Category Archives: set-list

Almost three years into Acentos I finally book myself into the feature slot. A good deal of thought went into that little piece of narcissism. First off, I have been to a good number of poetry readings where the host/curator believes his/her own poetry is the cure all. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all about adding a piece of personality into the proceedings and have made it a point to not change who I am or how I act when I am up on that mic. For good or bad people know that when they are coming to Acentos they are coming to hear a lil bit of me in between the poems. The key is the part where as a host you actually let the poems speak for themselves and keep the proceedings moving nicely with a nice touch of praise for work you enjoy and a dash of bitter for work that doesn’t suit your aesthetic. Change the recipe too much in either direction and I think it all goes to hell. But that’s just me.

Three years later, I think I have proven that I can effectively curate without having to rely on just my friends or just the features that I know can get asses in seats. Which is another beef that I have with some readings. “Why you gotta book _______ 5 times a year? When you do that, you are just being lazy and doing everyone a disservice.” Again, this is just my opinion.

Past all that, I am a huge fan of annual cycles and love to chart and mark that journey around the sun whenever I can and, lo and behold, it has been one year since my louderMONDAY feature at Bar13. I was just recovering from the most vicious attack of gout yet, basically bedridden for six weeks, and in need of the company of fellow poets. You can read through the post for some other thoughts but the short version is that it was the most important reading of my poetic career at that point.

Flash forward to the here and now– I am happily engaged to be married and preparing to leave the city that has been the only home I have ever known. Scary? A lil bit but the reward on the other side of the continent far outweighs any trepidation I may have to change. But that did not stop us from over-hyping the event as my last NYC reading ever (“the reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated” thank ya much Twain) it is quite possible the final curtain call for me in that I am not as interested in the stage as I was a year ago. And this, dear friends, is a good thing. More and more my focus is shifting to a well edited, carefully crafted poem that just plain works as opposed to a poem that works both on stage & on the page. The lines have blurred and my ego has shifted to a new place and this feature helped celebrate that change.

Mind you, I still thought I could pull an ob.special and bust out at least a trio of fresh out of the oven new hotness for the feature. Between a trip to Boston to be with bella, an interview for a documentary, work, and spending time with friends, the ob.special was not meant to be. This led me to put together a feature based heavily on the August Cornelia Street feature that was lightly attended by familia Acentos but which produced THE seminal moment in my life. I also included three newer poems, a trio of covers and one poem that just needed to be read at Acentos *No, Maria, not that poem!*

For your perusal, here is the set list. A mix of work that speaks more to where my art is heading versus my previous sets that revolved around a central theme or used a particular poem as the axis for the other poems. Let me tell you, only in front of the people I call family can I rise to a new level of confidence in my work. Gracias, Acentos, all your love was deeply felt and well appreciated. Sheet, you almost made me cry… twice! Almost, but not quite. ;-)

Take care, y’all!

ACENTOS SET LIST 01.24.06

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
-Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata

• Pacific Lullaby

• Menagerie

• To The Poets Sleeping By My Window

• Carlos Varela’s Una Palabra

• The Hue of Ripened Fruit

• Soneta De Mi Musa

• Federico García Lorca’s The Gypsy and the Wind

• orange alert

• a hex on past muses

• a hex on the man who stole my leather jacket

• Barbara Jane Reyes’s [state of emergency]

• The Poet is like a Guerrilla (after José Maria Sison’s The guerrilla is like a poet)

• Viewing the World from the Back of a Turtle

• About B-Boys in the Boogie Down

The four-one-one:

SET LIST: DOWNTWOWN BRONX CAFÉ/BX1 ARTS FETIVAL

Anything to Declare?
She Reads the Letter on the Bx1, Oblivious to the Fact That She Missed Stop Fifteen Minutes Ago
My Father Teaches Me the Aesthetics of Poetry
Getting Ronald Reagan to Visit the South Bronx
About B-Boys in the Boogie Down

The BCA only asked for a seven minute set. This actually clocks out to about 8:30. Yes, I do try to time out my sets on paper before hitting the stage for a feature.

This may have been one of the most nerve racking sets I have ever done. At first I thought it was the whole hometown crowd deal or maybe the fact that it was such a premiere event for the Bronx. Nah. With such a short time on stage and me trying to get in as much Bx poetry as possible, I knew that I had no time for any kind of banter with the audience.

Fault as poet exposed. I need – emphasis on that last word – to communicate with people. It is very hard for me to just go up there and let the set speak for itself. I got no problem going up and doing one piece and letting that piece speak for itself but in a longer set I need to not talk about the poems but talk about the duende. Let people know that something is going on up here. I am not a poetic automaton that can go into poetry mode one second and then out of it the next.

Sharing poetry requires some kind of exchange, a kind of trust thing. Y’all (the audience) can trust that I have tried to put together a well thought out set with some kind of intentional story arc that will give you some insight as to how I view the day/poetry/life/the cosmos. In return, I need (Ding!) for the audience to give me some kind of response that they are along for the ride. Applause is, in my estimation, a pretty base line barometer of attention. Some folks just clap cuz they see the rest of the bar is clapping and have actually not heard a damn thing I said since they were too busy kicking it to the latest poetry groupie that walked into the bar. Silence can actually be a real intense response but it’s a thin line between ‘Ohmygawdwhatishegonnasaynext’ and ‘IwonderwhowonAmericanIdol?’

Banter takes care of all that for me. It lets me gauge the room, see who is with me, who could care less and then tailor my performance around that.

Meanwhile back at the Downtown Bronx Café, I am shitting a brick when I realize that I have almost ZERO banter time.

