YEAR  8 AUTHOR VISIT 

STUDENT POETRY 

On Wednesday the 26th of March, the Year 8 cohort was brought together to listen to guest speaker/author Joel McKerrow. It was great to listen to his tips on slam poetry, and I think that his insights will be great for the next topic that we will be doing. He told us about how he is able to write poetry and how to write a poem without putting alot of thought into it. He shared a poem with us about sitting in a coffee shop and witnessing the world around him and told us that if we just start to write and don’t think, the ideas will come to us clearer. It was helpful and a great opportunity to learn more about slam poetry in class. 

By Willow S, 8C. 

Joel McKerrow is a very talented author and poet who came into our school, MESC, to talk to us about what he did and how he did it. Joel showed us different ways of how he got himself started to write poetry and books, and sometimes the smallest things can spark the biggest ideas. We were told to “think on the page, instead of in your mind” and write our own poem about an emotion that we had recently felt, because sometimes poetry can be better than speaking about it in real life. Joel had been around many places to share his poetry and stories. Most of his ideas came from real life moments or memories that he had experienced. He talked about his son and how only later he noticed the small things in our world that we normally ignore, I believe the message of that story was to see the world in your own way and embrace the little things that normally go unnoticed. Big thanks to Joel McKerrow for helping us open the door to a new way of seeing our world. 

By Alexa T, 8D 

Joel asked students to use the sentence beginning and continue writing a poem. 

In English I say boredom…

But in poetry I say… there’s an infinite clock ticking down the seconds and minutes of how long I have to work and my attention drifts, my thoughts drift. I’m standing on a cliff, a boat filled with attention drifts, my thoughts blow the sails like wind and the boat moves through the sea of work and expectation and pressure and my thoughts blow my small attention boat into the crashing waves while the clouds of instructions float away, but all you see is boredom.

By Mia T, 8D.