After a year without a school team, Daniel Pearl Magnet High School’s (DPMHS) new Get Lit team prepares for tomorrow’s annual Classic Slam Quarter-finals, taking poetry to another level. 

“I’ve been practicing at least three to four months, two to three hours a day, five to six days a week now and it’s great practicing for this year through virtual learning,” said junior Emily Flores, who is also a writer on The Pearl Post staff.

Representing DPMHS, juniors Flores, Sylvana Prieto Medina, William Myers and freshman Madyson Phillips will be performing in this year’s Get Lit Classic Slam Quarter-finals competition via Zoom against teen poets from other Los Angeles high schools. 

According to a few of the students on the team, Get Lit is a great way to express themselves through the words of poetry.

“I enjoy being able to express myself freely without being scared of judgment and being able to relate to other experiences in life as well,” Prieto Medina said.  

Preparing for this competition during remote learning added a layer of difficulty as technology made it harder for the poets to remain in sync and assemble their group poems. However, the troubles posed by virtual learning haven’t stopped these students from writing and reciting their own poems or responding to classic poems. This year’s Get Lit competition has instead pushed them to adapt and work harder.      

“I think it would be much better in person but doing it online is fine as well,” Myers said. “It’s a lot harder to do a lot of other things now.”

To prepare for the Classic Slam, DPMHS’s Get Lit team performed this morning to students in Advisory F. Tomorrow, they will perform against other schools, in hopes of making it into the semi-finals. 

“I would love to go to the semi-finals and even the finals,” English teacher and Get Lit coach Ronald Baer said.