The art of poetry can appear obscure
and many may not understand it’s allure
However, if you’ve got the time,
Nadia Najam will reveal what it means to rhyme.
Not every poem must rhyme, but for junior and Youth Poetry Fellow Nadia Najam, it simply makes the poem flow better.
This autumn marks Najam’s first year in the Youth Poetry Fellowship, a collective of ten young poets that meet up several times throughout the year with mentors to develop their poetry skills through workshops and have the opportunity to perform their poetry.
“I’ve been writing poetry for a while, but I never got to express that publicly with people,” Najam said. “Then I found this fellowship, and it was a chance to perform my poems and put them out in public.”
Their first meeting was in late September, where the cohorts received notebooks to start brainstorming their next poems.
“Right now my poems are all in my Notes app, but I’m trying to write them down in one place so they’re not as random,” Najam said.
For Najam, her passion for writing and the arts has been alive ever since she was around seven years old.
“I used to write songs a lot when I was younger, but I never actually made it into music,” Najam said. “And so I thought ‘what if I just keep the lyrics and make it a poem instead?’”
Although she’s moved from songwriting to poetry, one thing has remained constant for Najam: rhyming.
“If it doesn’t rhyme…” Najam said. “Well sometimes it doesn’t rhyme, but mostly it does.”
Other than rhyming, Najam’s poems stem from the emotions she feels when she’s in a “certain mood”.
“When I’m at a peak emotion, I try to write about it and make it sound pretty,” Najam said. “Like when I’m at a low point in my life or when I feel super happy.”
Poetry is a written expression of Najam’s own emotions, but she also sees poetry as a way to understand others.
“When you listen or read other people’s poems you get a sense of the inside of their mind,” Najam said. “You get a perspective of who they are as a person and I feel like that’s super powerful.”
(“We don’t always get the chance to look at what other people are going through sometimes, because we tend to focus on ourselves.”)
Charlotte Soliven
At times, the words on a page demand to be more than read by eyes alone. They swirl around the page, asking to be shared until at last, they are performed for an audience with awaiting ears.
For Charlotte Soliven, a junior and second-year member of the YPF, this is one of the best parts of poetry. Through YPF, she gets to perform her poems at events after being paired with an author.
“Last year I had the Rick Riordan event and this year I read for Connie Chung,” Soliven said. For reference, Connie Chung is an Asian-American broadcast journalist who was one of the first female reporters on U.S national TV.
Within the cohort, there are also individual readings where fellows share their poems with each other.
“These are personally my favorite, because you get to see what poems we choose to work on, not just the ones that are written for a formal event,” Soliven said. “But the Connie Chung event was fun because I got to read one of my older poems, and I would say I owe everything to this poem.”
As a child, Soliven would write little poems, but it wasn’t until 8th grade that she began to take it more seriously.
“I wrote this poem about a mother-daughter relationship [expressed through food] for Ms. Foltz’s Honors Lit. class and my mom found it coming out of the printer,” Soliven said. “I remember being scared of her seeing it, but as I walk in, she’s in tears. She’s wiping her tears with one hand, and in her other there’s a red pen that she’s circling lines with.”
Since then, Soliven has edited her poem “Three Words, Three Times a Day”, and improved it by showing it to people and applying the skills she’s learned in the YPF.
“I’m in a constant battle of loving this poem and disliking it. I’ve been editing that poem forever and it’s gotten me into the fellowship twice with different versions of it,” Soliven said. “Getting to read it in front of a big crowd felt like a perfect ending to that story. Now I get to be satisfied with it and put it away.”
In addition to sharing their poems with an audience, fellows also receive free admission to various poetry readings.
“You get a chance to be exposed to poetry in a way you can’t get through reading,” Soliven said. “I don’t think poetry should stay on a page.”
Every time she goes to a poetry event, Soliven has been known to shed a few tears ( over the writing of other poets.) [added for spacing purposes]
“I have this reputation among the YPF because everytime I go to these events I cry,” Soliven said. “I swear I’m not a sensitive person, but it gets me.”
Outside of the YPF, Soliven also teaches elementary schoolers poetry at The Bureau of Fearless Ideas, a Seattle-based nonprofit organization that promotes creative writing with young children.
“I’m always amazed by the kids and what they come up with,” Soliven said. “In a lot of ways, I find it more inspiring that the poets I see through the YPF program because it feels so unattainable and it’s nice to be reminded of where you started from.”
At Liberty, Soliven is also the founder and president of Poetry Society, where everyone is encouraged to tap into their creative side.
“Poetry should be for everyone, even if you’re not good or even if you’re terrible,” Soliven said. “Everyone deserves to be creative. It’s just another skill we should practice, like math or science.”
Lexie Rand
After four years of writing and compiling poems in Word Documents, Lexie Rand is ready to publish her book. On top of that, she’s ready for her first year of joining the YPF.
Rand mostly writes narrative poetry, but she’s hoping to expand her array of styles through the YPF.
“I had just finished writing my book before I applied,” Rand said. “It’s called “Flower Shop” and it’s a collection of poetry. After finishing writing it, I wanted to find an outlet that could know about it and find a program that I could learn to improve the poems in my book.”
At the age of 13, Rand had started writing a book, one she didn’t even realize would become a book yet.
“It was Mother’s Day and I told myself ‘I feel like I’m over the fact that my mom died’” Rand said. “And I wrote a short story about it.”
What started a journal began to grow as Rand added more short stories to it, which eventually turned into poems.
“I wrote this poem called “Where Did the Dragonflies Go?”, which I used as an application poem for the YPF,” Rand said. “It was about a younger me confronting grief and understanding where my mom went and why.”
“I couldn’t physically say my mom’s name in a conversation because it was too painful to think about,” Rand said. “After I started writing and wrote that poem, I could.”
That was when she decided she would make that little online journal of poems and stories into a book.
“I spent the entirety of the book talking about grieving, and living with grief, and loving, and being a kid, and a human,” Rand said. “Which is super ironic, because the first poem I wrote in it was about how much I’d gotten over it.”
After editing, Rand’s book is structured into seven parts, with each one based on a different flower and emotion that goes with it.
“The first part is about roses; the second part is about bleeding hearts; the third part is about dandelions; the fourth part is about lilies; then sunflowers; then tulips; and then forget-me-nots,” Rand said.
Now that she’s completed the book, Rand is on a mission to get it published and out into the world.
“Publishing that book would mean the world to me,” Rand said. “I would be able to say that I did something for myself; I did something to make my mom proud; and I did something that generations of writers in my family could never do until me.”
In publishing “Flower Shop”, Rand hopes that people who have experienced grief can connect with her poetry and know that they aren’t alone.
“Grief might not end, but it does change, and eventually it’ll be a scar, not an open wound. It might open all the same, but it’ll close eventually,” Rand said. If you have lost someone or something, I hope you can learn to remember the memory and not the absence.”
