Good things are happening! Our pilot project in Walker Riverside Academy is well underway and it is so exciting to be starting our work.
For those of you who missed it, SlamFresh are a community interest company made up of myself (Rowan McCabe), Michael MacDonald (pen name Donald Jenkins) and Jeff Price. Our aim is to help young people around the North East and beyond to write and perform their own spoken word poetry.
The first step of that mission is to run a pilot project in Walker Riverside Academy, to hone a model that we can then roll out to schools around the region. We’ve just started a 7-week project with a group of year 8 and year 9 students, and we’ll be meeting once a week to guide the young people through the process of writing, editing and rehearsing their own poems.
We got to Walker Riverside, signed in at the reception and went up to the room. Our 8 students started to filter in and sit themselves down. They’ve all put themselves forward for this, having just come out of a project ran by Seven Stories. We kicked off by playing an alliterated name game to get to know each other, before having a conversation about what poetry means to us.
One student talked about how he liked poetry, but the process of studying it for an exam could be exhausting. It made me remember what we’re doing this for. We explained that the purpose of these sessions was to express ourselves, to speak out about issues that were important to us, and to maybe not get so hung up on picking the structure of each poem apart.
Me and Donald then demonstrated what a poetry slam looks like by going head-to-head in front of the group, inviting 3 volunteers to be judges. After this we led the group through a series of writing exercises, inviting them to redefine commonly used words and make group poems from the results. We talked about zebras with yellow stripes, how bones are just meat sticks, and all of the many things you can do in 3 minutes.
While laying some ground rules near the start, I mentioned that perhaps we should avoid ‘isms’ in our writing e.g racism, sexism etc.
‘But some isms are good,’ suggested one student. ‘What about socialism?’
I can’t wait to meet up with this bunch next week. I’m really looking forward to hearing what they come up with next.
Spoken Word Workshops 