By Vanessa Kang (’20)
On Friday, April 6,  Expression Magazine presented its annual Poetry Cafe after school in Taipei American School’s Legacy Commons. The Expression Magazine is a student-run, annually published literary magazine that features the artistic and literary talents of the TAS Upper School student body. “Poetry Cafe is the one spoken word poetry and music event that we put on every year. It’s meant to bring the art of spoken word poetry to the TAS community in a fun, casual way,” says Hannah Smith (‘19), co-editor-in-chief of Expression Magazine. “It’s usually a big hit among the community, with the most unexpected people from all grades stepping out of their comfort zones to perform poetry or music.”
This year, Poetry Cafe featured a code poetry event in collaboration with APPS Club, a club dedicated to computer science. “We decided to launch this code poetry push in order to bring people together around this fascinating new field of synthesis,” says APPS Club co-president Alex Huang (‘18). “Bringing code into one of TAS’ most prominent literary events is our way of bridging the divide between computer science and the humanities. We are really excited about this and hope that this will spur more dialogue between these surprisingly connected fields.”
Several performers from Poetry Cafe also shared their experiences. “My favorite part of Poetry Cafe was definitely how relaxed it was. it felt like a very low pressure afternoon where everyone just appreciated each other’s talents in the form of literature and music,” says Tingjen Hsieh (‘20), a music performer at Poetry Cafe. “My group and I have always been really close, and we are all really into music. In fact, Sisy [Chen, (‘19)], Joy [Taw, (‘20)], and I have performed together before. We wanted to put something together again and explore pop music since we usually play classical and jazz in our music classes.”