Community High School

Poetry Night

Every poet has a reason to perform, and for every poet it is different. Some do it to realize something in themselves, some to have an audience, and others to learn.
Glenna Benitez, a CHS sophomore read in Poetry Night in Ann Arbor this past January. “It was a really nice experience,” she said. “Everyone at Poetry Night is super encouraging and it’s a really fun thing to be a part of.”
When Poetry Night started on December 10, 1999, it was named The End of the Millennium Poetry Explosion, and it was the start to Ann Arbor’s contribution to the poetry scene.
When I agreed to read in Poetry Night, at first it was because I was asked to. Throughout the next month, I knew I wanted to because the two minutes I spent on stage would contribute to my growth as a person. Afterward, I realized that a big piece of performing is for communication.
Dennis Kim, (a.k.a Denizen Kane) one of the featured performers of the show, praised some of the high school poets in the show for sharing their personal stories when he came on stage.
After every poetry event I go to or participate in, I remember that a big part of being a writer is being brave. Jeff Kass, a Pioneer teacher and director of literary programs at the Neutral Zone also commended several poets on stage for the guts they have to read.
Almost everything Kass does is connected to poetry. In 1998 when he moved to Ann Arbor, he started the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, modeled after his brother’s San Francisco organization Youth Speaks. It has been a great success.
“Little by little, we built it up from where two or three people used to come to Thursday night workshops at the beginning to our sort of peak days about four years ago when we used to have 25-30 people come every week,” Kass said. “We’ve fallen off a bit since then, but hopefully we’ll be able to build it back up.”
This year, two poets who performed were Dennis Kim from San Francisco, who is an accomplished poet, hip hop artist and fiction writer, and Aracelis Girmay, a teacher from New York who came out with her first book, “Teeth,” last year.
Kim had the bravery to do something different on stage. He played his guitar and sang about a fight he had witnessed outside a high school. He read a fiction piece about four brothers- one of many he has been working on. Kim does an excellent job of connecting with his audience.
When Girmay came on stage, she was not shy. She told a quick anecdote for each piece she read and made every story vivid. She even gave an amusing demonstration of what her astigmatism makes a jump-roper look like to her. Girmay made her performance feel relaxed and almost like a conversation, rather than her reciting poem after poem.
“Aracelis was my favorite of the adult people,” said Cody Pan, a patron of poetry night for several years.
Poetry Night was the first big event of the year, but poets will be busy throughout 2008. The youth poetry slams are in March, where students compete to fill one of six slots on the 2008 Ann Arbor youth poetry slam team. And to celebrate its 10-year anniversary, VOLUME will put out a collection called Decibels. The book will have 10 years worth of poetry from VOLUME youth poets and it’s alumni. It will debut on May 17 at the Ann Arbor Book Festival.
This year, Poetry Night had more high school poets than in the past. Every kid in the show has a different reason for choosing to perform, but everyone shares the bravery to get on stage.