ZEBULON — The media center had the air of a Beat poet coffee house — the audience snapped fingers as students strung together images and lyrical, metaphoric words in Zebulon GT Magnet Middle School’s first poetry slam.

Some eighth-grade students recited their own poems last Thursday night and others recited recognized poets’ works in the two-part contest. The orginal presentations were judged separately from the recitations for the top three awards. An overall winner was picked.

Jahkazia Richardson was the grand prize winner for the powerful delivery of her poem, “The Despicable Truth.”

“My boyfriend broke up with me, and instead of take it out on somebody else, I wrote this,” said Richardson.

Adreena Carr’s “Listen to the rain. Listen to the leaves how they push against each other like crowded stands at the final buzzer of a basketball game….” from her poem “Nature” took second place in the slam competition. For his confident delivery of his “The Face of an Angel,” Threyvon Suggs took third.

“I began to feel what the poet was saying and how he was feeling,” said Shandy Cherry, who placed first in the recitation division for Langston Hughes’ “Mother To Son.”

Nichel Hargrove placed second in recitation with her passionate reading of Maya Angelous’ “Still I Rise.”

Third was Shafon Smith’s dramatic recitation of another Angelou poem, “Phenomenal Woman.”

Though students didn’t choose poetry of the beats, the setting was that of a coffee house like those where Beat’s poets met in the late 1950s. Beats were known to snap fingers in praise and chant, “DaddyO,” at the end of poetry presentations.

The Zebulon crowd got in the spirit and snapped fingers before and after performances.

Judges included Dallas Pearce, a Zebulon realtor and songwriter; Eleanor Oakley, president of the United Arts County of Raleigh and Wake County; Heather Bunting, a Zebulon lawyer and president of the Zebulon Chamber of Commerce and June Baker, a ZMS social studies teacher.

The event was the brainchild of ZMS English teacher Donna Youngblood who laments the fact that poetry recitation often gets overlooked in today’s busy curriculum.

Youngblood modeled the competition students named “Word On” after the National Poetry Out contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Society that she hopes her students will enter in high school.

“Students compete and I found out that Wake County and never entered and I wanted my middle schoolers involved,” said Youngblood. “Poetry is meant to be a spoken art form. It’s a matter of sense and sound.”

“Everybody was very reluctant at first,” said Youngblood. “Now all of a sudden we’ve got kids coming out of the woodwork asking if they can still audition,” Youngblood said last week.

She took several students to the state competition at the North Carolina History Museum in Raleigh recently so they could see a competition.

Students can’t compete until high school in the national awards program that gives a $20,000 scholarship as the top prize. Youngblood said if students don’t have an outlet for poetry in high school, she will coach them and see that they can enter the state finals.