The Poem Chooses You

AMOS Koffa was a skinny, bespectacled, middle-school outcast with few friends when the student first wrote a poem. Amos knew of Maya Angelou (after hearing her poem “In and Out of Time” in the 2006 comedy Madea’s Family Reunion, Amos walked around the house murmuring the title like an incantation) but had never written anything that wasn’t part of a school assignment.

Then Amos, who uses the pronouns “they/them/their,” saw a flyer in the library of Science Park High School in Newark, New Jersey: a call for submissions for Talented: 2012 Poetry Collection, published by the America Library of Poetry. “I wrote a poem about being sad,” Amos says. “The title was ‘Sorrow.’ It got put in the book, and I was really happy. I felt like I did something, like my voice mattered.” Amos was fourteen years old.

That year, Amos and other eighth graders watched the school-wide competition for Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation contest created by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Poetry Foundation and administered in partnership with state arts agencies. Amos was a Glee devotee who aspired to be an actor, but this was something new: These were teenagers performing poems by William Shakespeare, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Naomi Shihab Nye. Using their bodies and voices to articulate confusion, passion, and loneliness. Earning applause.

Poetry Out Loud is for high school students only, but the eighth graders did a mock contest in the classroom; teachers and students raved about Amos’s performance. When the yearbook came out, Amos, the gangly teen with a habit of ducking their head at the end of every sentence, was stunned to see their photo with the caption “Most Poetic.”