlights of the year for me. I project manage the event and from simple means at the start six years ago when many of the students were simply reading from a sheet of paper, we now have them all with lines learnt and delivering the words with enthusiasm and confidence. The standard of writing and performance is extremely high and you often forget that these are just 12 and 13 year olds! For anyone that took part this will be an event that will stick in their minds for many years to come. It is quite an experience to get up on a stage and perform to a full house.

The event is open to Yr 8 students from Swindon secondary schools and this year all schools signed up including for the first time a group of home educated children. Sadly two schools dropped out last minute due to unforeseen events, one being the Icelandic volcano which left a teacher stranded abroad.

The project is delivered via school’s English Departments and children are selected either by audition, from the Gifted and Talented list or are spotted following the delivery of a scheme of work in performance poetry.

Prior to the Grand Slam the students take part in workshops with professional poets, Marcus Moore and Sara-Jane Arbury from Spiel Unlimited. Three schools hosts these events to which other schools are invited to attend. Hence you end up with three or four schools in one place, a bunch of young people who don’t know one another, but within ten or fifteen minutes of coming together Marcus and Sara-Jane weave their magic and the barriers come down and everyone interacts, it really is quite amazing!

The workshop is just three hours long and in that time they learn techniques on performance, write a A-Z poem using each letter of the alphabet as the start of each word in consecutive order and also write one poem which they then perform to their peers in the end of workshop performance where two teams from each school are selected to go forward to the Grand Slam at The Arts Centre. This leaves students ten days to write another poem, learn it and perform it. The students must write the poem themselves, but their teachers can help with the performance. Most importantly the team’s that perform at the Arts Centre are incognito and use a team name that doesn’t identify
who they are and which school they come from.

The skills students learn are transferable to all areas of life that rely on effective communication, English skills and maintaining a confident aura. I would like to say thank you to all students and teachers for taking part and going that
extra mile.

“What a wonderful opportunity for Swindon schools to show off their outstanding poetry skills. A really high standard of performance and word smithing, a real slam dunking experience!” Bob Linnegar, deputy head at The Commonweal School.
2010 winners – The Commonweal School.

“I think that the day was a fun event and would be worth coming to watch again next year. We would definitely encourage next year’s Yr 8 to take part if you are interested in performing arts or poetry,” Carli Green, second place from Commonweal School.

“Six boys, two teams, from Commonweal got through to the Grand Slam. The task was to create two poems which took about a week to write. We did new ones rather than the one we wrote at the workshop. We practiced every break and lunchtime and our teachers Miss Butler and Mr Leslie helped out. There were four heats and the highest scores went through to the final along with two other highest scoring teams. Our team Big Mac brought the house down with our poem Carli’s Afro, it was a really funny! Our team came second with 267 points, but we were just pipped to the post by the other Commonweal team Two Boys And A Half who scored 268 points. Isambard Community School were third with The Three Gems and Josh who scored 261 points. It was great fun.” Carli Green and Adam Pearce.

“I really enjoyed performing at the Arts Centre, as it definitely made a change from my normal weekend, it enabled me to get out and do something different!” Josh Key from Isambard Community School.