Rutgers-Camden Creative Writing Lecturer Michael Haeflinger invites our readership to attend Camden’s inaugural Louder Than a Bomb at the Rut-Cam Student Center, from 10am-4pm March 22nd.
I have just come from the individual poetry slam finals for Louder Than a Bomb in Chicago, where I am attending the National Symposium of Louder Than a Bomb Organizers. In the indy finals, twelve young poets took the stage to tell their stories about a variety of topics ranging from teen pregnancy to school closings to hip hop to family. For a packed house at the Broadway theater, these young poets left everything the had on the stage and left those of us in the audience gasping, crying, and laughing along with them.
In some ways, I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, I’ve been here before. In 2005, I organized my first Louder Than a Bomb poetry slam festival in Chicago. There were 44 teams that year from schools, community organizations, poetry clubs, and after school ciphers. Over 400 youth represented every corner of this sprawling metropolis and the event lasted four days. When I left in 2007, after planning my third LTAB, we had 60 schools, nearly 600 teen poets, and a week’s worth programming. This year’s LTAB in Chicago is 115 teams, who knows how many poets, and 30 days worth of programming.
What a lot of people don’t know is that Louder Than a Bomb, made famous worldwide by a documentary released in 2009 (louderthanabombfilm.com), is that LTAB began with a few committed teaching artists and handful of teams in a basement community theater in Chicago’s Ukranian Village neighborhood. I always understood the mythology as being four teams, though last night it was suggested from the stage that there were twelve teams in the original LTAB, started by teaching artists and poets Anna West and Kevin Coval. In any case, those first days were modest and it’s hard to imagine that LTAB would’ve grown to the levels it has in just fourteen years.
Since 2009, LTABs have been popping up all over the country. In Massachusetts, a handful of LTAB-Chicago alums (including Anna West) started a program based essentially in Boston (among their ranks, a South Jersey native who’s here this week). In Michigan, an already well established writing program in Ann Arbor adopted LTAB as a model for spoken word education in their communities. In South Dakota, LTAB happens largely on a Native America reservation. In Dallas, Tulsa, Lincoln, Greensboro, and D.C., local spice flavors the basic recipe for creating community around teen poetry.
In Camden, we ask our poets to let us into their spaces, into the imaginations, into their lives. We meet on Saturdays in the backs of bookstores and after school in library conference rooms. We write poems and rewrite poems and rewrite them again in order to to rewrite the narrative of the places from which we come, places deemed to be less than or valueless by national media. We cross streets to meet poets who don’t look like us, poets who don’t sound like us, poets who take buses to school, poets who walk, poets who drive themselves. We forget for three minutes at a time that we live in one of the battlegrounds for national urban policy and remember that the heart that beats in the chest of Camden is the heart of the poet: open, loving, enraged and enraging, engaged and engaging, willing to give and forgive.
On March 22, we continue our journey to be Louder Than a Bomb. Six teams comprised of more than fifty young poets from Camden’s city high schools, middle schools, charter schools, as well as writers from Collingswood and Gloucester City, come together as one movement, ready to stand up and give voice to their generation. The event begins at 10 a.m., with events all day. Included among the events will be an open mic that is, as the name suggests, open to anyone of any age. (So be sure to pack some poems when you come.) We have opportunities for people to get involved as judges and volunteers, just email me at mikehaef@camden.rutgers.edu and we will get you signed up. LTAB has been a real community effort and we have been blessed to have such outpouring from local poets, parents, teachers, and students.
In the meantime, I am here in Chicago reconnecting with old friends I don’t get to see enough, building with organizers who’ve come from much further than I have, and talking about the work we’ve all been doing in Camden since August. I am here in Chicago riding trains I used to ride to places I used to go, feet gliding down memory lane, appreciative and happy to have been a small part a long time ago of something that has affected so many people I will never meet. I am here in Chicago representing South Jersey proudly with my LTAB-CMD t-shirt and a backpack full of stories about the amazing kids I’ve gotten to know and the great poems I’ve heard from them so far. I am here in Chicago soaking it all in and letting myself get caught up in it all, but honestly, I can’t wait to get home.
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Can’t believe I just happened on this article nearly 14 months after it was posted…but glad to have had the opportunity to read it! Michael Haeflinger, your presence in Camden/SJ is greatly missed–our area’s loss is another section of the country’s gain.
PS: The young man from Boston–originally from South Jersey– who was at the LTAB National Symposium was introduced to spoken word when his mother (yes, that would be me) brought him to Transition’s Soul Fire Tuesday at the Sixth Street Lounge in Camden. A sophomore in high school, he’d never had poetry ignite his passion to write & perform quite like what he was exposed to that night by “Akademics,” “Blaakbuttafly,” Wm. Sankofa, “Quiet Rage” & other talented performance poets/spoken word artists.
Camden (&surrounding area) has always had more than its share of talented poets, musicians & other creative artists. LTAB CMD is a welcome addition to organizations which foster creative self expression in our youth.