April Angst is a poetry competition that Ms. Miller, an English and Creative Writing teacher here at Anderson, has held for the past two years. This system directly replicates March Madness, the famous college basketball tournament . Each round, two poems are up against one another and the common vote decides on who gets to make it to the next roun. The special element with this was that Ms. Miller made it an anonymous submission so that the votes were purely based on the quality of the work rather than the name tied to it.
When I asked Ms. Miller about opting for anonymous voting, she said “because teenagers are mean, but more like I don’t think people would’ve submitted the poems if their name were tied to them.” According to Ms. Miller, students are typically shy about showing their work alongside their names. She “would rather people start judging the work and not the author.”
The ways in which the poems were received says a lot about how the messenger really changes the whole narrative of a story. There were many submissions that touched on challenging personal topics. Poetry inherently has a level of angst to it, and when given the right circumstances of comfort and safety, people were able to embrace their vulnerability.
Students who participated shared that they are even hesitant to practice writing poetry and be vulnerable in private circumstances. The author of “Sweet Euphoria”, one of the poems featured in the competition, said “I used to think poetry was corny when I was younger, but in the past year I discovered that poetry can help me express and understand myself.”
This headspace is a common one when it comes to writing that is personal. The act of using writing as a vessel to put your thoughts into words and then on paper, then having others criticize something that you worked hard on often feels like a punch to the ego. Add in talking about personal hardship, worries, or beliefs into the mix and it becomes even more difficult. It takes courage to be bold enough to put that out there with people knowing it’s from you.
It’s also worth adding to the conversation that, because these poems were more mature in nature, students were able to see how complex the people around us are. Although it is obvious that people are more than the eye can see , it’s just “more insightful to the people they already have an image of,” Ms. Miller said.
The competitive aspect of April Angst did not seem to matter as much to most participants. When interviewing them about whether the common vote affected how much value they tied to their work, almost all of them said no. “The common vote didn’t make me question its value that much because I like it a lot so I don’t really care what other people think. I just thought it would be cool to see,” states the author of “Men Up High”.
The overall winner of this year’s April Angst was the author of “Men Up High”, who also happened to win last year’s competition. Ms. Miller pointed out that she knew some students had an advantage because “compared to the winners of last year, they knew the expectations.” Regardless, it’s a major accomplishment for your poem to win in a competition of 16 participants for two years in a row. Overall, April Angst is an important and exciting element of the Creative Writing course that makes things interesting and allows students to embrace their creativity, even in front of their peers.
