Last February, a few weeks before the Louder Than a Bomb teen poetry slam, Ciara Miller woke up at 3 AM. Her mother was yelling and banging on her bedroom door. “I looked out the window and it looked like the stuff from Rescue 911 or something,” she says. “The whole house [next door] was on fire. I started shaking and panicking.” As the fire spread to her building and the apartment began to fill with smoke, Ciara bundled her baby sister, Sagia, into her coat and fled down the back stairs into the alley. A few hours later her mother checked them into a motel, where they stayed for two days before moving to an aunt’s house. By Ciara’s count, about 12 people were already at her aunt’s, sleeping four or five to a bed. Not all of them were relatives. She woke up with feet nudging her throat, and had to hide her journal from curious cousins. All her belongings–including years’ worth of writing and the piece she’d been memorizing for the slam–had been left in the partially burned apartment.
Brave New Voices brought 20 teams from 12 states to Chicago. On the first day David and Ciara skipped school and took the bus to the Chicago Historical Society, where that afternoon’s bouts were held, to check out the other teams. The All-Stars were scheduled to compete at 5 PM. At ten till, just as the teams and their coaches began gathering in the auditorium, the last All-Star showed up–she’d been stuck in traffic on the Dan Ryan. Hip-hop beats filled the room and kids clustered in the aisles, hugging each other, bobbing their heads to the music, and swigging water.
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The emcee got things started with a nod to good sportsmanship: “It’s important that we give all the youth a lotta lotta love, because they’ve come from a lotta far places, and it’s important for them to feel comfortable up here. If I say give the poet love, what is it gonna sound like?” People hollered and whistled and stomped their feet. Then the emcee explained that the sacrificial poet should be performing first, but it seemed she wasn’t here yet, so…
The All-Stars placed second, but they won the next day, beating the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Center team as well as teams from New York City and Winnetka. The noise was deafening, with much of the audience jumping up and down, chanting “Ten! Ten! Ten!” after each of the All-Stars’ performances.
Though they’re rarely seen apart at poetry events, they swear they’re just friends. “David is not my type,” Ciara says, “because I know him personally; I know he has these shifts in attitude.” She doesn’t like the way he mouths off sometimes, and his love of trendy clothing gets on her nerves. But she also says they’re too much alike: “We think too much the same; we always jinx, say the same thing at the same time. I don’t like that.” They have an agreement about certain key words that one or the other has claimed. (“Haven” is Ciara’s. So is “configuration.”) “He’s gotta ask me, is this your word?” Ciara says, laughing. “I look at him like, yep, that’s my word, take it out!”
Betts had been slamming for years before she began coaching. She stopped competing herself to focus on writing, but she still sees slam as “a really good opportunity for kids….Performance poetry is a good way to build their confidence and get them to be confident articulating what they’re thinking to others.” During the weeks leading up to 2003’s Louder Than a Bomb, she earned the nickname “Mama” for her moral support and devotion to her students’ work, and for sometimes coming through with rides, cab fare, or a snack at McDonald’s. “She was there for us,” Ciara says, though she admits that when she first worked with Betts, she thought Betts was too strict: “If you came in late she’d stare up at that clock.” Now, she says, Betts is one of the few adults with whom she feels comfortable discussing things like crushes on boys or her fights with her mom.
David tried flattery, telling Ciara that she was the best poet he knew, “for real,” and reminding her that “holding off is your worst trait.” Only after David performed one of his pieces–“Filas,” a critique of brand consciousness and its effect on teenagers’ self-confidence–did she agree to recite “Our Nation’s Rapist,” the poem Betts referred to. David took the baby.
