April is national poetry month, and De Soto High School is celebrating with the annual Poetry Café and a new addition, the Poetry Slam, which took place during seminar on April 19.

The Poetry Slam is a new idea introduced by freshman Kaitlin Torres and will be a new club starting the 2018-19 school year.

“Kaitlin Torres came to Mrs. Sinclair and I and asked us to start a poetry slam group for next year. So that was kinda the prompt to getting us to have the Poetry Slam event during seminar,” said Library Media Specialist Jennifer Sosna.

Sosna and English teacher Crystal Sinclair-King are the club’s sponsors.

“The poetry slam group will become a club. We have already gotten that taken care of and okayed by the administration, so that is going to be a weekly kind of club that will meet,” Sosna said.

Sinclair-King is trying to open students up to the enjoyment of writing poetry.

“The poetry slam is a new group that we are starting. Kaitlin Torres is one of the students that approached me about starting it, and we are basically trying to encourage students to become more interactive with poetry. Poetry slam is really expressive, energetic presentations of poetry, so we are just trying to get more students involved with being excited about that form of writing,” Sinclair-King said.

The Poetry Slam club is going to be for all poetry enthusiasts and is a space for them to do dramatic readings and theatrical performances alongside their poems.

“Hopefully we have students come with poems that they have written, poems that they are excited about, things that they have created, things that are personal to them,” Sinclair-King said. “A lot of times, with poetry slam, that type of poetry is very personal, very emotional sometimes, and sometimes it is just more funny or lighthearted as well, so it does not necessarily have to be deeply emotional or serious, so we just expect students to create and bring that type of poetry to perform and to share, and just to get it out there and get some experience performing in front of people because I think that is a really powerful experience for students to have.”

To some, the Poetry Café and the Poetry Slam could seem like the same thing, but there is a slight difference. Aside from the Poetry Café being an annual activity between the English department and the library, the Poetry Slam is more of a club.

“[With] the Poetry Slam, the people can be a little more selective about the choices they make, and they are more demonstrative. There is more body gestures and things like that [with the Poetry Slam], so it is a little different [than the Poetry Café] in the presentation style, and there’s not as many people, so it is a little more personal,” Sosna said.

Sinclair-King wants students to be able to enjoy everything about poetry.

“Honestly, I just want students to enjoy poetry. I think a lot of times we over-analyze poetry to the point where we take all the enjoyment out of it in school, and I think that if I just had one goal, whether it is teaching poetry in my classroom or whether it be with the poetry slam, it is just [for]students to see poetry as an artform and something they can enjoy,” Sinclair-King said.