Oregon Humanities

Poetry in Motion

Poet Kaia Sand brings history to the present through explorations of space.

Lucy Burningham

Sitting on a bench overlooking a sea of sun-baked asphalt at the Portland Expo Center, Kaia Sand unrolls a long scroll of paper, the basis for her collection of poetry Remember to Wave. The paper crackles as semi trucks roar along Marine Drive and race cars whine at Portland International Raceway.

Every day for a month, Sand visited this site with a typewriter and her bicycle. She observed the activity of the present—men toting rifles to a gun show, blue herons wading alongside the mounds of the golf course, and MAX trains reaching the end of the line—while contemplating the area’s complicated past. In 1942, atop a livestock holding area in what is now the Expo Center, Japanese Americans were imprisoned before being sent to internment camps by train. At the same time, about forty thousand people were living on the surrounding acres, in a shoddy city named Vanport that was built for shipyard workers. In 1948, Vanport City flooded when a dike broke, releasing the Columbia River onto the floodplain. Some residents died, and the city was obliterated.

“The present can overwhelm the senses,” Sand writes in the book. “But if we muster an imaginative memory, we can read this geography in terms of displacements and exclusions.” The book weaves Sand’s words with images and found poetry: a page of the Vanport resident handbook, a modern sign advising against eating toxic fish from the slough, and a copy of the government order for Japanese Americans to evacuate. “Poetic form is a way to shape the mess that is history, information, and knowledge,” Sand says. “I love undertaking investigations and finding forms for how to shape that mess.”

As part of her investigations, Sand led a free tour of the site for the public in the fall of 2008, a project funded by a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, then additional tours in 2009 and 2010. “Inexpert inquiry allows me to do things collaboratively and have conversations,” she says. “I find that by not positioning myself as an authority, I open a bit of a space for people to enter.” For example, a tour attendee told Sand about a restaurant located next to the livestock zone; she had a piece of the old building in her garden. Someone else observed that a crumbling rock-and-cement wall near the golf course most likely wasn’t made by Italian immigrants—the work was too shoddy.

Sand isn’t currently organizing tours of the Expo Center, but she used the experience to create new projects, including half-day writing classes offered through Portland Parks and Recreation. She and other writers take participants into “lost neighborhoods,” such as Old Town and Forest Park. In addition, she’s been conducting writing workshops that tackle issues of displacement, prejudice, and civil liberties for school-age kids and homeless adults through the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, Street Roots, and Sisters of the Road. “People are so witty and interesting and creative with language all around us,” she says. “I try to create conditions for poetry to happen that’s not about making it easy and simplistic, which I hope honors all people.”