About Page to Mic, and about the domain it is published on
About this reference
Page to Mic is an independent reference on how a young person writes a poem and gets it said out loud, published by nobody in particular and connected to nobody at all.
There is a lot written about poetry and very little written about the week in which a poem actually gets made by somebody who has never made one. That week has a shape. A prompt lands, a draft comes out badly, the draft gets cut, somebody reads it aloud for the first time and hears which lines were never really there, and then there is a room, a microphone that is too tall, and ninety seconds. This site is written about that week, stage by stage, for the person living it and for the adult holding the room while it happens.
Who this is for
Two readers, and every page has to serve both. The first is a young writer, usually somewhere between thirteen and nineteen, who has a poem to write and would rather have the next step than a lecture about the history of the form. The second is a teacher, a librarian, a youth worker or a volunteer who has agreed to run six weeks of poetry and wants to know how the session is built, what goes wrong inside it, and what to do when a room of fifteen year olds will not read anything out.
Where the two readers want different things, the page says so and answers both. The stages of the route are written to the young writer, with a short passage in each on what the adult in the room is doing while that stage happens. The classroom pages are written the other way round.
How this site is put together
The spine is the workshop route, eleven stages from a first prompt to keeping going after the showcase. Around it sit seven other sections: what the words mean, the devices a poem is made of, the rooms a poem gets performed in, where the form came from, running the session as the adult, the ways a poem reaches people who were not there, and a plain record of work that already exists. Everything on this site lists all of it in one place.
Pages are written from published, checkable sources and from the ordinary practice of workshops and open mic rooms. Where something is contested, or where the evidence for a claim about what poetry does for young people is thinner than the claim, the page says that rather than rounding it up.
What this site does not do
It does not sell anything, run a programme, book workshops, take submissions, host a competition or represent anybody. It publishes no poem written by a young writer, in any form, including as an example: a poem written at sixteen belongs to the person who wrote it, and a reference work has no business republishing one. Where the site names poets, films, books and organisations it names them as third parties, from public sources, and links nothing behind a paywall as though it were ours to give.
About this address
Plainly stated
What this site is, and what it is not
Page to Mic is a new, independent, non commercial reference on young people writing and performing spoken word poetry. Nothing is sold here, nothing is sponsored, and no poem written by a young writer is reproduced anywhere on this site.
This address was used in the past by a documentary film about a poetry workshop. Page to Mic is not that film, is not published by its makers, and is not connected to the To Be Heard Foundation, to Power Writers or to Power Poetry. It claims no continuity with any previous owner of this address and uses no former name. The film is described at Documentaries in the third person, as somebody else's work, and this site does not host, sell, embed or link a copy of it. A reader who came looking for the film should go to the To Be Heard Foundation, which publishes at tobeheardfoundation.org.
That statement is on every page of this site, including the pages served at old addresses that still have links pointing at them, because those are exactly where a reader arrives expecting somebody else.