All’s fair in love and poetry… In February, members of our slam poetry team competed amongst other schools in a poetry competition called Poetry Out Loud, immersing themselves into this world of poetry. This month, they returned to the world of poetry with their advisor, Dottie Burkart, whom is no stranger to this world, as this marks her 13th year coaching a slam poetry team.
“What I love about this year’s poems is that they are so diverse in subject matter,” Burkart expresses her exuberance to be able to coach her slam team back into quarters, as the Keppel slam team, SNAP (Speak Now All Poets) has usually been the bellwether of their competition in previous years. This year’s cohesive team made their odds of winning auspiciously favorable. “We run the spectrum of what I think teenagers are confronting, trying to manage, and grapple with. I think for that reason, I’m particularly impressed with this year’s poets. The goal of our writing is to connect.”
In recent years prior, Keppel has been fortunate enough to have won each of GetLit’s annual slam poetry competitions that they have competed in. For students such as junior, Gabby Wong, also known as Lex, this victorious trend has dated all the way back to their freshman year– making them currently the only member on Keppel’s slam team to see victory in all of the years they have been at Keppel.
“My journey in poetry [began] my freshman year, when I joined the snap team, and it was in this first time that I did this that I realized poetry isn’t just something I’m interested in, but something I am good at, each year that I’ve been on the team something new has developed in me,” Wong dissects their journey with poetry, and their journey with the team. “Each of us was able to connect with each other. [All] of these little experiences formed a bond that we have today, which honestly I think is a lifelong friendship bond that we’ll take with us even when we go off to college.”
Though let this not take away from the victory of the other fantastic teammates, all seniors, Zenina Adao, Maryam Tall, Abby Gong and Samantha Rios who demonstrated astounding emotion and sentiment in their performances. Adao, Rios, and Tall have been on the team for two years now but this year was Gong’s first on the team. With fingers snapping all around, their team has proved their passion to poetry in their poems on the stage. This, their final year at Keppel, is no doubt to go out with a slam.
“A lot of my inspirations are drawn from personal experiences,” Adao shares what inspires her poetic expression, and how that has helped her strive. “A lot of what I write is hopefully [relatable], and makes [people] feel heard. A majority of them are like ‘Ok, let me get my feelings out,’ and then when I go through slam and the revision process, I think ‘Ok, how can I make my story heard and how can people relate to that and make them feel heard.’ [That] has helped me figure out how to express myself when I’m stressed out.”
With nothing but their hearts held high, Keppel’s slam poetry team comprised of Adao, Gong, Rios, Tall and Wong, along with a myriad of Burkhart’s students who came along for the ride and to support their team, they arrived at Get Lit Quarter Finals which were held in Downtown, Los Angeles. There they reunited with many other friendly poets they have previously acquainted themselves with at prior competitions, eager to share their pieces.
One of the most of very many striking and substantial poems at quarters came from Keppel’s very own, Rios. Sniffles could be heard as she poured her heart and story onto the stage, and the hearts of the audience. Her moving solo poem scoring so well, it tied as the highest poem in the competition with a group poem from another school. To have a solo poem be on par with a group poem is not an easy status to achieve. Rios’s poem, a revered memory she was able to produce for the judges as well as everyone else in the room, gained the judges’ acclaim.
“I first started to think about treasured moments with my dad,” Rios reflects on the process of how she crafted her introspective piece for the competition, and how it resonates with her. “I got into some really personal parts of stuff that’s happened, and I think that’s really the key of it; not being afraid of darkest hours– embracing it, and using the competition to turn it into something new.”
After advancing into the Semifinals, Keppel’s team competed against several other schools, such as Bravo High School, Harvard Westlake High School, Hamilton High School, OCSA and more. From Rios’s tearjerker to Tall’s conversation with God, Keppel succeeded in making it into the final four competitors, specifically amongst the top two of the four teams, advancing themselves to the finals held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on Saturday where they made Get Lit history. This year, Keppel shared their victory with Venice High School’s slam poetry team. Both teams ended finals with the exact same points, and instead of the making the teams battle it out, Get Lit awarded both teams the first place, making history for the first ever tie in over a decade of the competition’s history. Not only this, but Keppel becomes the first team to ever win three competitions in a row, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Congrats to both Keppel and Venice for an amazing competition. And as is the organization and the competition’s motto, ‘the points are not the point, the point is the poetry’.
