For the first time, students will be able to voice their opinions and feelings through South’s new poetry club, Poet Echo. According to Hillary Kane, sponsor of Poet Echo, the club was created in order to give students confidence through poetry.

The club meets on Thursdays from 3:30 to 4:00, and anyone can come to celebrate, share and create poetry. Senior Elaine Sine, creator and president of Poet Echo, said she was inspired to start the club because of spoken-word poet Sarah Kay.

“Just looking at Sarah Kay really inspired me to look into more spoken-word poets, and it really inspired me to start something like that here, because I’ve heard people really like spoken-word poetry, but there was no outlet for people to start doing it,” Sine said.

Poet Echo is centered around members’ creativity and what they want to do, according to Sine; however, the club will focus on performing and writing poetry. Despite the small size of the club, Sine said it holds great depths of talent.

“We have great poets in this club like Clayton Nimz, Dahlia Maleh [and] Fiona Hellerman,” Sine said. “The club really starts with the people first, and finding those willing, talented artists to come attend the club really makes the club. So, what they will find is a very casual poetry slam basically every week. We basically start with either performance activities or writing activities, and we switch off every week, so one week would be practicing how to write poetry, the other week would be practicing performance.”

Poetry, according to Sine, is about encapsulating the moment and writing it down. Most of Sine’s poems were created to be reflective of her experiences.

“First time I really started getting into poetry was when I started liking this guy and I wrote poems about him, and it was so bad,” Sine said. “I started writing poetry to really savor the moment and really understand what I was going through, so a lot of my poems are lovey-dovey.”

Sophomore Fiona Hellerman, Poet Echo member, says she first got into poetry in fourth grade through her Navigate program, which is a program typically used in the third and fourth grades in order to implement rigorous Language Arts material into the course curriculum.

“At first I didn’t really like it,” Hellerman said. “It was really annoying cause I hate rhyming, and that’s all we had to do. And then [my teacher] was like, ‘We’re gonna read this book called Out of the Dust’, and it was this verse book, where every chapter was a poem, and I found that I really like free-verse poetry a lot more. So, I said in fourth grade that I’m actually gonna write something that’s very similar to this book, so I made my own story alongside it, and I just kept writing poetry since then.”