April is National Poetry Month, this means that English teachers go crazy trying to make you aware of poetry/they haven’t taught it to you yet and this is the greatest time of year to do so.  My English teacher likes to go a little crazier and set her super slow computer up to a projector to show us some Def Jam.  We usually convince her to show us at least four different poems, even though our AP test is looming in the distance.  There was this one time, three years ago, in her first year of teaching, that she showed us some Def Jam to my class (we were freshmen…) that wasn’t exactly appropriate for our 14 and 15 year old ears.  It was awesome.

Anyways, since April is poetry month I was informed that if I went to this poetry thing at Hampshire College I would get extra credit.  Now, Hampshire College is practically in my backyard and in all my years I have never been there.  Hampshire College is pretty well known for being weird.  I’ve heard rumors of clothes optional dorms and the fact that the whole campus has a distinct smell.  So, I convinced one of my friends to go with me and we went.

We were like the fourth and fifth people to show up and when we got there we realized that the feature we had come to see actually wasn’t “performing” until 9, it was 8.  So, after we tried to steal some poetry books (we were unaware that we had to pay for them) we settled in for an hour of open mic.

It was REALLY AWESOME.

Now, I’ve never really had a beef with poetry, but I know a lot of other people that do.  Really, I don’t understand their hate of it.  It’s really not that hard, especially if you ignore all that meter and rhyme stuff.  Just free style it and then you can have fun with it.  I greatly enjoy watching Def Jam and I give people a lot of credit to go up there and pour their souls out in a poem.  There was this one guy who never seemed to wear shoes.  I mean, his feet were really dirty.  He got up there and pretty much recited a love poem and this other girl got up there with a memorized poem put out their for all black women.  It was powerful stuff.  I won’t lie, I was jealous that I didn’t have anything awesome to read.

Then, the feature got up and this was pretty exciting, because he’s like famous…and stuff.  He also managed to write a poem based off of everyone else’s poems that had come before him.  He was Taylor Mali and he was highly amusing.  I bought this sweet $5 pen that had his poem “What Teachers Make” inside of it.  He also inspired me to participate in the 30-30 challenge next year.