Slammin’ it

Writing poetry isn’t something that comes naturally to everyone, but when you’ve got the talent, taking it to the next level is the only way forward. Seventeen-year-old Aarcha R.S. did just that when she turned from writing poetry to reciting poetry. Performing slam poetry for the past year-and-a-half, Aarcha was recently selected as one of five winners in the Pangea Poetry Slam, an online poetry slam contest.

Beating over 70 others who sent in their poetry recital videos in the four-week knockout style contest, Aarcha, who studies in Class XII at Delhi Public School, Nacharam, says that she hardly expected to be selected as a finalist, let alone win.  “At the end of the fourth round, I was in final 10, and that itself was an achievement for me because I was the first Indian to go so far,” she says.

For the uninitiated, slam poetry, Aarcha explains, is just like storytelling. “The first video I watched was Shrinking Women by Lily Myers... It stole my heart. It was the most beautiful thing that I’d ever seen.” After watching a few more, she decided to try it out with her own poems (that she believed didn’t have the “poetic metres” to qualify as regular poems) and found that they went perfectly together.

“My first video was Dear Terrorist which was about the Peshawar school attack,” Aarcha says, adding that her style of slam poetry integrates her voice with others’ too, since she likes to write about issues and social causes. After starting her own slam poetry group — A Slam Dream — in March, Aarcha hopes to get more people in the city (around 15 showed up for her first event).

While she counts her parents and school friends as being supportive of her slam poetry from the start, she thanks her cousin, Malvika, for pushing her to record and put the videos. Using the £300 (around Rs 30,000) that she won from the contest, Aarcha hopes to set up a home-recording studio and gain some valuable mentorship from an established poet, and make slam poetry a viable career.

“I want to get my Master’s in Neuroscience but poetry and arts are my main passion. So if I can, I’d want to do a double major,” she says.