Precision Poetry Drill Team
NPR New Mexico School Lets Students Letter in Poetry from April 23, 2005 Click to listen to the report.
Picture 20,000 people cheering, waving, with shouts and applause washing over us. The young poets are chanting:
Tyger, tyger burning bright!
The huge crowd is chanting along. This is the Precision Poetry Drill Team (PPDT). The teenage poets are leaping up and down as if on pogo sticks. As their poetry coach, I spin and pump my fist and leaping about. As far as we can see the throng of people, three football field lengths of people are cheering. This is a poetry dream come true.
The concept of chanting a poem shifts the expectation of how poetry may be presented. It may tap poetry into its roots as an oral art form. By considering the poetry may be chanted it opens up the performance of poetry to include cheerleading calls and military marching cadences.
I honed the call and response technique during my work with the “Precision Poetry Drill Team,” as the Poetry Coach at Desert Academy, in Santa Fe, New Mexico working with middle and high school students using this technique we were featured on National Public Radio.
You may hear the PPDT perform “The Tyger,” Blake, “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge and “We Real Cool,” Brooklyn at the link to the NPR story on the Precision Poetry Drill Team in the comments.
Also, the student could letter in Poetry!
Zozobra
Performing at the Zozobra festival was a thrill. Zozobra had its start in 1924 when a group of Santa Fe artists led by Will Shuster decided to create an effigy called “Old Man Gloom,” and set him on fire in a ritual burning.
Zozobra means anxiety in Spanish and people are encouraged to write their “glooms,” on a piece of paper and stuff them into the effigy so that their worries go up in smoke when the man is burned. I hope that little bit of New Mexican history gives you a sense of what an honor it was to get to perform poetry at the festival.
The organizers had invited the Precision Poetry Drill Team to perform early in the event and if they liked what we did they would invite us back to perform just before the burning of the man for the full audience.
The stage was on top of a hill at the end of a string of playing fields. We got to the concert early and performed for a few thousand people milling around and setting up blankets to settle in for the night. The organizers loved what we did and told us to come back at 9pm to perform for the complete 20,000 crowd.
PPDT was Sky Sadler, Zak Hoerning-Silva, Jake Hayman, Danny Ross, Joe Clark, Lucas Buck, Phoebe Toole, Zoe Morris and Tashi Yazid.
Performing at the Zozobra festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2006, for this huge crowd of people was one of the highlights of my life as a poet.