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Rockford REV Poetry Showcase

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General information

This information is from a tournament in a past season!

This is a High School tournament in Illinois.

View manager contact information

Welcome to the 1st Annual Rockford REV Poetry Showcase!

 

When the speech and debate season is done what will you do with all those students who still want more?  Come celebrate National Poetry Month with us in Rockford.  Don’t let the “1st Annual” title fool you, we’ve been doing this for years.  What started as a classroom poetry night grew first into school poetry slams, then into The REV.  Last year’s inaugural event was so successful we decided to open it up beyond our own school district to any and all.

 

Event Details:

April 11, 2015 at Thomas Jefferson High School in Rockford, IL.

 

Registration will open at 11am

1st round begins at 12pm (noon)

Finals should begin roughly at 6pm with everyone on their way home with awards by 8pm.

 

Although we have come to understand that speech tournaments love early mornings, poetry really feels like an evening activity and we think you’ll agree.

 

Registration cut-off is March 26, 2015.  This is about two weeks before the event.  We need the time because all poets get a T-Shirt as part of the event and we need to give our supplier time to print the proper number and sizes before the event. 

 

Fees:

Our fee is a flat $10.00 per poet.  As we don’t have team events yet, there are no team fees. 

 

Any drops after the cut-off date of March 26, 2015 will still be required to pay the fee as we will have ordered the T-Shirt for them.  Of course, we’ll still give them that T-shirt if someone can pick it up for them.

 

Tournament Structure:

This is an original poetry event. 

 

Poets will compete in rounds using “ups-and-downs” to narrow the field to a final ten poets.  This means every poet is guaranteed two rounds of competition in fields of up to 10 poets.  Finishing in the top half of at least one round will allow them to continue into the elimination rounds.  From that point on poets will be power matched against poets with similar finishes with the top half of each round moving on to the next.

 

In the preliminary rounds each poet’s score will be the total value of three judges.  In the elimination rounds it will be total value of five judges after dropping the lowest and highest values.

 

We encourage any students eliminated to stick around and become the audience for the later rounds.  Poetry performance feeds on audience reaction so the better the audience, the better the poetry!

 

As of now there are no novice or varsity divisions, nor age-based categories (though depending on the results of this year’s event we may consider that in the future).   In addition, while we are considering adding group poetry we are not yet prepared to do so.

 

Judges:

We intend that each preliminary round will be triple judged, and elimination rounds will have five judges!  You can imagine how many judges this requires, but that is the tradition of slam poetry and we like to maintain our traditions.  We have strong support from the local arts community but we will need more.  We are asking school to bring one judge for every 6 poets.  Judges need no experience but clean judges are, of course, preferred but not required.  If we don’t have enough judges we will reduce those numbers.

 

Attire:

Though this event is held by the JHS Speech and Debate team, poetry like this isn’t formal.  Poetry is alive, vibrant, and diverse just as the poets are.  For this event students may wear any clothing that would likely be deemed “school appropriate”.  Jeans and T-Shirts are perfectly acceptable and no poet’s score will be dependent on their dress.  Heck, since you’ll be getting a free T-Shirt at the event you are welcome to just wear that!

 

Acceptable Poems and Rules:

We have only a few rules when it comes to the content and composition of the student’s poetry:

  • It must be the original work of the performer
  • It should go no longer than 3 minutes in performance
  • No vulgarity – expletives are lazy and good poetry is powerful without them
  • No hate speech – you can be angry, but no singling out any group based on race, sexuality, nationality, religion, etc. 

 

Contact Information:

Need to know more?  Did I miss something important you need to know?  Just let me know and I’ll get those questions or concerns answered.

 

Email: douglas.mcarthur@rps205.com

 

Team site (includes contact form and school location on Google maps) https://sites.google.com/site/jhsspeech/

Manager contact information

Douglas McArthur
Email address: douglas.mcarthur@rps205.com
Phone number: 815-874-9536

Mailing address

4145 Samuelson Rd
Rockford, IL 61109

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