Poetry Association reaches out to schools

With poetry gaining ground in the country, Poetry Association of Malawi (Pam) wants to build on this success by helping unearthing more poets.

The association has made strides reaching out to secondary schools in the three regions where it has established clubs.

Pam's vice president Jacinta Chisi said in an interview that poetry is currently doing well in the country although they have more room for improvement and that it was in this vein that they thought of reaching out to students.

"We are building on the success we have made as an association, we want to have more poets and so we established clubs which are currently supervising in the three regions. We established the clubs last year," said Chisi.

She said the poetry clubs were established as one way of giving a platform to the students to show their talent in poetry but also encourage them to write poems.

"We can only strengthen this success we have made if we unearth more talent and the best way was to invade schools. We want students to take an interest in poetry and so far we are happy with the progress made," he said.

Recently the association engaged 13 poets at Lunzu Secondary School i n Blantyre where the students meet every Wednesdays.

"There is alot of progress in the schools, the students are loving poetry and during the supervision we were impressed by the poems which the students recited," said Chisi.

She also said that through the clubs in schools they want to reach out to female students to participate in poetry.

"You can see that poetry has been dominated by men and so we want more women to be in this trade which would also give them a platform to voice out their challenges," said Chisi.

Despite poetry impressing and attracting huge audiences of late, some quarters have noted that many of the poets are losing direction.

"We will continue to hold workshops to guide each other on the best rules of poetry. At the moment everyone is just doing it freestyle and others are not following the pattern. But the good thing is we are getting there and we have managed to bring the people to love poetry which was not the case in the past," said Chisi.