The theme of this year’s festivities, a co-sponsorship between the not-for-profit arts organization Young Chicago Authors (YCA) and Columbia College, was “The Real Chicago Renaissance”, a title inspired by Chicago’s rich tradition of socially-conscious poets and writers. Hoping to inspire this city’s next generation of Carl Sandburgs, Gwendolyn Brooks and Angela Jacksons, YCA artistic director Kevin Coval and performanceartist and poet Idris Goodwin reunited for the fifth time since 2002 to co-host the evening, galvanizing the house with a rousing opening poem that was part social commentary (“Education is a private right, not a public company”), part political diatribe (“War abroad and the war at home is the same war waged in the name of corporation”) and part motivational speech, if the motivational speakers happened to be poetry slammers (“We are building an army of poets not prisoners, the possibilities are borderless, the new world is the napalm of your pen”).

The final line of their poem announced the evening’s theme once again: “The real Chicago Renaissance explodes!” And with that so did the capacity crowd of roughly 1,300 people, erupting into something that sounded less like poetry and more like pandemonium. For an annual event that was birthed in the basement of the Chopin Theatre 10 years ago, with 12 teenage poets and a handful of educators who wanted to provide a public forum for the truthful words their students were committing to their journals, the evening at the Vic was clearly a well-deserved celebration for all involved.

The day after the event Coval is speaking to me by phone. His voice sounds understandably hoarse.

“I told the kids last night that we would have a great time and that it would be a great party, but that the work to change the city and to have it be better and equitable for all who live in it continues. I know that today is the moment to chill and reflect, but that tomorrow the work resumes.”

That work, at least in the near future, involves taking the festival’s winning poets across the region so that they may participate in assemblies, perform in classrooms and lead workshops for their peers. As Coval explains, “The hope is that they’ve achieved a certain level of success and that they’ll now go out into the community to inspire others.”

This year’s LTAB festival, with over 60 teams competing and 650 young poets participating, saw roughly 1000 pieces of poetry written, revised and workshopped in the year-long season. Roughly three dozen pieces made it to the Vic stage Saturday night, and the final teams who made the cut included Kuumba Lynx, http://www.kuumbalynx.org/ a not for profit arts organization drawing its participants from the North, West and South sides of Chicago; Maine East High School http://east.maine207.org/ in Park Ridge; Northside College Prep http://www.nscollegeprep.cps.k12.il.us/; and TEAM Englewood Community Academy http://www.teamenglewood.org/ on the Southside of Chicago. The festival also featured several independent (or INDY) poets and all of the finalists’ work has been archived in their entirety online at Chicago Public Radio.

The winning team, along with their coaches and teachers, will be flown to Los Angeles to represent Chicago in the 13th Annual Brave New Voices international poetry slam festival. They may also be joined by an All Star team comprised of the winning INDY poets, depending on whether Brave New World will allow two teams to represent Chicago this year.

To focus on the competition, however, would be to miss the point.

“The point is not the point. The point is the poetry” is a phrase that has become something of a mantra for LTAB participants. Throughout the evening the spirit of this sentiment—connection, community, support and not winning or losing—was echoed continuously. Even the rules of the game included a way for the audience to disagree with a judge’s score—a number ranging from 0 to 10—by shouting “Listen to the poem” after that judge’s score was announced.

(For the record, any poet who received less than a 9.1 that night earned a sympathetic and supportive shout out of “Listen to the poem” from the enthusiastic crowd, which made the panel of seven judges—that included YCA co-founder Anna West, Columbia College director of admissions Murphy Monroe and writer and two-time American Book Award recipient Angela Jackson—probably the few people that night who weren’t feeling the love.)

The point is not just the poetry but the people who congregate, the community they form and the ideas they exchange. Maine East High School senior Cia Matthews, 17, said, “I’m a total nerd and I only have nerd friends, and that I’m now best friends with people who don’t care as much about academics blows my mind. It’s amazing to see how we can come together for one thing, the poetry.”

Benj Sullivan-Knoff, a 17 year-old junior from Northside College Prep said, “It’s about all these people I would have never otherwise met.”

And those people have different goals for their work. “I want to be the poetic doctor,” said Matthews, the self-described nerd. But for some, writing isn't just something they do, but a way to make sense of their lives. That's how it is for Paula “Lala” Bolander, a 16 year-old Pilsen resident from Team Kummba Lynx.

“A Facebook status is not going to compare to me pouring my heart out on stage. This is my way to heal, to commemorate the friends I’ve lost [to gang violence], to give them justice and a voice to be heard. Otherwise, they’d just be looked at as dead gangbangers. I’ve lost four friends, and I’m only 16, and to me that’s more than enough.”

Poems were dedicated to anorexic best friends, a dying stepmother and a deceased baby sister’s daddy. The audience was bombarded by imagery that captured the butterflies in the stomach of a first crush, to the bullet hole in a young woman’s chest cavity. The linguistic gymnastics were something to behold, and the wordplay and inventiveness dazzling in their odes to HIV-infected blood, $21 child support checks, siblings fighting in Iraq and absentee fathers.

There were lighter moments. Maine East’s Dana Castillo’s “This is a Break-Up Poem” brought the house down (and was later rewarded with a second-place finish) with its delicious double-entendres and Cowardian cleverness centering around a girl’s tortured relationship with high school math. Raymond Abercrombie’s “Picture This: A Nerd with a Camera and a Love Story,” that turned racial and masculine stereotypes on their heads, was a hit with the female audience contingent.

“This is what the city of Chicago looks and sounds like,” trumpeted Coval from the Vic stage as the evening came to an end almost four hours later. LTAB executive director Robbie Telfer called Coval “the biggest ambassador the youth movement has today,” and proceeded to hand out thank you notes stuffed with $10 Target gift cards to his indefatigable six-person staff while his voice trailed off as he said “I can’t give you much, but…”

The music was pulsating, the lights were blaring, and the evening had passed as a strange hybrid of poetry slam, rock concert, audience participation seminar and church. But it’s the image behind Coval that seemed to capture the evening best: a multicultural mix of kids of every size, shape and color, incorporating every sexual orientation, creed and religious affiliation, and featuring Valedictorians to near high school drop outs, co-mingling and dancing. It had the hard-won look and feel of diversity and of community, with a realness that a marketing team behind a United Colors of Benetton advertisement could never achieve. It made me almost forget that I had been there that evening to cover a competition with winners and losers. Until a young poet off to the side, singing at the top of his lungs, “No time for losers ‘cause we are the champions…” and straining to reach the top notes of that classic Queen song, grabbed my attention. Ironically, but perhaps quite tellingly of the Louder Than a Bomb Festival, he had not even been a finalist that evening.

The Louder Than a Bomb Festival is also the subject of an upcoming theatrical documentary by filmmakers Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel, “Louder Than A Bomb”, screening at the 34th Annual Cleveland International Film Festival on March 26 and 27. A trailer and more information can be found at http://www.siskeljacobs.com/development.php

For more information on the Louder Than a Bomb festival, visit http://louderthanabomb.org/

To learn more about, volunteer or support Young Chicago Authors, visit http://www.youngchicagoauthors.org/