Kwame Alexander’s Visit
Every year, an award is given to the best book in the world. This award is called the Newbery Award, and just last week, Kwame Alexander, the 2015 Newbery award winner has come to SAS! Want to know what happened when he arrived? Read on.
When Kwame arrived, I was really looking forward to first meet him. When I saw him up close, he always had a really excited vibe about him. This was because he was always really happy and upbeat, and all in all, really hooked me to poetry. The first time we met him, he started out with a talk about trying out different sports in his school, just to be cool, and he linked poetry to everything he did in middle school. An amazing quote from Kwame Alexander when talking about trying out different sports is this: “Never let the no’s define you, always say ‘Yes!’”
The next day, when he came personally to the library to give us a lesson on poetry, he started by asking us to list out the ingredients of a pound cake. After listing the ingredients, he then went on to say “Poetry is a pound cake.” Analogies were made: the ingredients of the pound cake were poetry rules, the idea of “made with love” is a metaphor to the emotion in the poetry. I really learnt how poetry is made up, and a quick “definition” our class came up with together is this: “An arrangement of the right words in a concise manner that uses originality, rhythm, repetition, figurative language, emotion, meaning, and showing rather than telling. Then, we started writing clerihews.
For me, this was my favourite part of the classes with Kwame. A clerihew is a poem that makes fun about a famous person. I really enjoyed this because we got to make fun of people in a nice way. The poem that I wrote was about a cricketer - Steven Smith.
The clerihew was:
Steven Smith
Shuffles like a sith
When he plays a shot
He ties himself in a knot.
In addition, there was going to be one last lesson with Kwame Alexander. In that lesson, we were supposed to write a list poem about what we learned that week, and Kwame randomly chose different people to come up and present their poem. I got chosen, and finally steeled my presenting nerves, and presented. I really learnt a lot about how a poem was presented that day, and at the end, we all got to get Kwame Alexander’s signature!
