Taylor Mali, one of the most well-known spoken-word poets in the country, recently came to Belmont Hill to share his work with the student body. A four-time National Poetry Slam champion, Mali has spent much of his career writing and performing poems that defend the teaching profession. For many students at Belmont Hill, his visit was their first real experience with spoken word poetry, and one they will not forget anytime soon.
Mali started off with some lighter poems that got the crowd laughing and loose pretty quickly. He has a very natural stage presence and knows how to work a room, which made the whole performance feel more like a conversation than a typical Chapel. The mood shifted when he got into his most famous poem, “What Teachers Make”. The poem began with a real situation in which someone at a dinner party questioned why anyone would want to be a teacher, and Mali wrote it as a direct response. He builds it up slowly, and by the end of it, he is basically shouting, and the whole room was locked in.
“What Teachers Make” is different from most things you hear in a school setting. Mali is not trying to be subtle about his message. He thinks teachers are some of the most important and underappreciated people in the world, and he says it in a way that is hard to argue with. At a school like Belmont Hill, where the relationship between students and faculty is a big part of the experience, it felt like the right poem for the right place.
What also made the visit stand out was that Mali did not just perform and leave. In between poems, he talked about his own story, how he used to be a teacher himself before he started performing full-time, and how he uses poetry to keep advocating for education. He also talked about how spoken word is different from the poetry most of us read in English class, and he made it seem a lot more approachable than most people probably thought going in. For a lot of students, spoken-word poetry is not something they think about much outside of class. Mali’s visit changed that. He showed that poetry does not have to feel distant or academic; it can be loud, funny, and serious all at once. He had the whole room paying attention, which is pretty impressive in itself during these school events. According to one of this year’s Poetry Fest winners, Alex Chen ‘27, “His enthusiasm for poetry was infectious, and getting to hear from such an accomplished slam poet while working on my own slam performance made his visit particularly impactful for me. I hope the school continues bringing in speakers to get boys excited about Poetry Fest in the future.”
Taylor Mali came to Belmont Hill with just a microphone and a handful of poems, but he left a bigger impression than most visitors do. His message about teachers and the work they do every day was one that stuck with a lot of people in that room, and “What Teachers Make” is a poem that is hard to get out of your head once you have heard it performed the right way.
