The auditorium grew quiet after Morning Ex in February of last year when members of Slam Poetry recited their team’s group poem, “Period Profits.” Vigorous snaps responded to the passionate poets as they spoke of menstrual periods and stigma, growing louder. The snaps turned into cheers when, at the end of their performance, the group stepped back from the microphones, and the lights went dark.

Parker’s slam poets competed in Chicago’s Louder Than a Bomb (LTAB) competition on March 1 and March 3 and moved on to quarterfinals on March 6. Unfortunately, the team did not receive the score needed to advance further.

Parker put up 12 students in total for team competition, and three others participated as indie poets, including junior Annette Njei. With her individual poem entitled “Northern Native,” Njei was able to craft her personal story to fit the rhythm and rhyme of poetry.

“It was something I was passionate about, and it was about me walking through life,” Njei said. “The hard part was coming up with the concept and making sure it all came together, and I was proud that I got to share my work with other poets.”

Unfortunately, the timing of LTAB proved difficult for the team. “We build all this momentum every year, and then we’re gone from school for a week and have to feverishly prepare to compete,” Fuder said. “This year we really had to work to be ready to go, and we did well enough to advance to quarterfinals.”

While a lot of the work the Slam Poetry team goes into preparing for LTAB, there’s more to the club than just the one event. “It’s tricky because when we start in October, we say that we don’t do this just to compete in LTAB, but we always get so consumed by it because it’s a lot of work to prepare,” Fuder said. “My hope is that we enjoy being a poetry club, with our participation in LTAB being part of it, but that we can have kids really invested in that poetry scene in Chicago, outside of Parker.”

Slam Poetry faced an additional challenge this year as prior to the season they’d lost Franny Weed ‘17, a four-year member, to college.

“Franny was the heart of the team for four years, and each year she solidified her place, and we definitely missed her this year,” Eighth Grade English teacher and Slam Poetry coach, David Fuder, said.  “The upperclassmen looked at her as a leader, and we needed people to fill that gap.  It got down to our needing to write a group piece and jokingly saying, ‘Maybe Franny could write it,’  knowing full well she was in college, but it was a good opportunity for the seniors to see if they could fill her space and take the initiative, and they did.”

Losing team members from last year affected Braye as well. “The hardest part was trying to find a new flow because we lost so many amazing seniors who created an identity for the team,” Braye said. “Making a new identity, finding what we wanted to be and write about and what was important to us, was hard.”

For junior Zoe Laris-Djokovic, the biggest challenge was the level of commitment–and the difference in expectations between the poets and leaders.

“No one was waiting for Franny to come write,” Laris-Djokovic said. “The problem was that everyone was doing it for fun, and no one took it seriously.  People on the team were annoyed at how seriously it was being taken when the point of Slam Poetry is for fun, and the reason it fell apart was because no one expected to move on, and everyone was prioritizing school instead.”

Crafting group poems is not as easy as listening to them, Braye added, and the poets have to take various aspects into consideration. “Not only do you have to come up with a good concept,” Braye said. “You have to come up with good characters and block it.  It’s very different from writing an individual piece.”

Njei  joined Slam Poetry as a sophomore and was able to put her internal struggles into her competing poem. “Coming up with a poem that I felt both comfortable and proud of was hard because I have this internal issue that whatever I write isn’t good enough,” Njei said. “Coming to terms with my self worth and success was a challenge.”

While LTAB has come and gone for this school year, Fuder hopes that the poets will continue to work again after spring break–and then pick up again next year.

Scratching out lines, revising poems, and reciting their compositions, Slam Poetry members met every Saturday from 10:00-12:00 from October until LTAB, and will start meeting  after spring break. Although there are no more competitions for the year, Slam Poetry meets to write and develop their work through the spring.

According to Fuder, the weekly sessions were spent looking at poetry, performance, and sharing the poets’ own work, as well as working toward understanding of what performance looks like and how to get the most from the audience. Sometimes the poets were enhancing poetry they’d written in English classes, sometimes writing from a fresh prompt, and at other times using outside poems as a focus.

“My favorite part of the team is the relationships we create,” senior Natalie Braye said. “Every other school is at Louder Than a Bomb, and that’s why we do it, so we’re open to hearing new types of poetry.  Last year we brought in the team from Phoenix Military Academy, and it was very different from our style.”

According to Fuder, this is Slam Poetry’s seventh year at Parker. The club started in 2009 when then-senior Molly Coleman participated in LTAB as an individual poet and asked Fuder to be her faculty sponsor.

LTAB is the world’s largest youth poetry festival. 120 teams compete. Structured around two preliminary bouts, the competition asks each team to send up to four different poets performing individual poems and one group poem. Each poem must meet various criteria, including a time length of three minutes or less, and each poem receives a score. The top-scoring 32 teams advance to quarterfinals, the top-scoring 15 teams advance to semifinals and the top four teams advance to team finals.

According to Fuder, LTAB allows only 12 student competitors per school, and poets can improve their work throughout the year to heighten their chance of being selected for competition. Not everyone who shows up to Slam competes, as poets must try out for a spot at LTAB.

“Not really knowing what Louder Than a Bomb was, I went to watch Molly perform, and I was blown away,” Fuder said. “I was very intrigued with these high school poets who have amazing stories and share them with great composure.”

Fuder later connected with Young Chicago Authors, the organization that runs LTAB. A few juniors expressed interest and reached out to Fuder, and Slam Poetry has been at a part of Parker every year since.

“Sometimes it’s easy to stay in our own space here and not engage with other schools and other spaces in the city devoted to youth poetry,” Fuder said. “I’d like kids to really get the most they can out of our experience with LTAB and become better poets and more aware of their place in Chicago as teenagers, but I always want to keep things balanced and give them a safe space to explore themselves as writers beyond what they have time to do in the English classes.”