Celebrating 20 years of youth poetry slams in Portland

It’s been 20 years since Nancy Sullivan, a media specialist at Portland’s McDaniel High School, organized a poetry slam for students in the school’s library. That one slam eventually evolved into Verselandia, the citywide youth poetry competition now sponsored by Literary Arts. The slam allows students from across Portland to bring their original spoken word poetry to the stage of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall to be scored by a panel of judges.

Alex Dang competed in the first Verselandia back in 2012. Qiana Woods won last year’s Verselandia and is set to compete again this year. They both join us, along with Sullivan, to talk about the history of the competition and the importance of slam poetry as a creative outlet.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Twenty years ago, Nancy Sullivan, a librarian at Portland’s McDaniel High School, organized a poetry slam for students in the school’s library. That one slam eventually evolved into Verselandia, the citywide youth poetry competition now sponsored by Literary Arts. The slam allows students from across Portland to perform their original poetry on the stage to be scored by a panel of judges. The latest edition of Verselandia will be Thursday, April 24th ‒ that’s two Thursdays from now ‒ at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Alex Dang competed in the very first Verselandia back in 2012. Qiana Woods won last year’s competition and is going to be competing again next week. They both join me now along with Verselandia’s creator, Nancy Sullivan. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.

Nancy Sullivan, Qiana Woods, Alex Dang: Thank you for having us. Wonderful to be here.

Miller: Nancy, first, what made you want to start a student poetry slam at McDaniel 20 years ago?

Sullivan: Well, before I became a school librarian, I used to hang out at Berbati’s Pan – some of you will remember – and just loved the poetry slams that would happen there. I was a big fan, then I became a school librarian and thought this will be really fun to do with kids.

Miller: What made you… I’m curious, first of all, just what you appreciated about those slams that you went to, and this was in a bar setting.

Sulivan: Yes. It’s the connection between the poets and the audience, really, that’s I think the most attractive thing about poetry slams. You get to hear people be intimate, vulnerable, express themselves eloquently in a way that you don’t usually. And there’s audience participation, so you can cheer for your favorite poet and you can boo the judges if you don’t agree with one of their scores.

Miller: “How’d you give that person a 7? It should’ve been a 9.7…”

Sulivan: Yes, exactly.

Miller: Was there anything like that for high school students when you said, “Let’s do this at my high school?”

Sulivan: No, not at the time when I started.

Miller: What do you remember from the first event, before it became Verselandia, what was it like?

Sulivan: We did poetry slams at Madison High School, which is now McDaniel, for several years before it started growing. So, Franklin High School did a poetry slam, and then Grant High School, and then all the high school librarians jumped in and we decided that we would do a citywide slam against each other, and luckily we were able to talk Literary Arts into taking on the role of putting that big event on.

Back in the day, once you start saying that you’re going to have a poetry slam and promoting it, students come out of the woodwork. Poets, spoken word artists, rappers, all kinds of students come out and then share their talents with you.

Miller: And Alex, you’re one of those students for the very first Verselandia when it became a bigger thing. Do you remember your introduction to slam poetry?

Dang: Oh, I think my very, very first introduction was Def Jam poetry on DVD that was hosted by Mos Def, and I remember Saul Williams unrolling a literal scroll of poetry to perform and I went, “Oh my goodness, this is incredible.” And then I remember seeing a poem by Dante Bosco and I was like, “Oh my gosh, it’s Rufio. It’s Zuko,” like I didn’t know that people could do more and more of this. So that was my first media introduction to it.

As far as in person, I remember going to the Portland Poetry Slam at Backspace when it was still around, when I was 16, and then I just kept going every Sunday. I just couldn’t stop.

Miller: At that point you were still an audience member or you were a participant?

Dang: A little bit of both. I was still working up to being able to perform. At Portland Poetry Slam, they had the first half which was the open mic, and then the featured performer, intermission, and then it would go into the competition itself. So every now and then I’d hop on the open mic, but I was still gathering that courage. I was still building that confidence.

Miller: We’re going to listen to one of the poems, the first half of one of the poems you did in that first year back in 2012, which I don’t think, I don’t think ‘rizz’ existed as a word then.

