Clad in gray polo shirts and khaki pants, the students find seats among clusters of small desks in history teacher Dave Stieber’s classroom.
“First up to the stage, the first poet from TEAM Englewood is …,” says Stieber, an instructor at TEAM Englewood Community Academy, mimicking a TV announcer.
Johnathan Nesbitt, 16, rises before a name is called and approaches the “stage” — topaz-flecked linoleum lit by a fluorescent rectangle.
His dimples flash as he recounts, in verse, a bad breakup that “crumbled like a chocolate chip cookie.”
“You seem more natural today,” Stieber says. “Do you feel like you can’t breathe in certain spots?”
Nesbitt shakes his head.
“At one time, it was like you were trying to search for a breath. Maybe that’s something to be aware of.”
The gentle critique comes as Nesbitt and six other TEAM Englewood Community Academy sophomores — Melana Bass , Myara Robinson, Kadedra Hill, Keith Warfield, Jeremey Johnson and Montrel Marks — prepare for the teen poetry slam Louder Than A Bomb.
View photos of TEAM Englewood at Louder Than a Bomb.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, Louder Than A Bomb has blossomed from a dozen teams battling in a sweaty basement to 60 teams competing over a week, said poet Kevin Coval , the slam’s co-founder.
The lyrical duel, put on by nonprofit group Young Chicago Authors and Columbia College Chicago, occurs in two bouts — each against three other teams, each requiring four individual performances and one group piece. Participants have three minutes to share an original poem that a panel of judges, sitting in the audience, scores on dry-erase boards.
Four teams reach the finals, to be held Saturday at The Vic Theatre. The winning troupe and six individual poets represent Chicago at the international Brave New Voices poetry slam set for July in Los Angeles.
LTAB uses the competition as a way to expose more people to poetry and unite participants across racial and socioeconomic lines, Coval says. One young poet described it as “meeting a family that you never knew.”
Though Coval warns teens against taking the contest too seriously (“take the writing seriously,” he says), TEAM Englewood has gathered weekly this winter to practice, sometimes at Nesbitt’s house.
“They feel great about what they’re doing. They believe in their pieces. They believe in each other,” says Melissa Hughes, another coach who teaches reading and language arts at TEAM Englewood.
Back in Stieber’s room, he and Hughes take notes in composition books during each performance and monitor a digital stopwatch.
Then come suggestions: Keep hands out of pockets. Control “the giggles.” Slow down. Articulate.
Next come questions: Are you going to walk across the stage freely with the mic in your hand? Or leave it on the stand and remain stationary?
The team, which competed in LTAB for the first time last year, had several questions of its own while trying to fashion a group piece. The piece features not only four poets, but four different writing styles and four opinions.
Bass, 16, a vocal leader who says she will not commit a poem to paper until it has been thoroughly edited in her head, describes the endeavor as “just complete chaos.”
“It’s just always that one person who doesn’t agree with something,” she says , adding that even cutting random lines of poetry and pasting them on boards didn’t work.
Focusing on a theme — “listen” — became a source of frustration, Stieber says.
But once the students stopped arguing and started listening, their group piece, “A Poet’s Prayer,” about what they hoped their poetry would accomplish — be “so miraculous that the heavens will sing ‘aaahhh'” — emerged.
“It’s like, we’re telling the audience to listen to us, but we weren’t even listening to each other,” said Warfield , 16. “So we said out loud, ‘We gotta listen to each other in order for this to work.'”
First battle
At the preliminary competition — the week after practice in Stieber’s room — where an elevated platform rises amid some 150 spectators, balance seems to be the last thing on the young poets’ minds.
Huddled with their coaches, they say a prayer.
“You guys got eight minutes to get your nerves out — jog, stretch, whatever,” Stieber says.
Instead, seven bodies form a line, noses nearly pressed against the neon-green wall at Columbia College’s Conway Center. Cacophonic verse erupts as each teen moves hands in sync with verbs.
Warfield shows no sign of nerves when it’s his turn. Girls yell collective “aww’s” and “woo-hoo’s” as he tells the story of meeting his girlfriend on a school bus where he always sits in the window seat.
The girl “whose love I get so high off I could look down and go fishin’ for airplanes” changes not only his heart, but also his penchant for a particular seat. Down the line, after the couple was “diggin’ each other like wedgies,” Warfield proclaims: “When we take the train home from here, I’ll be sitting in the aisle seat.” (Insert “awww.”)
Bass earns fans, too, during her poem, “A Defined Goddess.” Audience members burst into applause when the self-described “gorgeous, thick Madame,” wearing side-swept spiral curls and a fingerless black glove, dubs herself “God’s fourth gift to man, right after me, myself, and I.” Judges, equally impressed, award her the highest individual score of the afternoon.
It’s the kind scene that has outsiders taking notice of LTAB’s teen competitors. Emmy award-winning filmmakers Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs profiled four Chicago-area high school teams during the 2008 slam in their documentary ” Louder Than A Bomb .” (The film is currently in post-production and set to debut next month at the Cleveland International Film Festival.)
TEAM Englewood poets also are set to showcase their work this spring in a scheduled performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that combines poetry with live classical music, said Cayenne Harris, the orchestra association’s director of learning and access initiatives.
But in this moment during the preliminaries, a DJ spins rap tunes while volunteers tabulate the scores from the bout. Myara Robinson nervously taps her sneakers and clutches her cheeks.
Prodded to try spoken word a year ago by teachers, the 15-year-old perhaps most embodies the spirit of a competitions where young people speak their truth — and discover its value surpasses the marks on a score card.
Says Coval: “This for a million reasons disproves most of the fallacies that exist about young people — particularly young urban people, particularly in the city of Chicago. I think we know better.”
When TEAM Englewood wins the preliminary bout by four points, Robinson’s teammates scream, and the young woman can’t stop smiling. (The team will compete in a semifinal Monday at the Steppenwolf Theatre. )
“I really feel like all our hard work has paid off,” she says. “I’m hoping to do this for the rest of high school, probably into college.”
