Emotion, eloquence in young voices
a TV series with “Creed” and “Fruitvale Station” writer-director Ryan Coogler, and her close friend Daveed Diggs, who stars on Broadway in the hip-hop musical “Hamilton.” “Daveed would win every time,” Hodge says of their Berkeley High slams. “But it was never really about that. It was always about the community, and having a place where I could be heard and seen.”
A former teacher, Kass grasped the alienation of mid-’90s teens. “They were being mis-portrayed in the media, and particularly kids of color were being vilified,” he recalls. “They didn’t have a place to come together across community lines, and they didn’t have any adults nurturing their writing.”
He thought poetry could be a good outlet for them, as it had been for him. “It allowed me to get to know myself,” says the self-described hip-hop kid who wrote and DJ-ed with friends in New York. “It also taught us how to listen. Like, ‘Oh, you’re fresh too! I want to be fresher than you, and you’re going to be fresher than me.’ It creates this collaborative competition where we’re all trying to be our best selves.”
Fifty kids did the first slam at the old Intersection for the Arts on Valencia, covered in The Chronicle. “Kids started coming from all over,” Kass says. They keep coming — from Lafayette, from Richmond, from the Sunset — because Youth Speaks offers a safe place to express themselves through poetry, plays and fiction, plus guidance that can be life-altering.
Slams are competitive, with winning poets advancing to local semifinals and final rounds, and then to the Brave New Voices national final. But the vibe is supportive, scoring is anonymous and the audience boos low marks and cheers high ones. “Everybody knows it’s ridiculous to put a number on a poem,” says Kass, “so we make fun of it as it’s happening.”
In their poems, the teens speak passionately about identity, justice, sexuality, drugs. They aim sharp metaphors at questionable authorities — that night at 826 Valencia, more than one person noted that police and protesters were outside, clashing over the police shooting of Amilcar Perez-Lopez.
The poets also discover their own power. “At home, my perspective didn’t
necessarily matter,” says Brandon Yip, 18, a three-year participant and UC Berkeley freshman. But at slams, he says, “people are inclined to listen because you have the mike.”
Marc Bamuthi Joseph agrees. Now Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ chief of programs and pedagogy, he was Youth Speaks’ founding program director and Hodge’s mentor. “We’re cultivating an aspect of our society that is underutilized,” he says. “The slam is not just an exercise in young people speaking out, it’s an exercise for the rest of us to listen and, hopefully, grow.”
Youth Speaks has brought unique opportunities to Kass, too. In 2009 he curated the inaugural White House Poetry Jam, where Barack and Michelle Obama heard Lin-Manuel Miranda share the first song he wrote for “Hamilton.” “We’ve allowed young people to redefine for themselves what poetry is,” says Kass, “and I think Lin is doing the same thing with theater.”
From the Mission to the White House — 20 years on, Kass describes Youth Speaks’ growth as, simply, “crazy.” But he’s still making good on his pitch to that first group of teenage poets. “Come get down with us,” he told them, “and we promise to create opportunities for young people to have a voice on their own terms.”