Troupe performs original works, compares Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with hip-hop artist Talib Kweli, and recites lively versions of Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Edgar Allan Poe. 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.