You’ve Got a Pal in Me
The Poets and Lyricists Society is a safe space for poets across all majors to find and share their creative voices
Write a love poem to someone you hate.
This prompt is written on the board as students of all different majors trickle into Bond Hall 112 one Thursday evening. After long days of attending classes and working jobs, they have chosen to spend an extra hour and a half on Western’s campus together to write.
They sit in a sea of yellow chairs, no chair quite the same shade of yellow as another, and pull out notebooks, scraps of paper, laptops or their phones to write. Soon the room will be silent except for the clicking of keyboards, the occasional flip of a notebook page and the loud creeks of the old desks as they give into the pressure of the writer’s words.
The room is brimming with the overlapping voices of friends, some who haven’t seen each other since last Thursday.
The officers of the Poets and Lyricist’s Society, or PALS, read the prompts out loud and start a ten-minute timer as everyone begins to write.
Later, when the group circles up to read their work to one another some of the poems shared bare deeply personal and traumatic details. The vulnerability in the room becomes palpable, as does the compassion and support from everyone else in the room.
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Nathan Shephard, a sophomore who is now the budget coordinator for PALS, was introduced to the club at the very beginning of his time at Western. After seeking out a poetry club at the Red Square Info Fair and finding PALS, he started going to the open-mic nights that the club hosts.
One evening, Shephard decided he was not only going to perform at the open-mic, but he was also going to sign up to read first. This would be his first time sharing his work in front of an audience. He read a poem about the end of a long-term relationship with his high school sweetheart.
Ever since that performance, Shephard has been hooked. Maybe it was the catharsis of sharing something so personal with the world. Maybe it was the validation he felt from the snaps in the audience, each one a reminder that he is not alone in what he feels.
“I find the world very absurd, hard to understand and difficult, and all of my poetry is an attempt at deciphering it.
Poetry club has given a space for me to do that,” Shephard said.
Whatever it is, Shephard hasn’t stopped chasing after what he found that first evening he performed at a PALS open mic. These days, he hosts the open-mic events, sitting front-row as other poets experience the same feelings he had on that stage.
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The Underground Coffeehouse has a double life, according to freshman PALS member Jocelyn Wiebe. In one life, it is what it appears to be: an on-campus cafe where students gather to drink coffee and work on homework. But on PALS open-mic nights, the Underground Coffeehouse transforms, she said.
Wiebe has been writing about nature a lot lately, with imagery of trees and moss frequenting her work. At the April 29 open-mic night, she read a poem about human composting.
“I have always said I would return to the earth, but I have never mulled over whether she will take me back.” Written by Jocelyn Wiebe
Wiebe had read a version of this poem the Thursday before at the PALS meeting. Some of the lines had changed, but the concept of returning your body little by little to the earth, from fingernail clippings to ground-down teeth, stayed the same.
The idea for the poem came from a conversation Wiebe had with a friend who told her about human composting. When she first started writing the piece, she did not like what she had come up with.
“It’s frustrating when I really want this concept [in my poem], and I hear other people’s poetry and it sounds like it’s so easy for them to write,” she said. “I have had to try and learn that it’s okay not to get it right the first time. Going back and revising is really important.”
PALS gave Wiebe an opportunity to dive deep into poetry. She remembers going to open-mic nights in high school where she loved to listen to the performers, but wasn’t confident enough to share her own work. Now she performs almost every week.
“Performing still makes me a little bit nervous, but especially with the community for the open-mics we have here, I feel really comfortable and everybody is so supportive that I don’t get super nervous anymore,” Wiebe said.
Getting to see other club members’ revisions is one of Wiebe’s favorite parts of PALS.
“It’s really interesting to see the whole process,” she said. “It’s a totally different poem, but it’s the same concept. Even if it’s just a couple of words that you can think of to make it a little bit better.”
At open-mic nights, sometimes poets will announce that they are reading a poem that they have shared in club before. Charlene Davatos introduced her poem at the April 29 open-mic night by saying, “I’ve read this poem in club, so this is the second time some of you have heard it, so you’re welcome.”
