nothin Hill Central Poets Slam Into Action | New Haven Independent

Hill Central Poets Slam Into Action

Lucy Gellman Photo

Clockwise from top: Williams, Serena Anes, Dejesus, and emcee Elijah Vann.

Tyrese Dejesus ran onto the stage of Hill Central and lifted both hands in the air. He puffed out his chest and took a quick, deep breath. Then he looked out into a swelling audience, ready to make an announcement.

I am not a poet!” he declared.

His peers raised their eyebrows and cocked their heads to listen closely. A few looked as though they were ready to call his bluff. Others waited to hear more.

That momentary confusion — and then delight at a fake-out — came as part of the sixth annual Voices of Hill Central” Poetry Slam, held Wednesday at the eponymous schools gymnasium in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood. Over almost two hours, 16 sixth‑, seventh- and eighth-graders took the stage in a poetic processional, spitting spoken word pieces that they’d been rehearsing for three weeks straight.

Delbasso presents the winners.

Organized by Scientific Research-Based Interventions (SRBI) leader and former language arts teacher Donna DelBasso, the slam is an annual opportunity for students to practice a component of the poetry they are studying and discussing in their classes. That started six years ago, when DelBasso, watching how engaged her sixth-graders were in a new poetry unit, suggested it at a staff meeting. Students were already into the poems they were reading. Their interest in spoken word skyrocketed when they saw the documentary on high-school poets performing at the Louder Than A Bomb poetry slam in Chicago. It seemed like the right thing to try out, DelBasso said.

Since then, the slam has grown to a large event with an emcee, blaring music, brightly illustrated digital word clouds for each poet, and a panel of wordsmithy judges from around the state. It’s not a full-blown slam in the technical sense (three rounds, three-minute maximum, no props, and five judges) but a weighty training ground, introducing students to the medium firsthand and giving them a chance to flex their public speaking muscles.

Clockwise from top: Regina Lewis, Jackie Chiarelli singing, Diaz, and Gonzalez with Williams.

These students that would probably not have any other voice — this is the window into their soul,” DelBasso said. What she thought would be a couple kids reading from paper” on the stage has grown prodigiously, with a mix of students now volunteering themselves in February and March, and being encouraged by their language arts teachers to participate. 

She added that for many of the poets, spoken and written word is a direct and necessary path to getting heavy emotion, from early depression to dealing with the death of a close loved one, out into the open. She recalled watching students who had been silent in their math or language classes explode on the stage, and wind themselves around stories with equal parts creativity and compassion. And nowhere was it clearer than in the lineup of poets on Wednesday, she said — poets who also included student Ariana Alvarez and sonnet-conquerer Irving Ramirez, who brought the house down with his Shakespeare-inspired Ode to a Tamale” before the slam began.

If Ramirez warmed the audience up, the 16 poets brought fire to the stage, leaving embers in their path as they performed. With a steady, unwavering voice that came straight from her diaphragm, Mariene Gonzalez spoke directly to an absent parent who had abandoned the family when she was just two years old. Jayleen Nieves went for a slow, thrilling twist, recalling that she was deeply afraid of losing friends, getting teased or bullied, of familial troubles — but wasn’t going to allow that fear to hold her down anymore. Leiana Diaz brought the audience (or at least this reporter) to tears remembering the day her mother burst through the school doors with the news her grandmother had died suddenly. 

Pearsall and Nieves.

Regina Lewis had had her heart broken but wasn’t giving up on love. Jacob Williams, who ultimately snagged first place, recalled a spiraling depression that began with the death of his grandmother, punctuated with ribbons of light as his life fell in and out of darkness again. John Cruz drew from mythology, leaving the stage littered with references to Hercules and Apollo. Shante Harris brought out whoops, cheers and wild applause before she had finished with her self-realization that I am black, beautiful.” With tears streaking her face, Trinity Pearsell urged the audience to stop making youth — like her — feel smaller than they are. 

Judges deliberate.

Where there might have been silence or strained, competitive breath between poems, DelBasso said, the group worked very hard to make sure there was nothing of the sort. For the three weeks leading up to the slam, participants spent their lunch hours together on the gymnasium’s stage, workshopping their poems, performance styles, and memorizations while also learning how to listen to each other. Several times they had built restorative circles,” delving into personal stories and talking to each other about respect.

As the slam wound down, The Word mentor and Literary Happy Hour Director Hanifa Washington, also a judge at the event, said she had noticed — and applauded — that kind of support from poets to other poets. Before launching into a a call-and-response meditation, she said she’d seen in the young writers a way to communicate uniquely with their peers.

I hope you can find where the beauty is in the writing,” she said. The medicine in the words.”

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