On Tuesday, April 23, the WHS slam poetry team housed a Poetry&Pizza performance in the library during lunch where members of the slam poetry team, as well as a handful of teachers and students not affiliated with the team, read and performed poems aloud as the audience ate complimentary slices of pizza.

“We’ve performed [our poems] for each other in the slam poetry club, but it was the first time we performed in front of other students,” junior Matt Cooper, a member of the slam poetry team, said.

Cooper and junior Roxi Habibi were the only members of the slam poetry team who performed on Tuesday. However, students who are not part of the slam poetry team, such as senior Jonathan von Mering, also performed.

“There’s a lot of overlap [between poetry and acting] because a lot of poetry is about expression,” von Mering, an active member of the Wayland High School Theater Ensemble, said. “It’s about beauty and a lot of plays are about expressing a very specific idea. In poetry, it’s the language that’s the only way of doing that.”

The WHS slam poetry team began this past winter and is currently practicing poems for the Louder Than A Bomb competition in May. The students on the team write and perform their own poetry to present at the competition.

Each poet is given the freedom to write poems about anything they want.

“I usually try to make it bigger than just the stereotypical kind of thing that people would expect from a teenager,” Cooper said. “But I definitely write about things that bother me in the world and how things are run.”

For now, the number of members on the team is fluctuating. However, Cooper hopes to have at least five or six members for the competitions and hopes that others will share his passion for poetry.

“Slam poetry is really about taking a simple idea and elaborating on it as much as possible,” Cooper said. “It’s very open and isolated and the poetry is the only thing there.”