A team from South Delta Secondary will be competing at Hullabaloo, the B.C. Youth Poetry Slam Championships next month.

A squad from the Tsawwassen high school finished second at the inaugural event last year and teacher/coach Trevor Spilchen likes his team's chances at the upcoming championships.

"The goal ideally is to do the best job ... to do as well as we can; to perform the poems to the best of our ability," he said.

A poetry slam is a competition where poets perform their work and are judged by selected members of the audience. The best slam poems have a real synthesis, said Spilchen.

"The writing has to be really good and the performance has to be really good. I think the beauty of this art form is when those two things come together. When really good writing meets really good performance, that's the magic."

Students Maddy Van Beek, Sam Merritt, Parker Woods and Zoe Wessler are on the SDSS team, which will do individual performances as well as perform as a group. Van Beek was on last year's team. It was her first time taking part in a slam outside of the school.

"It was eye-opening, cool and awesome," she said.

The school has a club where around 10 to 15 students meet once a week at lunch.

Lee Cannon-Brown, an SDSS grad who was on last year's team, will be one of the feature performers at next month's event.

"I'm going to at least try to do as much new material as possible, because it's a drag doing the same old poems all the time," he said.

Cannon-Brown, 18, who's now studying music at SFU, has competed in a few slams at Cafe Deux Soleils on Commercial Drive.

"The community there is awesome, though; the people are very friendly, accepting and all-around interesting."

Venues for Hullabaloo include Cafe Deux Soleils (Home to the Vancouver Poetry Slam), the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Rio Theatre.

The finals will be held at the Arts Club Theatre's Granville Island Main Stage.

Cannon-Brown will perform during the semi-finals on Friday, April 13 at the Rio Theatre.

Hullabaloo runs from April 10 to 14. For more on the event visit http: // youthslam.ca.

dwillis@delta-optimist.com