Poetry Club

Calliope. In Greek mythology, she is the muse who inspires eloquence and epic poetry, and it is her name that the Diamond Bar High School poetry club has adopted as its official title.

The club, as the name suggests, is a congregation of students who are poetry fanatics, hoping to improve their skills in composing poetry.  

The club holds weekly meetings at English teacher Julie Galindo’s room in which members take turns reciting poetry in addition to helping each other by exchanging opinions on their poems.  They also share poems that they have stumbled across over the week and taken a liking to.  

But Calliope doesn’t restrict itself to poetry alone.  A poetry competition was held last year where they collaborated with an organization dedicated to informing people about Alzheimer’s.

“We partnered with the Alzheimer’s Association of America to raise awareness via a poetry contest with the theme ‘memory,’” senior Treasurer Jay Zhang said.

The club also publishes an annual anthology a collection of its members’ poems.  Students who are not apart of the club can also submit their own poems and have it included in the anthology.  

Since the goal of the club is to help students develop their own style of writing, Calliope does not focus on any specific genre of poetry.  

Although the club originally assigned a specific theme for each week, the tradition has long been removed. Now, students are free to write in whatever style they wish in order to better express themselves, with free-verse and prose being the most popular.

The club doesn’t have many members, with it fluctuating between five to twenty people throughout the year, but this has resulted in a tight knit group that holds meetings regularly.

“We’ve developed a sort of mutual understanding between regulars,” Vice President Adeline Lee said via Facebook.

Deborah Clifford, their previous advisor, no longer teaches at DBHS, so the club is now overseen by Galindo.

“I agreed to being advisor because I think it’s a great place for students to come in to share ideas and to hear about other’s unique ideas through poetry,” Galindo said.