Fremont's team beat poets from Pioneer and Bellarmine high schools to walk away with the trophy at the end of the final bout, held April 23 at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA), a cultural arts center in downtown San Jose. The Grand Slam was part of MACLA's Art and Resistance Summit, a weeklong festival of spoken-word poetry and hip-hop music.

Both the Fremont team and MACLA's slam league were formed at the beginning of the current school year. The league now boasts teams from five South Bay high schools. According to Marc David Pinate, MACLA's director of literary and performance programs, the league was created "to provide venues and arenas for young poets to cultivate their craft, develop competition ethics with their peers and build cross-generational relationships."

"Each school had its own thing going on, and we wanted to build a community," said Fremont senior Nicole Mehta, who served on the committee that helped Pinate develop the slam league. Mehta, Kassie Korobkova, Dominique Valderrama and Emil Frazier represented Fremont High at the Grand Slam finals.

"Our goal was to provide a space for poets to socialize and network," said Fremont High's librarian and slam team coach Ruben Zamora, adding that he viewed the Grand Slam as a forum to show the general public what performance poetry is about.

"This is what we always hope our youth are doing—something positive. We need to support and witness that," Zamora said. "Our students are in touch with what's happening in Iraq and with the state budget. I think that says a lot about their connectedness to society. It's great to be able to verbalize what you're feeling in an intelligent, creative way that the adult world is willing to hear."

Mehta's poetry deals with everything from racism ("I'm standing right in front of you, but all you see is brown") to teen pregnancy ("I wanna hear a poem about the baby you helped create") to "the state of the world and our rhythm nation." She said she prefers writing spoken-word poems to more traditional forms of poetry.

"People can relate to it a lot more. It's a good way for people to express themselves and not worry about the rules," Mehta said. "You can be creative with it. It definitely has a hip-hop influence, but people put their own spin on it."

According to Zamora, some team members need their words shaped more than their performance; with others, the opposite is true. "Some write poetry that's better for the page than the stage. They've been able to embellish it and add a performance element," Zamora said. "One student is a very strong freestyler. His style could be compared to Charlie Parker's sax-playing: Give him a beat, and he takes off. I had to teach him to write down his freestylings so his poems could be reproduced."

At last week's Grand Slam finals, some poets read their work off the page, while others had their poems memorized. Judges scored the poets for style and content on a scale of 1 to 10. In the end Fremont High's team had the highest cumulative score.

Not only did the members of each team cheer each other on, but poets from other teams also lent support to their competitors. Mehta said the slam league encourages this kind of sportsmanship. "You're influenced by other members of the league, and you learn from them."

"They're inspiring to each other and to the adult world," Zamora said of the young poets. "There's such strength and power when a message comes from a place you don't expect."