Two teams from Upper 4 (Year 9) took part in the Devon Schools’ Poetry Slam workshop and competition at the Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival on Thursday 20 September 2018. The teams were Rose Finnegan and Alex Hudson, as well as Eleanor Cumbley and Daisy Hoban. Both teams wrote wonderful poems and performed them absolutely brilliantly, and they were a true credit to the school.
Led by John Paul O’Neill from Farrago Poetry and Aislinn Evans, the current UK poetry slam champion, the students started the workshops with free writing for 10 minutes inspired by the line ‘In one hour she said you will be walking the plank’. They then chose their favourite sentences as a starting point for their poems, adding lines and editing the poems until they had something they could perform. They had plenty of time to practise with performance tips from John Paul and Aislinn, and the slam took place at 5pm in front of an audience of parents, teachers, other festival attendees and a judging panel of three local poets. Everyone enjoyed the slam, with a lot of cheering, stamping and clapping for the young poets, and they all learned valuable lessons about creating and performing poetry.
