Students express themselves during NE poetry event

Alfredo Padron
reporter

NE students speak what they feel using poetry in The Creative Intersections, a hip-hop, pop culture and spoken word event.

“It’s a creative intersection where you have poets from various ages and races that are coming together in this multicultural experience here at TCC,” said Michael Guinn, speaker at the event.  

Many NE students came into the student Center Hall and enjoyed breaks to grab pizza and a drink and have music like Ambitionz Az A Fighta played by Tupac Amaru Shakur, an American rapper better known as 2Pac. 

“It’s going to be a mixture of poetry, music, art and that’s special in itself,” Guinn said.  

The event had a student open mic where students can express themselves using poetry and play hip-hop trivia.

“I thought of an area to communicate and be around people,” NE student Nit Neziri said. 

He wasn’t interested in poetry as much but said he figured he would give it a shot coming to the event and would participate in the trivia. 

“The different thing I bring into this is a sort of an on-ramp to the poetry communities in the local area,” said Steve Sanders, who represents The Fort Worth Poetry Society and The Poetry Society of Texas said. “Sometimes poets feel like they’re out there all by themselves struggling to try to start a career or get something published or get something in front of the public.” 

Fort Worth Poetry Society and Poetry Society of Texas do events like this often, and Sanders said he would leave an envelope by his office door during national poetry month in April and would have a few 2pac poems thrown in an envelope. Soon enough students would come back and tell him that all they heard was 2pac rap stuff. 

“He’s known as a kind of fourth writer, but some of the poems that he’s got in here are very deep expressions of questions about love, questions about life,” Sanders said. 

The Rose that grew from Concrete by 2Pac is filled with many poems like that, he said. 

At the end students came to the stage after they had time to write a poem and NE student Aston Cowell would recite a verse from his own song, Insatiable Sensation Vol. 1. Other students would either perform their own poem or quote a poem from someone else off their phone.