Questions Answered

 

             To begin my closing remarks, then, I shall briefly re-capitulate the conclusions which my analysis reached. As Professor Cruz Malavé said, “[the Nuyorican aesthetic] embraces the spirit of experimentalism itself. The poetry is about things that you can never quite totalize.”¹ I have argued that this untotalizable Nuyorican aesthetic is manifested in Newness. In Segment 1 I pointed to the characteristic of Newness as manifested in Vintage Nuyorican poetry through the linguistic code-switch. Despite the significant differences between Vintage Nuyorican poetry and Post-Nuyorican poetry, I argued that the aesthetic of Newness persists throughout the movement, with Post Nuyorican poetry exemplifying Newness through the transgeneric code-switch, as discussed in Segment 2. The experimentalism which the aesthetic of Newness promotes is partially forwarded through the Nuyorican insistence on performance, as discussed in Segment 3. I argued that performance poetry has fundamentally different qualities to printed poetry, and therefore that the Nuyorican performances undermine the authority of print culture. Through the aesthetic of Newness and its challenge, firstly, to the authority of monolongualism, secondly to the classification of literature into genres and lastly to the dominance of the written word, the Nuyorican movement presents a subversive ideology. Given the expansive nature of the aesthetic forwarded by Nuyorican Newness, I argued in Segment 4 that the Nuyorican Poets Café plays an essential role in maintaining the cohesion of the movement. The physical base that the Café offers is an important symbolic site upon which the movement’s experimentalism can grow and flourish.

            

Questions (Un)answered

 

Of course, the ‘answers’ that I have provided are, at best, riddled with caveats, and at worst might be considered to violate the very nature of the movement I am attempting to highlight as important. While the Nuyorican Poets Café exists today and poets regularly perform there, how many poets actively consider themselves Nuyorican? How much self-identification with this label is necessary before these poets can be analyzed as part of the Nuyorican tradition, given the inclusivity of the aesthetic terms of Newness? Has the label ‘Nuyorican’ lost its Newness and become irrelevant in multi-cultural America? Does the Nuyorican Poets Café retain its original, subversive motivations given the mainstream nature of Slam poetry and the Café’s reputation as a venue for excellent artistry? Is it possible to know how much exchange occurred between Nuyorican Poetry, Slam Poetry and Hip Hop to have birthed the rise of spoken word in the U.S today? Does the agility offered by the ideology of Newness in fact render the Nuyorican movement so broad that it is impossible to define its limits, and therefore the discussion of it is as inclusive as one may choose to define it, weakening its resonance? How can we consider oral Nuyorican poetry in terms of other oral poetry traditions? Can we consider it a form of oral history or storytelling?

Answers to these questions are relevant and important, and ones that remain largely unanswered by my work. Given more scholarly attention, these and many other questions raised by my debate will be adequately answered. However, some issues concerning my work persist on a deeper, near ethical level. These must be brought to light here. In attempting to illustrate Nuyorican Poetry as being an important contributor to American literary culture, have I undermined its very goal in remaining perpetually counter-cultural? What is American literary culture, and how is it possible to know when a particular tradition has been ‘accepted’ into it, and therefore codified? Had I not self-consciously labeled this website as a ’thesis’ from ’Harvard University’, would the aforementioned questions apply to this website? Is it ironic that in order to discuss the aesthetic trope of the poetry I labeled some of the poetry ‘Vintage Nuyorican poetry’ and some of the poetry ‘Post Nuyorican poetry’, thereby violating the Nuyorican attempt to remain un-labeled? What will the next stage of Nuyorican poetry be—Post Post-Nuyorican? Or to borrow Svetlana Boym’s ’Off Modern’, Off Nuyorican? More importantly, given the expansive nature of Newness, how will this aesthetic stage define itself in opposition to Post-Nuyorican poetry? By highlighting some poets and their poetry have I canonized them, elevating their work above that of their contemporary poets, violating the Nuyorican principle of the democratization of art?

