For as long as he can remember, Dario Serrano's life was all screeching tires and echoing gunshots, babies' cries and barking dogs, a symphony, as he puts it, of "hood rats and gangsters," of "vatos and payasos" -- dudes and numskulls, loosely translated.
By high school, he'd pretty much given up on himself. He bounced around between three schools. He started selling pot, though he always seemed to smoke more than he sold. His GPA fell to 0.67, which is about as bad as you can get and still be showing up.
Literature, it is fair to say, was not resonating. "I mean, 'The Great Gatsby'?" he says incredulously, and when he puts it like that, Lincoln Heights does feel pretty far from Long Island.
When a friend suggested that poetry might be his thing, Serrano scoffed. Grudgingly, he started tagging along to a poetry club, and one day last year he took his lunch break in a classroom where a teen troupe called Get Lit was holding auditions.
Get Lit's artistic director, an African American artist named Azure Antoinette, performed an original composition called "Box," a denunciation of anyone who would define her by the color of her skin, who would lump together, thoughtlessly, faces of color:
"The general population has come to a consensus that we don't have a prayer," she said, her voice filling the room. "All we have is prayer. . . . We are not victims."
This, Serrano thought, was something he could get behind.
Today the nonprofit Get Lit Players are barnstorming Los Angeles, kids performing for kids, thousands of them over the course of a dozen school performances this winter and spring.
Some of their readings are of the classic variety -- Ezra Pound; Langston Hughes; "The Boy Died in My Alley" by the great Gwendolyn Brooks, written in the voice of a girl who confesses that she heard the gunshot but didn't think much of it because she'd also heard "the thousand shots before."
But much of their material consists of in-your-face original compositions -- about teenage mothers and mixed-race children, about gang violence and immigrant pride -- that are performed in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Bengali, like a soundtrack to a modern, messy L.A.
Serrano, now 18, has become a troupe leader. Poetry, he says, saved his life. He graduated last year from Marshall High School, earning straight A's in the homestretch, he said, and now attends East Los Angeles College, where he is considering a career in education.