This leads to one of the most nervous readings I have ever had. I’ve been nervous before and I’ve been disappointed after but it’s rare these days for me to be nervous while doing the actual poems themselves. (Note: this is only for features I still get very self conscious during open mics.)

Despite all this, the feature went very well. The poems told their stories and I was in-and-out in quick, but not too quick, fashion.

As part of the event, I figured I would put together the set in the form of a mini-chapbook: The View from Mt Eden Ave. The actual chap is only eight pages and requires just one staple to keep it all together. I couldn’t justify charging even a buck for this thing so I came up with THE most masterful promotional gimmick ever…

Sign my mailing list and you get a free copy of the mini-chap.

Nice! Right? Wrong! The only folks that signed my mailing list were the four nice folks that actually purchased the full chap book. Which means—I could not give away my poetry! LOL

There are still a couple of copies of The View from Mt Eden Ave nicely inserted into the latest printing of Sorta Rican so BE DIALIN’ PEOPLE! (Inside Joke Y’all)

As of this writing, I have NO plans to feature anywhere in the immediate future which I am kind of digging cuz it may just be time to start submitting some more work to journals.

Love ya like commuters love a seat on the 4 train at rush hour

travelin back to new york with marc anthony and la india blaring on the radio. tata is rockin a dam good tune while profe and fish are keepin themselves entertained with parodies. i love it.

the poets asylum was all that and some seasoned bagel chips. them worcester folks is MAD rowdy and damn good listeners. lets start with the cold hard facts:

SET LIST
Sorta Rican
Cartography
Capicu
Spanglish- The New Mother Tongue
Poem for the Hispanics who insist on mispronouncing
the menu items at the Chino-Latino restaurant
The New York Times finally got it right
when they took the R out of my “a’ight”
Paying the Toll
Carried Game by Jai Chakrabarti
Where’s the new shit, O?
She Reads The Letter, Oblivious To The Fact
That She Missed Her Stop Fifteen Minutes Ago
My Father Teaches Me The Aesthetics of Poetry At Age 8
Getting Ronald Reagan to Visit the South Bronx
Anything to Declare?
About B-Boys in the Boogie Down
Ceviche
Oda Para Leticia
Zero Hour at the Event Horizon
Mercy on the Battlefield

whew! the biggest challenge of putting together this set was mixing up the pieces where i could keep the energy up and moving. not all of my pieces end on definitive notes and that leaves some audiences scratchin their heads wonderin exactly how i could be on the mic for so long and NOT detail exaclty how republicans lie, the blueprint for ending racism and the date poetry will be the new TV.

luckily the java hut crowd is not looking for that. instead, they are on the hunt for strong lines, good imagery and tight metaphor and their feedback says they found some of that in my work.

the initial set list was pretty rich with the spanglish so i threw in Cartography in there to break that up and to also perform it with some early feature high energy. in bodybuilding, you work out your weak body parts early to let them catch up with your stronger body parts. same concept here.

from there the ‘short poem’ part of the night to the ‘new shit’ but i cant assume they are goona vibe with the short poems and sometimes the new shit is a lil TOO new so i break it up with Paying the Toll (kinda short, kinda new and funny finish) and Carried Game (ya didnt know Jai wrote a poem about Latinos playin soccer did ya?)

from the new stuff to the core of this set. the ‘where im from’ section. it feels good to gice the bronx a good shout out and unless i come up with a new poem, this may well be the set for the BX1 Festival (more details soon to come)

more on the ‘where i’m from’ tip but this time focusing on ecuador and then Zero Hour which got a very strange reaction. something i was kinda expecting as its one of my more surreal pieces. no worries cuz from there we end on the ol stand by.

the flow went near perfect. my banter was also dead on. with me telling good stories without giving away the core of the poems or apologizing for anything.

preparation was the key here. i had this set list in my head for the last 24 hours and had all the poems ready to go. with the good flow and personal satisfaction i am gettin from She Reads The Letter and About B-Boys, i wasnt stressin out that i didnt have NEW new shit and just focused on gettin down the flow.

the last time i had to put together a 30 min set was for the Syracuse Univeristy reading and i damn near crapped myself in the process with an end result that was not the bestfeedback ive ever received. amazing what 8 months does. this time around i had extra(!) poems in my holster. a full ten more poems i could have busted out if need be.

the highlight of the evening was presenting Tony Brown with a copy of the set list and all the poems (cept for Jai’s as i only had one copy on me). tony is a poet’s poet and i was happy to give a lil sumthin back to him.

did i mention that the Acentos crew rocked out? hell yes! they all brought the fire and i was happy to acknowkledge them from the mic.

the cherry on top– chapbook sales… thru the roof!

okey dokes, i need some sleep.

love ya like the pocket knife i carry just cuz

i dont have time to go into all the details but i really want to post this up before it joins the graveyard of posts that i dont get around to actually putting on the blog

SET LIST: SPOKEN WORDS CAFÉ
-Brooklyn Back Break Beat
-Bermeo
-Hosting 101
-She Reads The Letter, Oblivious To The Fact That She Missed Her Stop Fifteen Minutes Ago
-My Father Teaches Me The Aesthetics Of Poetry At Age 8
-Brand Name
-Right Here in the Bronx

the set went aight, i think. it was by no means a standout performance. with the exception of BBBB all these poems are less than 90 days old. with a room full of friends that have all heard me bust out the hits, i didnt think i had much of a choice. some of the words were like taffy in my mouth, they taste good but still leave my tongue heavy. at any rate, this is a great warmup to worcester where i can mix up more of the older work with this fresh stuff and we’ll see what happens.

go outside and pick a flower