Poetry Slam shines on literary talents

First draft, needs quite a bit of work.-

When asking Jason Taylor, the advisor of the Poetry Slam, how to describe the poetry slam for the newspaper, he said one word, “awesome.” On the October 15th, the first poetry slam of the year occurred in the Black Box Theater. The Poetry Slam consists of two parts, an open mic night and shortly after the actual “slam.” The slam is a spoken works poetry competition, in which students must recite their own work. A highly competitive competition as well, students will battle for the honor and glory of winning the poetry slam. The winner of the most recent Slam was senior Steve Gibson; second place went to junior Rachel Airey, and third place to junior Ryan Pisscatelli.

The slam is considered highly competitive just like any sport to students who participate in it, you will hear screaming, yelling, and any other emotion possible to display in speech. BAHS alumni Rachel Bond says, “It really is a battle for glory, it’s combat, it’s a fight, and it’s extremely competitive; it’s difficult to write, and especially to perform a slam poem. It contains rules just as other competitions, that it must be your own poem, it can’t be more than three minutes with a ten second break period, and that you can’t use props, fire, animals, etc. There are two rounds, and possibly an earlier elimination round varying on the number of entries into the slam.

In the audience, there will one timer and five judges. The timer will of course time each entry to see if they stay under the time limit; if the time limit is gone over, points will be deducted from your score. The judges are five randomly picked people in the audience given a blue binder with a number scale from 0.1-10.0. Based on each slammer’s poem, they will at the end raise the binder with the desired score. The final score for each slammer is made by subtracting the lowest score from the highest score and adding it together with the three middle scores, then averaging that number. A perfect score would be a thirty.

Before the slam begins, an open mic night is created on the spot with students performing raps, playing guitar, reading poetry, or singing a cappala. The audience will interact with each performer and yelling and commenting. One freshman student, Jordan Wilneer, came onto the stage saying, “so I have a Pokemon hat!” You’ll see the audience cheering, laughing, and holding an interaction with the current performer. Even during the actual slam, if the audience does not like a judge’s choice of a score they can boo them for a low score, and praise and cheer for a score they thought was correct. Justus Eapan created a rap for the open mic, while other students like Katie Procell will sing a cappela to the audience. Host Greg Klock, holds conversation with the audience as well and keeps the night flowing smoothly.

As slammers performed throughout the night, chills would overtake you from the power of each of these slammer’s pieces. “Yay for word nerds,” you would hear the audience yell. Though these students performing had talent and skill, as Rachel Airey performs her first poem chills ran throughout students from the intensity of it. The poem scores a 29.7, very close to a perfect score. Also, in the night you could laugh in amusement from how well some can speak, like Steve Gibson with a poem about Arizona that scored a 29.5. The slamming, screaming, laughter, joy, and chills continue on through the night in each students work, the poetry slam a great event to attend.

Lady GaGa in HCR and March for Equality

So this past week, in Washington D.C. there have been so many awesome events supporting equality, with even Obama helping out. I myself, certainly believe everyone deserves equality and no one has the right to deny someone the rights to be happy. Lady GaGa this week, I could not be more proud of all I've seen her do in the week long events.

At the Human Right's Campaign Dinner, we see Barrack make a joke about opening for Lady GaGa, but our president is supporting equality, how great is that? Obama has made promises to help out the community and it's really nice to see someone making a stand in the political world.

You can also see Lady GaGa performing her rendition of Imagine at the HCR Dinner where thousands of activists were gathered for the rally march that was just yesterday.

Lastly, here is GaGa's awesome speech from the day of the rally. She's had so many speeches within the last 2 weeks supporting these events, and I couldn't be more happy to see the support these groups are getting. I know this is long to read through, but I'm a huge fun of GaGa firstly, and secondly a supporter of Human Rights. This week couldn't have gone better, I'm glad to see society starting to recognize equality, it's not just something people deserve, but a right.