Everything on this site

The site is one route with seven sections built around it. If you are here to write a poem this week, the route is the part to read and the rest can wait. If you are here because you have agreed to run six sessions and are not sure how, read the classroom section first and then walk the route yourself before a room of teenagers does.

What the words mean

Four short pages that settle the vocabulary before anything else uses it. What spoken word poetry is and what separates it from a poem written for the page, what actually happens at a poetry slam and how the scoring works, what performance poetry means and why the two terms are not quite interchangeable, and what a spoken word poet does. Start here if a room has been using these words at each other for a fortnight without agreeing on them.

• What spoken word poetry is, and what it is not
• What a poetry slam is, and why the score is not the point
• Performance poetry and page poetry: one poem, two lives
• What a spoken word poet is, and how anyone becomes one

The route, stage by stage

The spine of the site. Eleven stages that take a young writer from a first prompt to a poem performed and then to the week after, in the order they actually happen. Each stage says what it is for, what the writer does in it, what goes wrong there, what the adult in the room is doing, and what tells you it is finished. It can be read straight through as a six week course, or opened at whichever stage a poem is stuck in.

• The workshop route: from a first prompt to a microphone
• Where a poem starts when nothing has been assigned
• The first draft: your own life without the diary entry
• Revising your own draft, and reading it as a stranger
• Reading a draft aloud to a circle for the first time
• Feedback rules that keep honest criticism safe
• Learning a poem by heart, and what that changes
• Delivery: voice, pace, breath, hands and eyes
• Stage fright: what to do in the ninety seconds before you speak
• The microphone and the room
• The showcase, the recording and who agreed to what
• The week after: the notebook and the next poem

What a poem is made of

The devices a young writer actually reaches for, one page each, with the plain version first and the technical name second. Metaphor and the difference between metaphor and simile, imagery that a listener can see at speaking speed, repetition and the particular kind of repetition that opens a line, free verse, where a line breaks and why, how a poem is shaped as a whole, and the list poem, which is the single most reliable first poem there is.

• What a poem is made of
• Metaphor in poetry, and how to write one that is yours
• Metaphor, simile, analogy: which one you actually want
• Imagery: making a reader see the thing you saw
• Repetition: the device the microphone was made for
• Anaphora: the same opening, line after line
• Free verse: no rhyme scheme is not no rules
• Line breaks: the only punctuation a poem invented
• How a poem is built: structure, form and the persona
• The list poem, and the letter poem

The rooms, and the circuit

A poem said out loud needs somewhere to be said. These pages describe the rooms and how they work from the inside: the open mic and the etiquette nobody writes down, what happens over the course of a slam night, hosting a room and keeping it safe, recitation contests and how they differ from a slam, and the teams, festivals and youth laureate posts that a young writer can move into once the first performance is behind them.

• Where a poem gets said out loud
• Open mic: what it is and how to read at one
• How a slam night actually runs
• Running an open mic night
• Poetry Out Loud and the recitation contests
• Youth slam teams, festivals and poet laureates

Where the form came from

Spoken word did not begin with a school assembly, and a young writer is owed the real lineage rather than a sentence of it. The griot and the traditions of oral poetry that long predate the page, the Black Arts movement and what it argued poetry was for, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the invention of the slam, and the relationship between hip hop and poetry, which is closer and older than either side of the argument usually admits.

• Where spoken word came from
• The griot: the oral poet of West Africa
• The Black Arts movement and the poem said aloud
• The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the slam that followed
• Hip hop as a written craft, and what poetry took from it

Running it, as the adult

Written for the teacher, librarian, youth worker or volunteer rather than the writer. How a workshop is actually built and paced, how poetry is taught to teenagers without turning it into comprehension, what the evidence for the benefits of all this genuinely shows and where it is thinner than the leaflets suggest, and which published poems reliably work with a room of teenagers who have decided in advance that they hate poetry.

• Poetry in a school, a library or a community room
• Running a writing workshop in a school or library
• Teaching poetry so that somebody writes one
• What a poetry workshop is claimed to do, and what holds up
• Choosing poems to put in front of teenagers

Beyond the room

What happens to a poem once it exists and the showcase is over. Submitting to magazines and what an editor is reading for, publication and what it does and does not mean at that age, anthologies and how young writers get into them, putting work online and the rights a writer keeps or signs away when they do, and competitions and prizes, including the ones worth entering and the ones that exist to sell an anthology back to the entrant.

• Getting a poem heard beyond the room
• Sending a poem out for the first time
• Getting a poem published, and what publishing means
• What a poetry anthology is, and how to get into one
• Putting a poem online, and keeping your own words
• Poetry competitions for teenagers

A record of other people's work

A plain third party record of work that already exists, kept as a reference and nothing more. Documentaries about young people writing and performing, books worth putting in front of a teenager, and recordings and performances worth listening to. Nothing here is hosted, sold or embedded on this site, and every item is somebody else's to give.

• The record: work about young people writing and performing
• Documentaries about young poets and poetry workshops
• Books for a young writer, and books about the practice
• Where to hear spoken word poems performed

About this site

Who publishes Page to Mic, what it does not do, and the standing statement about the address it is published on.

• Page to Mic: young people writing and performing poems
• About Page to Mic, and about the domain it is published on