School poetry tour seeks to ‘find your stride’

Finding Your Stride is the theme for this year’s eighth staging of the annual Jamaica Poets Nomadic College and School Tour, from November 3 – 15. The tour will target 50 schools across the island organised as hubs and also will mark the launch of Jamaku and Selected Poems, the latest publication of tour founder Malachi Smith.

The tour, said Smith, is about “creative works capturing the human condition and is, therefore, a tool for social transformation”. As such, there is the commitment to engage high school students in particular about “personal resolve, self-worth, and self-esteem through the artform of poetry”. Notably, throughout the years, the tour has also enhanced schools’ curriculum delivery of English language and literature.

The tour will be launched on Monday, November 3, at 6:30 p m at the Dennis Scott Studio Theatre at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, which is endorsing the school tour.

Guest speaker will be Natalie Corthésy, senior lecturer, Faculty of Law, UWI Mona. Corthésy is the Calabash International Literary Festival Poetry Workshop Fellow and the 2020 winner of the Caribbean Writer’s Marvin Williams for her work The Helper Experiment.

Hosting the event will be Amina Blackwood Meeks.

Jamaku and Selected Poems, the latest publication by Smith, is a reconstruct of the Japanese artform Haiku, a short form of poetry originally consisting of three phrases with longer poems over time being produced. The book is the author’s defining life’s journey of all that is deeply rooted in his experiences in Jamaica and of his eye-opening experiences as well in the US, where he resides.

The tour will also be staging two workshops for educators and members of the public. The first on November 5 at the Bethlehem College, St Elizabeth, will be hosted by Opal Palmer Adisa. The second workshop will be staged on Saturday, November 15, at the Department of Literatures in English, UWI, Mona, and will be presented by Aisha Spencer.

A line-up of poets will be presenting their work throughout the tour, including Kwame McPherson, Opal Palmer Adisa, Christine Neil-Wright, Darwitt St Aubyn, Charlie Bobus, Antonia Valeire, Marlon Thompson, Curtis Myrie, Tomlin Ellis, and Malachi Smith.