Nuyorican Poets Bring Hip-Hop Style to the Brooklyn Museum

Regie Cabico is a former Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam champion, which means he knows how to put his poetry over to a demanding crowd. He is also a former resident of Fort Greene, and indeed wrote an entire book of poems based on his life in Brooklyn, "I Saw Your Ex-lover Behind the Starbucks Counter."

Yet, when Cabico goes on stage tonight at the, along with other Asian and Asian-American performing artists in the fifth in a series of six events sponsored jointly by the museum and the Nuyorican Poets Café, he is going to tread carefully. At least for the first few seconds.

“I like to see how raunchy I can get in a crowd and I’m going to have to feel it out,” he says. He will start with his most anthologized poems,Check One, "pertaining to Filipino American identity ... and I hope to get seedier and sexier from there.”

That's fine with Daniel Gallant, who for three years has been the cafe's executive director. “The Brooklyn museum is family-friendly, but our position is that we prefer to give poets free rein,” says Gallant.”It will all be thoughtful and sensitive even if it’s confrontational.”

For four decades, the Nuyorican Poets Café has helped define the culture of the Lower East Side. Its vivid mix of poetry, hip hop, stand-up and performance art -- and music and video and theater – has traveled around the country and around the world via the touring artists who gain their reputation at the café. There are still long lines in front of what is now the most dilapidated building on East Third Street between B and C in Manhattan, the now-gentrified block that is the long-time home of the cafe.

But efforts of the café as an institution to branch out beyond its building, and not just to schools, began to intensify under Gallant.

 In the most extensive collaboration so far, a group of Nuyorican Café poets, musicians and dancers have performed on the third Thursday of every month since January at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium on the third floor of the Brooklyn Museum. Each month, there has been a different theme – one focused on female poets; another, African-American; a third,  gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender. The two remaining programs will present Asian poets this month and Latino poets on June 16th, accompanied, as always, by dancers and musicians. (Obviously, the Nuyorican – New York Puerto Rican -- has gone beyond its original roots.)

The audience for the museum series has not been precisely the same as those who typically crowd the East Village café. There are more of them, for one thing; the auditorium holds about 200 people, about twice that of the café. They are also more comfortable; there are seats for everybody.

Mahogany L. Browne, host of the famed  Friday Night Slam Series at the café, had never performed at the Brooklyn Museum before. But she lives nearby in Crown Heights, and drew a crowd that included people from the neighborhood who already knew her work. The people who attended the museum event, Browne says diplomatically, “were very interested and invested in the happenings on stage, though they may have been a bit quieter than a normal Nuyorican crowd.” And what is a normal Nuyorican crowd? "The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is a special place. Not only is it a mecca for poetry,  but the people walk in wired and ready to experience anything."

If the intimate setting of the cafe is intense, Gallant says, "there’s something more laid back and accessible about the experience at the museum."

For his part, Cabico is sure the audience will be receptive to what he does – which he calls "slam poetry" and which he considers “a unique American art form like jazz” – given that Brooklyn is now full of “spoken word gatherings."

He is excited about tonight's event, which also features Tahani Salah, Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, and Pandora Scooter, with music by pianist Nisha Asnani. "I love the line-up of performers most of whom I have worked with as collaborator and teacher. All of us are doing our own thing and showing that Asian American spoken word is varied. This is an unprecedented moment for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe to support a gathering like this."

The poem with which he will open his set,  Check One, begins:

The Government asks me to "check one" if I want money.

I just laugh in their face and say,

"How can you ask me to be one race?"

 I stand proudly before you a fierce Filipino

who knows how to belt hard-gospel songs

played to African drums at a Catholic mass-

and loving the music to suffering beats,

and lashes from men's eyes on the capitol streets

It ends:

I have danced jigs with Jim Crow and shuffled my hips

to a sonic guitar of Clapton and Hendrix,

waltzed with dead lovers, skipped to bamboo sticks,

belleted kabuki and mimed cathacali

arrivedercied-a-rhumba and tapped Tin Pan Alley-

and you want me to dance the Bhagavad Gita

on a box too small for a thumbelina-thin diva?

I'll check "other"

Tonight's performance of Nuyorican Poets Café takes place at 7 p.m. at the Brooklyn Museum's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium on the 3rd Floor. Free with musuem admission of $10, $6 students and senior citizens. Advance museum ticket purchase recommended, which can be done here.