 

Closing Thoughts

 

             It seems undeniable that Nuyorican poetry is one example of today’s ever popularizing multi-genre, inter-cultural, public exchanges of ideas through art. Even if the Nuyorican label has lost its significance as indicative of a specific demographic, as a poet claimed was the case with ‘Nuyorasian’—“I love Nuyorasian… it means absolutely nothing.”²—it nonetheless persists as a signifier of the history of Nuyorican poetry and the Nuyorican movement. Nuyorican poetry, through the experimental aesthetic of Newness, prompts the question, “What is poetry?” Nuyorican poetry presents two modes which are marginal areas of literary study: bilingual literature and transgeneric literature. Professor Werner Sollors wrote the following on multilingualism in American literary history:

 

Contemporary American literary histories, anthologies and bibliographies tend to marginalize non-English writing in the States… As American literature has been established in the course of the century, it has also been transformed out of many languages into one—English. It is the purpose of The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature to make visible the most glaring blind spot in American letters.³

 

While Sollors and Shell’s project in the Multilingual Anthology of American Literature was to bring early multilingual American texts to critical attention, thereby closing some gaps in American literary history, the term ‘glaring blind spot’ seems to apply directly to Vintage Nuyorican poetry. Echoing Sollors, it is essential that in today’s multi-cultural America, texts born of U.S. citizens’ multi-cultural experiences are not silenced due to the linguistic boundaries they transgress. Rather, I assert, they should be paid careful attention in reward for their innovative challenge to monolingualism.

             Turning to the transgeneric quality of Nuyorican poetry, Professor James Fenton commented on the critical enquiry into Spoken Word poetry, and other multi-generic performance forms in his essay “The Raised Voice of Poetry”:

 

What I’m concerned with is the low level of critical inquiry and debate surrounding these developments…This is a case in point: we need critics who are open to the transfigurations, with the vision and intelligence to deal with complexities of cross arts creation, not just knock them out of the water for fear of the “mud”.⁴

 

It is vital that critics take seriously the analysis and debate of experimental literary forms which blend genres. It is equally important that this analysis does not belittle the literature in question by implying that insightful critique can only be presented in linear, printed essay form. I hope that my modest gesture towards this new direction of criticism will prompt discussion of the benefits, limitations, strengths and weaknesses of hypermedia analysis.

I will close with my final claim, that when examined on its own terms, the Nuyorican movement demonstrates itself to be an important part of American literary culture. The bilingual, transgeneric and performative quality to the aesthetic of Nuyorican Newness renders the poetry and therefore the movement slippery to engage with and critique. It is precisely this evasive quality which renders the movement relevant. Nuyorican poetry and the Nuyorican movement not only challenge the boundaries of language and art forms aesthetically, but question the value of these categorizations at a fundamental level. The Nuyorican movement flaunts the inadequacy of labels, claiming that art cannot be accurately represented by a descriptor. This claim is penetrative and important and it can be extended from the debate of artistic genres to the discussion of personal, ethnic and national identities. In today’s globalizing world, the limitations of denomination only become more apparent. As Algarín insists in the introduction to Aloud, “The poets of the Nuyorican Poets Café take responsibility for breaking all boundaries that limit and diminish the impact of their work.”⁵ I hope to have contributed to their legacy.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

1:Interview by Elizabeth Brook with Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, July 25th 2009.

2:Un-named poet quoted in the Introduction to NuyorAsian Anthology, ed Bino a Realuyo, (The Asian American Writers Workshop, New York, 1999), iv.

3:Werner Sollors, Introduction to The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, (NYU Press, New York,2000), vi.

4:Fenton, James “The Raised Voice of Poetry” in The Spoken Word Revolution Redux, Ed Eleveld, Smith and Collins, Sourcebooks MediaFusion, New York 2007), 6.

5:Miguel Algarín, Introduction in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, ed Algarin and Holman, (Holt Paperbacks, New York, 1994), 3.

Questions (Un)Answered

“Newness...grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before…”—Miguel Algarín