"As long as we're under this roof, we are family," host Jamele Adams told the near-capacity crowd at VOCAL 2008 in Spingold Theater Saturday evening. The event, organized by Justin Kang '09, sought to raise money and awareness for after-school programs in Waltham. Its spoken-word format was sufficiently personal to make the large audience feel intimately connected with the performing poets yet political enough to fit the evening's spirit of social action. Sixteen-year-old Noel Scales of Philadelphia started off the evening reciting two love poems, which struck a sometimes intimate, sometimes defiant tone. Her extraordinarily touching opener concerned a boyfriend's death in Iraq. HBO veteran Kayo followed with a witty and insightful memoir about a love affair with an older woman. He then recited a political poem that compared black history with the modern lifestyle of the black man.

Skinny, quirky George Watsky was next, with the night's most innovative piece. Watsky, a sophomore at Emerson College and a member of the grand prize-winning team from San Francisco at the National Youth Poetry Slam in 2006, adjusted the microphone to different parts of his body, imitated the sound of rewinding tape and recited binary code (a trope that caught the eye of headliner Saul Williams) in an altogether amusing performance. The mixture of nationally acclaimed poets with young amateur performers continued with Anthony Febo, who presented a pleasant but forgettable political diatribe on inequality and violence. Febo, of Lowell, Mass., gained a spot on Saturday night's bill as the winner of a competition held at More than Words Bookstore in Waltham. Student performers Alysia Harris of the University of Pennsylvania and Jason Simon-Bierenbaum '11, who helped organize the show, rounded out the student portion of the bill. Harris offered a highly original exploration of her identity as a minority growing up in the South, sharing both racial and regional implications, while Simon-Bierenbaum spoke about a childhood friend who joined the army.

One of the biggest names of the night, Carlos Andres Gomez, recited poems that drew on his experience as a middle-school teacher. He read with genuine feeling, albeit with an occasionally preachy quality. His most affecting poem drew gasps from the audience when he pointed out that his students knew about the Holocaust but could not define genocide. The intense political tone of the evening was then broken by Iyeoka, who delivered three optimistic poems concerning dreams, miracles and fate.

Buddy Wakefield, a self-described "cross between Bruce Willis and Charlie Brown," breathed life into the program with his humorous banter and fiery verses. In one poem, Wakefield revealed the irony in the United States' outrage following 9/11, despite the fact that America has staged violent interventions in 25 countries. He also delivered an emotionally charged poem that sketched the characters of a number of real or imagined people who suffer from extreme self-hate.

A couple of local poets gave very tense performances. Laura Murphy's poem described in exquisite detail a fantasy of burning down Providence as an adolescent reaction against conformity and emotional isolation. Jared Paul, whom Adams described by saying, "If the revolution started tomorrow, Jared would already have known about it for two weeks," re-energized a lagging crowd with dramatic physical and vocal contortions. He delivered both a diatribe against imperialism and a plaintive description of life on tour.

After Paul's intense offering, Chicagoan and Puerto Rican poet Mayda de Valle performed bilingual poems ranging in subject from the role of language in expressing racism to the sights and sounds of her mother's kitchen. Her subject matter was strong and her delivery uplifted the audience-an important element of her performance, for she came just before Saul Williams took the stage.

Throughout the evening, both audience members and performers called for Jamele Adams, associate director of student life and a slam poet himself, to perform. Finally, just before announcing the headlining act, Adams pulled out a cell phone and appeared to be texting onstage; he then announced that he would perform a poem he'd only recently composed in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. The poem, which he read from his cell phone, told of political disillusionment and anti-establishment anger.

When Adams finally introduced headliner Saul Williams at 11:30 p.m., the entire crowd rose to its feet in applause, only to find Williams perched on a ledge along the side of the theater. Williams, a renowned slam poet and rapper, has recently received considerable praise for his album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, released on November 1 of last year. The album is a collaboration between Williams and Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, who contributed the beats for Williams' rhymes.

So compelling was Williams that those closest to him remained standing throughout his first piece. Williams' poems were a fluid landscape of violent, sexual and religious images, presented through beautiful inversions and wordplays like, " 'Mother Nature is a whore,' said the shotgun to the head." Williams ended on a cautiously optimistic note, asserting, "The greatest Americans have not been born yet. They are waiting for the past to die."

Williams also introduced surprise guest Amanda Palmer (of rock band The Dresden Dolls), who read a fairly traditional poem about love and heartbreak.

VOCAL 20008's coordinators packed the bill with enough talent to readily justify the show's four-hour length. On the whole, the night's performances bore witness to the delicate negotiation between personal and political consciousness in an energizing display of talent and promise.