Dang: Maybe it was still ‘swag’?

Miller: Yeah, but then now it’s like ‘nerd rizz’ essentially, is what this poem is about. But before we hear it, can you just give us a sense for what it felt like to be up there?

Dang: Incredible. Scary. All the emotions. Fortunately, I had experience with speech and debate, so I was used to performing in front of a lot of folks. I did a lot of theater and improv, so I had a lot of experience, but with poetry slam, you’re the only one up there. You’re both the director, you wrote the script, you’re the performer, and so you get to take them on a ride as well, but it was definitely a lot of nerves. I remember one of the first times reading a poem on stage at Portland Poetry Slam… still remember my hand shaking with the page.

Miller: All right, let’s have a listen. This one, there’s no shaking hand holding a piece of paper, this is all in your head. This is Alex Dang from 2012.

Dang [performing]: Sexy, funny, smart, sexy, funny, smart. Now, ladies, gentlemen, this is what we all desire in our future lives and our future husbands and our future wives, and life isn’t perfect and neither am I. But gosh darn it, I’m gonna try, because us nerd boys and girls, we are the world’s biggest untapped source of romanticism.

Now I’m not saying you should go out there and grab the next geeky guy you see. I’m just saying treat us like Gatsby, give us the green light. By the end of this, you’ll understand, you’ll have chemistry with every nerd, and we won’t propose to you on the spot, but we can lord over your ring.

Sexy, bold, dashing, smooth, debonair. Honestly, not the best words to use to describe the general nerd populace, but we can be sexy every now and then. Do you, ma’am, find crippling awkwardness adorable? Try us today.

Now, do you know us nerds put in that extra effort? You know how nerds are able to remember every significant date in history? We’ll remember every insignificant date you go out with us on. We put in that extra effort. We remember the little things. You like cooking? Well, look, we just learned how to do it, how do spaghetti carbonara sound? Iron Chef? Try AU chef, ‘cause us nerds, we got the Midas touch.

Funny, hilarious, gut busting. Well, honestly, we won’t make you split a scene like Oogie Boogie, but we can make you giggle or chuckle or chortle, and we will make your knees red ‘cause we got knee-slappers.

Now, imagine our witticism and sarcasm in class. I mean, you need an animal name. Well, what do you have? A horse? Leon Trotsky. You’ve got a frog? Hip-hop. You’ve got a cat? Isaac Meowton, Schrödinger, Chairman Meow, Tupac Shapurr, the notorious C-A-T, AKA Kitty Smalls.

Miller: That’s just the first half of one of Alex Dang’s poems from the very first Verselandia in 2012. He is with us right now, along with Nancy Sullivan, a school librarian at Portland McDaniel High School. She started what is now Verselandia back in 2005. And Qiana Woods is with us, as well. She won last year’s competition and she’ll be back again next week. Qiana, how did you first get into writing poetry, and then performing it?

Woods: When I first got into writing, I was introduced by my second grade teacher. I started out at eight years old. She gave me one of Maya Angelou’s poetry books and that was my first introduction to being, like, “Wow, this is what I wanna do. I want to make people feel the same way that Maya Angelou made me feel at eight years old.” I also seen my sister was a poet, my mom was a poet, a few of my aunties, my grandmother, and they would share their poems with me and I felt another sense of empowerment. Like, these words can make you feel something so strong. And so that was my first introduction to writing.

Miller: It’s fascinating. All those people you just mentioned, from Maya Angelou to your sister to your mom to your aunties, they’re all women. Is that significant?

Woods: Absolutely, for sure. It makes you feel a different sense of connection, especially with Maya Angelou writing “Phenomenal Woman.” Things like that definitely encouraged me,as a young woman, as a young Black woman, to want to write as well.

Miller: What do you remember about the first time you went up on a stage? I mean, as Alex was saying, it seems like it’s just you up there. I think you were nodding when you were saying that you’re the director, you’re the writer, the performer. It seems so vulnerable in some ways.

