"Poetry saved my life."
Those are the words of Piper High School senior Zoharian Williams.
It’s just one of the powerful statements being voiced through the Omari Hardwick BluApple Poetry Network taking root here in South Florida.
Omari Hardwick is the lead actor on the STARZ series, “Power,” and is a poet himself. The namesake has teamed up with Miami Dolphins legend Jason Taylor and his charity foundation to create the network which has now branched out into more than 50 schools throughout the Broward and Miami-Dade area.
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Now in its third year, BluApple Poetry is in the middle of its largest endeavor, Louder Than a Bomb Florida. LTABFLA is an eleven-day festival at numerous locations that features both individual and team spoken-word poetry competitions.
The festival builds on the work of the original Louder Than a Bomb, started in Chicago in 2001 and held annually since.
The poems are sometimes raw and gritty, focusing on the trials and tribulations of a diverse swath of South Florida students. Drugs, rape, gender identity, love, joy, parental relationships and peer pressure are all topics shared with audiences – often to rousing applause.
“It helps build one’s self-confidence,” says Darius Daughtry, Director of Poetry Programs. “I think students just need something sometime to help bridge the gap between what’s going on in their personal world and the world at large.”
“We’re always looking for different avenues for these kids to be able to express themselves and learn and grow and be exposed to different walks of life,” Taylor says. “Most of these kids just want to see that somebody cares, somebody has interest and is willing to help them.”
For Hardwick, it’s more personal. He continues to write poems while shooting his hit series in New York City.
“I don’t know why I’m [acting], or making money doing it, if I can’t turn back around and help out,” he says. “I’m very hands on, leaning over their shoulders, helping them with poems, calling them, talking to them. I don’t know the point of it if I’m not hands on.”
“I just write how I feel,” Williams admits. “For me, poetry really gave me life. If you take away everything that happened from poetry to now, I don’t know where I’d be.”
“I don’t believe in good and bad poetry now. I just believe in truth and raw expression. Nobody can write a bad poem if it’s your truth and it’s real.”
“To me, poetry has sort of been a cool big brother or little brother or just an imaginary person that he could talk to in the dark when nobody’s there,” Hardwick says of Zoharian.
Williams will be just one of a dozen poets showcased during Thursday’s final round of individual competition of LTABFLA at Nova Southeastern University.
It’s the hope of Taylor, Hardwick and Daughtry that this will be the first in an annual tradition of spoken-word slams.
“We would like to move them into other cities, where BluApple has a face and a presence that is louder than just Broward County,” Hardwick says. “That’s the goal. We went from 7 to 12 core kids and then it grew to 300-plus kids.”
Taylor adds, “We’re an organization of five or six people trying to affect thousands. When our five or six become thousands, and those thousands become tens of thousands, it just continues to grow.”
