Last week at Schine Underground, the National Association of Latino Fraternal Organizations’ Lambda Alpha Upsilon Fraternity, Inc. hosted the fourth-annual Slam 4 Scholarship, a creative competition in which local high school students shared their talents in exchange for scholarship funds. The night was filled with powerful poetry readings, musical flair and open-mic sessions.

April is National Poetry Month, and there is no better time than now to celebrate the art form. While poetry is appreciated for its beauty in the literary world, poetry must also be recognized as a powerful method for invoking social change. Its conventions allow poets to share messages in creative and inspiring ways.

At the Slam 4 Scholarship event, one high school contestant performed hip-hop and another read a poem. The two split the contest’s $1,000 prize evenly. While the judges from Nu Rho Poetic Society deliberated, Syracuse University students from the audience got up on stage and read their poetry. A local resident also went up and performed stand-up comedy.

It’s events like these that keep us grounded in our efforts to create a more positive, inclusive campus environment, and poetry’s a great mechanism to do that. Through creative writing, writers share their most vulnerable and honest thoughts.

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“Poems don’t shake things up because they’re merely pretty — that’s a painting in a motel room, whose aesthetic is meant to match the drapes,” said John T. Casteen IV, an assistant professor in the academic and professional writing program at the University of Virginia. “Poems express a sense of things that’s inherently transgressive — all real art does. It asserts that the world is not enough as it is, that the world can only become more complete and less imperfect if the poem speaks to people.”

Similar to the way art visually conveys an artist’s experience, poetry can be a direct account of how people navigate life. That can open up perspectives and allow us to hear, from the poet’s own voice, how they are affected by their place in the world.

“Poems don’t use language to communicate but to explore, discover and challenge,” Casteen said.

The SU community has celebrated the power of poetry all month. The graduate creative writing program has been hosting the Raymond Carver Reading Series, featuring several authors of different backgrounds. The next reading will feature Indian American novelist Karan Mahajan on Wednesday.

Poetry imparts knowledge about how others exist in our community. It offers insight into experiences we may not ourselves have access to. By engaging more often with poetry, we can find new and creative ways to challenge our thinking.

Jennifer Bancamper is a sophomore double major in English and textual studies and writing and rhetoric. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at jbancamp@syr.edu.

Published on April 21, 2019 at 11:57 pm