Slammin’ at the Gym: Local Youth Discover the Sport of Poetry

By Alan D. McNarie

The bleachers of Pahoa High School Gym are packed with cheering, clapping students. The noise is deafening. But this isn’t a basketball game, or even a pep rally. It’s…a poetry reading?

It’s Guinevere Balicoco’s turn at the microphone. She’s chosen to share a poem about her surfer boyfriend.

“He’s in love with the female ocean,” she reads into the buzzy microphone. The sound system bites, and the gym has the usual loud, echo-y gymnasium acoustics, but the youth have tamped their crowd noise down tight, as they strain to pick out the words:

I want to know what you know
I want to feel what you feel when you go surfing
Cause I’m stuck here wondering
What it’s like to be in love with something
That turns your fingers into wrinkles
To be immune to the scent of salt water
For the sun to turn this skin darker….

This is electric. This is slammin’. Literally.

I envy him
Dehydration from too much land…

She finishes, and the crowd erupts again. The emcee raps, “Let the youth, let the youth tell the stories of Punaaaaaa.” And the crowd roars again as the next student takes the podium.

Teens on the Big Island are discovering what the kids on O‘ahu have already discovered: Poetry is cool again. Poetry is beast. Especially if it’s your classmates doing it.

In one corner of the gym, Caki Kennedy sits among students waiting to perform. Kennedy is beaming. And she should be. She and her husband Robert are the initiators of this movement.

“I saw a great slam on the First Friday on O‘ahu. I saw it and thought, ‘Gee, this might be great for high school kids,’” she’d recounted, a few days before the Puna event.

Poetry “slams”—oral performance competitions of original poems—have been around for quite awhile, long enough to develop a whole new style of poetry, akin to the beat and protest poetry of the ‘50s and 60s, and even more closely akin to rap music. It’s not stuff that is likely to be read in a literature class; the emphasis tends to be on rhyme, rhythm and energy, not technical perfection. But in its element, spoken aloud, it can be electrifying. In recent years, it’s been spreading to high schools. When Kennedy decided to do something in local schools, she had merely to call Liz Soto of Youthspeaks Hawai‘i, which has been doing slam poetry workshops in O‘ahu schools since 2005. For the past two years, the Youthspeaks Hawai‘i team has won the Brave New Voices international poetry slam festival. Counting the school workshops that the organization conducts and its weekly Wednesday slams at Mark’s Garage in Honolulu, says Soto, “I think the number of kids that we’ve worked with runs into the hundreds and possibly thousands.”

The Kennedys recruited some young veterans from the Youthspeaks Hawaii on O‘ahu to help start a similar program here. So far, they’ve done readings, workshops and slams with Big Island youth at Ka‘u and Kea‘au High Schools, then at Pahoa. The results have astonished local teachers. Kids take the workshops, then get passes from other classes to attend the workshops again.

“What I’ve heard consistently from school staff is they’re surprised how attentive these kids are at the slams,” commented Caki Kennedy. “At assemblies they’re normally restless, but at these slams, they pay attention to each other…This is peer influencing at its zenith. The poets that I bring in are under 30. The kids are captivated. The poet that I brought to Ka’u High two years ago…the kids would be nudging each other and texting, they’d be putting their heads on the desks like they were going to go to sleep, and within minutes, their heads would perk up at attention, then they’d look at each other, they’d start elbowing and nudging each other, and they’d be captivated.”

At the mic, it’s Devon Gonsalves’ turn, “What would you do/ If you were that li’l haole girl/ being picked on in school?” he chants:

Everyone teasing you,
thinking they’re so funny,
not knowing that little girl’s heart is racing.
She’s feeling like a monster inside

One of the appeals of the slam is that teens get to write about what they want— what they need— to write about. As the slam goes on, kids take on some tough topics: the agonies and ecstasies of young love; the loss of loved ones; the emotional scarring from school bullies, abusive parents, abusive politicians. One poem by Storme Eisenhour attacks politicos who tell young people to how to live, who to love, and what causes to die for: “So tell me, who do we believe? Who else is around?/ When all the President wants is a few more boots on the ground.” Another girl reads a searing poem attacking her own, abusive mother. Sarah VanSwearingen paints a vignette of a girl worn down to bare nerves by listening to her parents fight:

She’s sitting in her room
Alone.
Screaming!
Hitting every wall
‘til her knuckles start bleeding.

It’s a catharsis, and a lesson. These kids are aware that their world isn’t perfect, and they want the world to be aware too.

Let the youth, let the youth tell the stories of Puna

“Coming here, it is refreshing to hear these voices because their stories are so genuine and so honest. It’s an inspiration to see teens have the courage to perform in front of their whole high school,” comments Jocelyn Ng, one of the national-award-winning, young O‘ahu poets who had come over to help with the Pahoa workshops and slam.

Caki Kennedy hopes that Hawai‘i Island kids will also be entering national poetry competitions. And there’s no reason to think that they won’t. Every once in a while, a kid steps up to the mic who’s just, without apology, a damn fine poet. Take the conclusion to Triston Kimbal’s poem, “Who I Want to Be”:

so get to sleep and your mind swims like
fishes in the biggest sea in the world
and no fisherman can catch
those fish. They are
yours and your feelings
and your thoughts
so laugh and say
thank you.

If you’re a veteran poet like this writer and you hear a teenager reel off lines like that, you want to laugh and say “Thank you!” too. One of these young people has gone a step beyond using words to express anger or grief or joy. He’s discovered the joy inherent in words themselves. ❖

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Email Caki Kennedy at palidogs@hawaiiantel.net.

Email Alan McNarie at amcnarie@yahoo.com.

Photos by John Lyle