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Symone Camargo, a fourth-year student at Western, said she didn’t come to PALS club on her own. She came with a friend to read a poem they had written together. Camargo went with her, with the intention of showing up, reading the poem and then leaving.
Four years later, Camargo still hasn’t left. She is one of the co-lead officers of the club and is in the process of self-publishing a chapbook of her work. Chapbooks are short, bound collections of poetry or prose, typically no longer than 40 pages. She joked about getting “Bond Hall 112” tattooed on her forehead when she graduates next winter.
Camargo said that she appreciates all the different styles of poetry that get shared in club meetings. Many of the members, including the officers, aren’t even English majors. The variety serves both as inspiration for techniques to incorporate into her own poetry and as a way to lighten the mood.
“It can get really heavy in here sometimes,” she admitted, adding that it can be nice when some poets share more lighthearted pieces between the darker ones.
“leave places better than you found them. / except your body, / because boys do not like, / do not want, / will not love / ‘a Big Girl’ / and a man’s love can fill the gaps left behind / by skipped meals and missed lessons in self love.” Written by Symone Camargo
Vulnerability is an important and respected quality at PALS. The walls of Bond Hall 112 have heard a lot of hardships over the years. Club president, senior Wyatt Heimbichner Goebel shared a poem about his experience trying to mend a strained relationship with his mother as she faced severe health complications. Other members have shared poems written about personal struggles with depression, thoughts of suicide and instances of sexual abuse.
But the classroom has also witnessed healing and the forming of friendships. It has heard poems about falling in love and poems about how complicated and beautiful the earth is. It has housed students as they found their voices and grew brave enough to share them.
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Freshman Ren Santucci has been a regular member at PALS since coming to Western in 2018. Santucci had been involved with art clubs in high school, but hadn’t explored poetry until college, where it soon became a vital creative outlet.
“Having a way to express how you feel without saying ‘I feel this way’ is freeing. You get emotions charged into the words,” they said.
Santucci transitioned from being an audience member at the PALS open-mics to being a performer. They said their first performance was a blur. Santucci said they feel encouraged by the snaps they receive from the audience during performances.
“I wonder how many apple cores i would have to eat to start foaming at the mouth / and i wonder how many “you”s i will write to before i realize none of them can hear me” Written by Ren Santucci
Snaps, though, have a bad side too, they said.
“Everyone here is so good, so there is definitely this pressure to get snaps,” they said. “You can’t just be taking up this space… and nobody resonates with anything you say and your words are bad.”
Santucci said that poetry is such a personal platform, and vulnerability can be hard for them. But PALS has been a welcoming and safe space where they can trust their words and feelings to be acknowledged and accepted.
“Having a platform as someone who’s queer, as someone who’s a person of color, as someone who’s disabled, it’s amazing to have people care about my opinion. I want to be somebody that people in my same position can look up to,” they said.
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More people in the U.S. are reading poetry now than in the last 15 years, according to a 2018 National Endowment from the Arts survey. Young adults make up the largest percentage of poetry readers. Women and racial/ethnic subgroups also increased since the previous 2012 survey.
PALS is growing, according to its officers. While the increase in poetry readers in the U.S. could mean good news in the poetry market for PALS members, they aren’t highly concerned with getting published and making money from their poems.
Shephard said an artist’s job is to make someone feel something through their work.
“It doesn’t matter if we make money. It doesn’t matter if we’re famous or anything like that. What matters is if we can get any of those words, or any of that feeling, for anybody else to feel something, that’s it. Even if that’s ourselves. That’s it,” he said.
Camargo believes one of the most important things about sharing your work, whether or not it makes you any money, is to let someone else who might be going through similar things in life know that they are not alone.
Podcast Alert! Click HERE to listen to PALS member Nathan Shephard read from his work and discuss his experience with slam poetry competitions.
