The night began with a call-and-response session: “Poetry!” the emcee yelled.

“Slam!” the audience shouted back.

“Poetry!”

“Slam!”

Presented last night by six student groups, “He Said, She Said” featured spoken-word poetry — a form of performance poetry popularized in the 1980s and ’90s — centered around sex, race, gender roles and the relationships between men and women. Brooklyn, N.Y.-based artist Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai hosted the event, sharing a few of her own feminist-themed poems before ceding the Stamp Student Union Atrium stage to students.

In her first poem, Tsai rhythmically recited, “Real women I know have flaws/ … Flaws like cheating on our partners, stealing our best friends’ lovers/ … Real women I know support the economies of entire countries.”

Getting Tsai, who was a part of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry and now tours internationally, to come to the university was a process that started last summer, according to organizers. Junior government and politics major Elma Sakian, a former intern for youth advocacy group Campus Progress, first asked Tsai to perform after hearing her poetry at the organization’s July conference.

“[Sakian] was talking about how there’s such a strong and vibrant community here at Maryland, especially for spoken word,” Tsai said. “We had kinda talked about doing something very interactive and showing off the talents of people here.”

Luciana Debenedetti, a junior government and politics major who had also seen Tsai perform, was the chief organizer for the event, geared toward creating a dialogue about sexuality and relationships. She sent e-mails to university listservs and recruited student groups including Feminism Without Borders, TerPoets, Terps for Choice and Community Roots — as well as the Student Entertainment Events Review Board to provide some of the funding — as co-sponsors to provide a broader student voice than the typical on-campus spoken-word events, which tend to draw the same crowd every time.

“I wanted to make an event that appealed to the wider Maryland campus,” Debenedetti said. “By having a wide variety of sponsors, we got different students performing.”

In addition to Tsai’s performance, seven students shared their poetry with the roughly 70-person audience, who enthusiastically clapped, laughed and nodded along to the flow of the words.

Two male students performed during the open-mic portion of the night, one reciting his poem and the other rapping and singing along with backing music of his own creation. Tsai then roused the audience for a poetry slam, a two-round competition among five student volunteers — four women, one man — that was decided by the crowd and four judges.

The poems ranged from abstract meditations on life and love to bold statements about rape, gender roles, hip-hop and sex.

“I had no idea if I heard what I was looking for,” said junior English and history major Emily Zido during her performance. “And the month of fireflies came tumbling down and Odysseus came back to his wife/ So all’s quiet on the August front.”

Junior psychology major Chantelle Doswell chose the other route for her three poems: “I should have realized it was you being a bastard/ I wish I could’ve realized that faster/ … I’m just a woman, not a sexist.”

Amid cheers from the audience endorsing or decrying the judges’ decisions, Tsai declared Doswell, who is also president of Community Roots, the slam’s winner.

In line with the theme of the event, Doswell, who said she has performed in about 10 slams, detailed the purpose of her poetry last night: “Sometimes I just like to smack people in the face with feminism.”

kraftery at umdbk dot com