Guest poets to visit poetry slam
By Colin Smith
Contributor
Though The Return of Border Brujo by Guillermo Gomez-Peña is expected to attract a lot of student traffic this Saturday, the directors of the Kalamazoo Poetry Collective hope to have just as many attendees at an open mic later that night featuring two award-winning poets from Ann Arbor.
The Kalamazoo Poetry Collective’s first open mic performance of the school year, “Me in the Mirror: Identity Poetics,” is scheduled to begin at 10 p.m. on Saturday in the Hicks banquet hall. The Collective is inviting any members of the Kalamazoo College community to share words, but the event’s focus is reflection and identity.
At 11 p.m. the two guest poets, Aimee Le and Gahl Liberzon will join the stage. Le has opened for The Roots and Quest Love, and appeared on Sundance Channel, while Liberzon has won several awards in Ann Arbor.
“Students should share their voice and check out the poetry on campus,” said Bridgett Colling K’13, co-director of the Collective.
She said she has noticed that K College is becoming a hotspot for poetry.
Allison Kennedy K’15 said both poets are “very intense and vulnerable at the same time,” and that Le in particular “will go to the hardest places and shake hands with it.”
Kennedy comes from Ann Arbor where Le and Liberzon coached her in slam throughout high school through a young adults organization. Liberzon graduated a few years before Kennedy and she remembers him calling her every day to work on her speech impediment. Kennedy said he was a busy-21-year-old, yet “poets in general are very invested in each other.”
“If I had to put in five words, you have to see them,” Kennedy said. “Social justice organization begins with a story, and that’s why I think poetry is important.
Doors open at 9 p.m. for food, music and refreshments prior to the event.
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