Chloe Rippe
Reporter
Many know of senior Alima Cannon’s knack for poetry from her delivery of her poem “Things Fall Apart” at the spoken word poetry assembly in the fall. But what they may not know is the depth of her poetic passion.
Her affinity for poetry is deep rooted, beginning at a young age. “Ever since I was a kid I wanted to tell stories,” Alima said. “[Poetry] allows me to articulate what I see around me emotionally and in words.”
Alima uses specific experiences, words, or things that have meaning to her to inspire her work. “I start with an image, then I try to find out how to describe it, and then I write about what goes along with that image,” she said.
Alima also gains inspiration from personal anecdotes or memories. In her poem “Things Fall Apart,” she drew from an experience with a close friend. “‘Things Fall Apart’ was inspired by my really good friend,” she said. “He was going through hard times, he had depression, things weren’t going really well for him. He had to go away for a while for therapy, so the poem is just about sadness for my friend and my wanting to be there for him, and knowing he is in a better place.”
Having never performed one of her poems in front of such a large audience before, the assembly was in a sense her debut. This pivotal experience lead to her writing another poem, “Flight.” “The best poems come this way,” she said, “My friend mentioned the word ‘flight’ and I thought about what the word meant to me in my life, and for me it started in fourth grade on the playground when you’re on the swings and you jump off at the top.”
She then related this ‘flight’ experience to her performance of “Things Fall Apart.” “At the assembly when they were calling on people to share, I knew there was only one opportunity to do it, so I raised my hand and my stomach just dropped, like on the ride or the swings,” she said. “When I read my poem I felt like I was flying, it was wonderful.”
Not all of her poems are such a success, however. When Alima embarked on what she calls her one-month “poetry fast,” she learned what it really means to write good poetry. “I chose to stop writing poetry for about a month because I did poorly on a midterm and my parents asked me to stop writing so I could focus on grades,” she said. “It’s funny because my friends say their parents tell them to stop watching TV and mine tell me to stop writing poetry.”
This brief fast, however, actually helped Alima in her poetic endeavors. “It ended up really clarifying what poetry meant to me,” she said. “When I came back I knew that I didn’t have to write all the time, and that I can take the time to edit and make it better instead of writing a bunch of bad poems.”
Writing with such consistency has allowed Alima to learn from her own mistakes and improve. “You have to write a lot of bad poetry to get good poems, and if I had to give one piece of advice it would be to just keep writing,” she said. “Even if you write something bad, just take the time to think about what it means to you.”
This year, Alima is taking AP English Literature taught by Darcy Smith. Though the class requires some degree of poetry writing, Ms. Smith is aware that Alima’s dedication to poetry goes much further. “Between her natural writing voice and her desire to write, she is a devoted student. She will carry her desire with her after NCHS, and as I said to her, she will always treasure those notebooks she has filled.”
Regardless of the likelihood of becoming a professional poet, Alima says that she’ll continue to write poetry no matter what. “I don’t aspire to write poetry as a career, just because you can’t write poems as a job, but I plan to write poetry for my whole life.”
Some of the ways she hopes she can share her poems are through future magazine publications, a poetry book, and presently, her spoken word poetry club and a poetry blog. “I don’t know if anyone would want to read them but I would like to do it anyway,” she said.
Alima, although widely known as a poet, does not like labels, and as she wrote explicitly in one of her poems, “I am not poetry.” But now that her poetry fast is over, she looks forward to writing poems for a very long time. She explained, “It’s my passion.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btGG0ERhsFo&list=UUnc-K-elRCI7ufdJr5p2I-A
Watch Alima perform…
