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past year, including attendees at a May 2009 Board
of Trustees dinner that featured an Open Moments
performance.
“They were just shocked,” group co-founder and president
Keron Alleyne ’12 recalls. “Some didn’t know that
the poems were our original pieces. They were amazed
something like this was happening at the College.”
Another point of amazement: all of the Open Moments
performers at the Trustee dinner were freshmen.
Established by Alleyne and three other first-year
students – Sam Maldonado ’12, Tiffany Williams ’12,
and Jamilia Cain ’12, Open Moments was predominately
made up of freshmen in its inaugural year. Not
all of the participants had written or performed poetry
prior to their membership in the group. Maldonado,
one of the club’s most accomplished performers, began
his poet’s journey in October of 2008, after a random
encounter with Alleyne at their residence hall.
“Keron and I both lived in North Hall,” Maldonado
recalls. “He was coming into the building and I was
coming out. I had a pen and a note pad, and I guess he
was curious, so he asked me, ‘Hey, do you write poetry?’
I told him no, just music, and Keron said, ‘Well,
that’s good enough – it’s still a writing art.’ And I was
like, yeah. We started talking after that.”
Williams’ first encounter with Alleyne was similarly
random. “I had seen Keron on campus,” she says. “One
time I was sitting in the lounge of North Hall writing,
and he said, ‘Oh my god, you write, too?’ And I said,
yeah. So he started to tell me about how he wanted to
start Open Moments. From there we kind of lifted off.”
It was, in fact, a relatively off-hand suggestion by
Cain that got the idea of a club started.
“One day I noticed Keron was writing poetry, and
I said, ‘Hey, we both write poetry. Why don’t we start
an organization?’ At the time, we didn’t know whether
or not there was already a poetry club at the College.
It just seemed like it would be something really big for
UC,” says Cain.
Being heard
Though poetry was new to Maldonado, he did have
some experience writing songs for R&B singers. He
was not, however, a performer himself when he started
working with Alleyne. One of his first public poetry
readings took place at an open mic event hosted by
UC’s Latin American Student Union (LASU). “I was
pretty nervous,” says Maldonado.”The paper was shaking
in my hand.”
In spite of the nervousness, though, Maldonado felt
strongly about delivering the poem. “It was a piece
about racism,” he explains. “It was like a true story
poem. Once I was in the dining commons and noticed
that the white kids were sitting on one side and the
Tradition. Opportunity. Transformation.®
black and Latino kids were on the other. It was just
irritating me – I was thinking, why can’t everyone just
sit together? So I decided I should write a poem about
it, and that’s what I read at the LASU event.”
“It’s kind of cool, because the day after I read it, I
saw some kids kind of mingling with others in the dining
hall. I guess the people that were actually listening
had switched their seats. That’s why I feel if I can touch
one person with my poetry, I know I’ve made a difference,”
he says.
Alleyne, Maldonado, Cain, and Williams started
building Open Moments from the ground up at the
start of the 2008-09 semester. They settled on the
name as a way of paying tribute to a friend’s late sister.
“She and her boyfriend had started a poetry club called
Open Moments at Baruch College, and we named our
group in homage to her,” says Maldonado, though
for him, the name carries layers of meaning. “Open
Moments is a way of saying you have to be ready for
whenever your moment comes. Also, the initials O.M.
are like a mantra. Poetry is kind of like a meditation.”
First on the agenda was approaching the Student
Senate for recognition as a club. They saw this as more
a performance opportunity than an interview. “We
didn’t just want to go in there and tell them what the
club was about,” Cain says. “We wanted to show them.”
“Together we created a poem that had all four of
us talking about the positions of president, secretary,
treasurer, and so on,” says Maldonado, “and we performed
it at the Senate meeting.”
Alleyne counts this among his favorite performances.
“I said something like: I’m the president like
Bush, but more like Obama; because I bring change and
a little less drama. Everyone was just stunned. It was so
small, yet big at the same time,” he says.
Their first public performance as an official UC club
was at the LASU talent show in November 2008. Alleyne
says the piece they performed began with a poem
he was working on that compared relationships with
basketball and featured the refrain, “pass the ball.”
Williams, Cain and Maldonado had written pieces as
well, and then together they crafted a kind of poetic
conversation about relationships, each playing a role.
“The final piece went through different scenarios,
from abuse, to relationships in general, to how guys
and girls feel about one another, to raising awareness
about STDs,” Williams says. “It all just flowed together
as one piece. We hadn’t planned it that way. It ended
up making total sense.”
“It was powerful,” says Alleyne. “The audience was
kind of stunned. When we finished, a lot of people
were still thinking about what they’d heard. Then they
started to applaud.”
pioneer 21 fall 2009