Last night, Bwog enjoyed the literary and cuisinary culture of the Latino-Caribbean with the volunteers and novice poets of Voices UnBroken.

Bwog arrived to the Voices UnBroken Poetry Slam a little late last night, but there were still plenty of maduros to be eaten and plenty of amateur poets to be heard. The reading drew a relatively small group of socially inclined and literary minded students to pay tribute to the work of the Voices Unbroken volunteers, whose mission is to bring creative writing workshops to prisons, residential treatment facilities, and various other transitional settings in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx. Despite its small size, the event lasted a solid three hours and filled the auditorium on the fifth floor of Lerner with the smells of what could be called pan Latino-Caribbean cuisine and the sounds of what it is to be young and of color in New York.

Although the poetry of isolation and ethnography can often air on pedestrian side of things, last night the poets expressed a remarkable sense of honesty and cogency. The student poets embraced the open-mic and unabashedly read, rapped and sung work that ranged from highly crafted mediations to recent observations to spur of the moment improvisations.

It seemed all too auspicious that moments after Bwog arrived that one Stephan Vincenzo, infamously of CC '12, stepped up to the mic to read his lengthy Bildungsroman styled poem, "Where I am and Where I would be." And indeed his poetry is as epic as his persona.

We got an inside sneak peak of the West End's newly Cubanized interior earlier tonight when it opened its doors for the now-annual celebration of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other Columbia-affiliated Beats, culminating in an enthusiastic reading of Ginsberg's Howl. For an event devoted to subversive young artists, the 'Stend's new digs, not to mention the sumptuous banquet with all-you-can-drink wine and beer, were a bit incongruously swank.

Still, several of the bar's former mainstays, among them Kerouac's former lover Joyce Johnson, evoked memories of the old West End, one going so far as to suggest that the renovation brought back the spirit of the bar of years ago. What's old is new again? Maybe we'll figure it out when all the orange paint is finally dry.

-CJS