After years of writing in metaphors and similes, Venice High’s poetry team shared first place at this year’s Get Lit / Words Ignite! Classic Slam finals last month at the Wilshire Ebell Theater.
The poetry team has participated in Get Lit for the past nine years, and this year was the first year they’ve won. Twenty-five other schools from Los Angeles County competed.
Venice High tied with the two-time returning champions Mark Keppel High School.
Witham said that it felt even more special to get to share the victory.
“It was like double the amount of kids that were so ecstatic,” she said.
Students who performed at the finals included seniors Amy Carranza, Jaylen Germani and Jonathan Smith, and junior Zara Seldon. Other team members include sophomore Aarna Kumar and freshman Prianna Singhania.
Smith wrote a poem called, “If High School Isn’t a Fairytale, Then Why Do I Feel Like Magic?,” to capture the magic that high school can make you feel. He wanted to have this poem as something he could look back on to remember all his high school experiences. He said that it felt so amazing for Venice to get to take home this trophy.
“Just the fact that Venice had never won before in the nine years they’ve been competing,” he said. “It made me feel really proud.”
Venice had made it to the finals twice before, but it was during the pandemic.
“The other two times that we made it to the final stage it wasn’t on a stage it was on a screen,” said English teacher Hazel Kight-Witham, a coach alongside English teacher Samantha Cline. “That did not feel like the win that it felt to see this years team reach final stage.”
There are a lot of poets whose stories can really captivate the judges—and no one has any control over that. So Witham went in with the idea that even just making it to final stage would be rewarding.
Some of her poets went in with an opposite mindset and instead said, “we’re going to win,” according to Witham.
“But then to actually win was pretty phenomenal,” said Witham. “It was an affirmation of all the really hard work that our poets did.”