Woods: Absolutely. I was extremely nervous. Before the majority of my performances, I contemplate not doing it.

Miller: Have you ever not done it, or you always just…

Woods: Oh, every time, you have to pursue.

Miller: You just do it.

Woods: You have to persevere. You have to just push through, because you know that the crowd is ready for you. And so even if you’re not ready for it...

Miller: You have no choice.

Woods: Yeah, you have no choice.

Miller: How would you explain the appeal of poetry to someone your age, maybe younger, who says, “It’s not for me,” or, “It’s scary,” or, “I’m not a word person.” What would you tell them?

Woods: I deal with that often with running my poetry club at Parkrose High School. One of the dilemmas that the teacher and I that run it were facing was like, how can we get people excited? How do we make people feel the same thing that we feel?

And what we first started with was just playing YouTube videos of slam poems, of Def Jam and stuff like that. Because just watching somebody perform can make you feel so many things that it’s like, “I want to do it too,” because that’s what I felt. And so that was my first approach at it, just showing people what it can look like, how it can make you feel to watch, let alone be up on the stage yourself. So that was the first approach that I took to it to get people excited.

Miller: Let’s listen to one of the poems that you did for last year’s Verselandia – again, the year that you won the competition.

Woods [performing]: January 1st, 1863. Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation stating that all persons held as slaves henceforward shall be free. December 6, 1865, Abraham Lincoln abolishes slavery with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

Now imagine having been chained in shackles for four centuries, seeing your brothers and sisters beaten, raped and killed, and finally a lovely white man comes along with a key written by freedom. The overwhelming sense of euphoria, bliss, and… gratitude?

But the white man always harbors a secret, you see. We were not told until June 19th that we were free and if you ask me, I still see a lot of my Black peers shouting to that white man, “Pick me, pick me.”

And the validation we seek has been embedded so deep that we took the tendencies of thee and beat upon ourselves senselessly. To beat a Black child is to instill a runaway slave. I used to tie a bindle on my back and declare my escape. Mind you, this is how we took massa’s ways.

Meanwhile, he wouldn’t dare utter such a wretched name, the same length of the switch you picked to get hit. You see, there are so many parallels to the plantation and we are not too far from it.

And did you make massa proud when you beat that Black child black and blue, and taught him to code switch for massa, too? Taught him to haul a** when we laugh ‘cause wasn’t s*** funny on that plantation? Taught him to love the intestines of a dead pig cause that’s all massa fed him, begging the puppies to hush ‘cause --- was in a rush. And did you make massa proud when you line them babies up and told them to fess up or they all get whipped for a crime they didn’t commit?

Or was it when we created an imaginary cookout specifically to invite them to… because they’re now included in everything we do, knowing salt and pepper just ain’t enough.

The generation that this confederation has traumatized is tired. Passing it down like grandma’s ugly jewelry, a worn down hand me, an aggressive --- chest pass. Cut it out! How dare we allow them to conform our nature. And all we did was simply conjure a word to call on our brother without the “er.” We are the hope and the descendant of the slave and today, that s*** really shows.

But I ain’t just blaming us. Look at what they did to us. We simply repeated what we were shown. Y’all should have just left us alone. Our community has transformed into a deep rooted reflection of what we’ve endured and overcome to the point that we’ve become numb. So I simply ask God to deliver us salvation from these parallels to the plantation. Thank you.

Miller: Qiana, what does it mean to you to have this avenue for communicating your ideas? I mean, there are others. You could write an essay that I’m sure would be powerful with your verbal skills, but this is a very specific way to tell the world what you want to tell it.

Woods: I honestly think this is the only way that I know how to do it, because this is what I’ve… you know, poetry is what I’ve seen from such a young age that I couldn’t take the avenue of like, rapping or anything different. This is just what I’ve seen. And even like you said, like an essay, I love writing essays too. That’s something that I find fun, but I think poetry and performing on such a big stage is the best way to do it, because you have thousands of people watching you and so the likelihood of you reaching your target audience is a lot higher.

Miller: Who’s your target audience now?

Woods: I think with that poem, my target audience was definitely my community of Black people. With a lot of my poetry in general, my target audience is anybody who can just relate. That can be someone younger than me, that can be someone older, that can be someone in the same race as me, someone in a different race, the same gender, a different gender, anything like that. Just anybody who has had similar experiences, who can listen and say, “I have had this experience. I have felt this way before and I’m glad somebody’s speaking about it.”

Miller: Nancy, you’ve been doing this for a while now. Have you seen themes come and go? Are there seasons for themes and styles?

Sullivan: There kind of are. We never can predict what they’re going to be, and then usually after Verselandia we will get together and the librarians will say, “Oh my gosh, there were four poems about such-and-such topic.” It’s interesting, there are, but there hasn’t been a trajectory or an evolution that you can really tie together that I’ve been able to find.

Miller: One of the things that stands out to me is that, in the poems that I’ve seen, young poets, they don’t pull punches. I mean, we could have played another one, Qiana, that you did last year, which is about – among other things – sexual assault and misogyny. One of the reasons it was hard to play that was just that we would have had to bleep a lot of words, literally. It’s a really intense, hard, impressive poem.

Woods: It’s realistic.

Miller: Yeah.

Nancy, maybe you’re just around so many young people all the time that you’re not surprised by the smarts and power of them, but I guess I’ll just turn it into a question. Are you surprised?

Sullivan: I’m always so impressed by their talent, their courage. I’m inspired by them. I’m moved by them. They’re amazing, and part of… You asked why we do this, and part of why we do it is because we wouldn’t have given Qiana that platform to know about her thoughts and her feelings and her brilliant ideas about the world and her experience in it. And some of the really entertaining things that come from people like Alex Dang talking about his personal experience and articulating it so well that it makes you understand your own experience better.

Miller: Alex, you now have, I don’t know, a dozen or so years since you were in high school. Looking back, what did you gain from doing poetry slams?

Dang: Oh, the moment in which I knew I could do this for the rest of my life. I remember that, in particular, my parents for Verselandia were there, and I remember my mom said, “I didn’t understand all of the words, but I understood the audience,” and I remember, after that night, we ‒ me, my mom, my dad ‒ went to go get dinner and they congratulated me on the poetry. We had a really nice evening. And I remember thinking, “Wow, this is what I want to pursue. This is what I want my life to be.”

Miller: And when your mom said that, is English not her first language?

Dang: No, both my folks, English is not their first language. Technically, English isn’t my first language either, but we spoke Vietnamese at home.

Miller: But she was saying that, “I could tell… I understood a lot of it, but I could really understand how much the crowd was getting.” She was proud of you.

Dang: Yeah, one of many things .She’s an awesome woman, really appreciate her around.

Miller: Qiana, has it felt different getting ready for Verselandia next week given that you are now going to be the returning champion?

Woods: I definitely think it feels different. I think, because I am a returning champion, people have a lot higher expectations now compared to last year. You know, nobody had seen me perform. That was my first big performance and so this time it’s very… It’s a little bit nerve racking, but I think that the high expectations push me a little bit more.

Miller: I don’t suppose you’d give us just a hint of what’s to come next week?

Woods: You’re just gonna have to wait till next week.

Miller: Nancy, did you think this was gonna be what it is now when you started it, just at what’s now McDaniel, 20 years ago?

Sullivan: I didn’t think it would be, but I’m glad that it is. It’s hard to plan ahead when you work in education in Portland Public Schools. The first five years I worked for the district, my position was cut, so I didn’t know what would happen.

Miller: You didn’t know if you’d have a job, so who’s to say if this is going to survive as one of your projects.

Sullivan: Let alone be able to produce slams for 20 years.

Miller: Nancy, Alex, and Qiana, thanks so much.

Sullivan: Thank you so much. It’s an honor.

Woods: Thank you.

Dang: Thank you. We appreciate it.

Miller: Nancy Sullivan is a media specialist, a librarian at Portland’s McDaniel High School. She started what is now Verselandia back in 2005. Alex Dang competed in the very first Verselandia in 2012. Qiana Woods won last year’s competition. She is a senior now at Parkrose High School.

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