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Segment 2: Post-Nuyorican Poetry |
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“Newness...grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before…”—Miguel Algarín |
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Setting the Scene: The Second Nuyorican Wave
In 1980 the Nuyorican Poets Café closed, coinciding with the quietening of the Nuyorican political movement. Nuyorican poetry continued to be written, as exemplified by the publishing of By Lingual Wholes by Victor Hernández Cruz in 1982 and La Bodega Sold Dreams by Miguel Piñero in 1985, among others. However, without the Café as a location for exchange, the vibrant performance poetry scene subsided. In 1987, the Café was re-opened, largely due to the efforts of Bob Holman and the Café’s founder, Miguel Algarín. By 1990, the Café had re-exploded as a venue for spoken word poetry. I have named this second phase of poetry Post-Nuyorican poetry. Bob Holman tells the story of the reopening of the Café in his essay “In and Around the Scene”:
The Nuyorican Poets Café, where I’d first heard rap, was closed in the 80s because of AIDS, crack and gentrification. I started to think about opening up my own club. This lead to my investigation of what had happened at the Nuyorican, and eventually leading the effort that reopened the Café. The vectors were lined up and ready for the explosion that was the Café in those early years of the ‘90s. Multi-culti was energizing. The Nuyorican was an open platform for these voices. Hip hop was poetry here; performance was poetry too. The Nuyorican aesthetic was open, street, loud. It was the perfect patria dish for slam.1
Holman here points to the topic of this chapter—the aesthetic change between Vintage Nuyorican Poetry and Post Nuyorican poetry. Beginning by examining the poetry itself, I shall look at a sample of the spoken word and ‘slam’ poems which have been performed at the Café in this Post-Nuyorican phase in order to compare their literary characteristics to that of the Vintage Nuyorican poetry. In comparing the overarching aesthetic trope of Vintage and Post-Nuyorican poetry, it seems that a notable change occurred from the bilingual poetry performances which referenced the diasporic experience of a specific demographic, to transgeneric poetry performances which were executed by individuals from all ethnic and national backgrounds. This may appear to be a stark change in the poetry’s aesthetic, however I shall argue here that these changes are merely an extension of the original characteristics of Nuyorican Newness. However, who is Nuyorican, as ‘multi-culti’ becomes the anti-nationalistic credo for the Café? What effect does this departure from, firstly, the bilingual Newness aesthetic and, secondly, the use of Nuyorican as a demographic signifier, have on the Nuyorican movement?
Nuyorican Newness in Post-Nuyorican Poetry
As a reminder, Algarín wrote the following concerning Newness:
Newness in language grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before. The experience of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York has caused a new language to grow: Nuyorican…We come to the city as citizens and can retain the use of Spanish and include English…The mixture of both languages grows. The interchange between both yields new verbal possibilities, new images…2
Here Algarín specifically references the languages Spanish and English, and is concerned with the experience of the Puerto Rican on the streets of New York. However let us imagine that rather than referencing language and the specific diasporic experience, instead Algarín references poetry and its hybridization with other art forms. The paragraph might read as follows:
Newness in performance poetry grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before. The experience of people on the streets of New York has caused a new mode of performance to grow: Nuyorican…We all come to the city stage as poets and can retain the use of performance poetry and include music and theater…The mixture of all the art forms grows. The interchange between them yields new creative possibilities, new images…
While my changes here might be criticized as a violation of Algarín’s words, if we consider that each performative art form—music, poetry, theater—can be considered a language or code, which in turn renders ‘Nuyorican’ Newness a mode of performance, this substitution elicits a re-statement of the Nuyorican aesthetic utilizing new terms. Is it possible that, as Newness in language (as performed by the Vintage Nuyorican poets) became stale given the change in political circumstances for the Puerto Rican community in New York City, the experimental aesthetic trope of Newness was applied to a revolution of poetic aesthetics in the late 1980s, 1990s and beyond?
New Newness
To begin answering this question, it is indubitable that the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the spoken word poetry for which it became celebrated, were part of an enlivening of the poetic tradition in America in the 1990s. As Professor Frances Aparicio comments in her essay “Loisaida Literature”:
The spoken-word performances for which the Nuyorican Poets Café became famous and which expanded their reach across the United States during the 1990s had brought back to life poetry as a social event, as an interactive, collective, polyphonic performance.3
While there is no doubt that the poetry performed at the Nuyorican Poets Café was ‘collective’, as the audience partook in a shared experience of it, and ‘interactive’ as the live audience-poet relationship thrived in the poetry Slam setting (as Segment Three will discuss) the ‘polyphonic’ characteristic of the poetry is most important to the analysis of the Nuyorican aesthetic here. My interpretation of Aparicio’s usage of this term extends Bakhtin’s original definition of the polyphonic. Scholar Mikhain Bakhtin referred to the polyphonic novel as a form which Dostoevsky pioneered in his text Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, presenting an aesthetic where no voice in the novel was prominently authoritative.4 Post-Nuyorican poetry presents a variation on this aesthetic, blending a multitude of voices and/or genres in the poem itself into one cohesive art form, thus rendering no single contributory genre or character’s voice authoritative. If Newness in Vintage Nuyorican poetry was characterized by bilingualism, Newness in Post-Nuyorican poetry is characterized by the blending of voices and genres, eliciting polyvocal and transgeneric5 performances.
Polyvocal Newness
Polyvocal Newness is exemplified in “Running a Race (No One Knows)”, a poem performed by the NYC Urbana Slam Team, a group brought together by their successful individual performances at the Slams hosted at the Nuyorican Poets Café in 1996. I listened to this poem on the accompanying CD to The Spoken Word Revolution, and it is interesting to note that the text contains no printed version of this poem, a testament to the truly performative nature of this poem.
RUNNING A RACE (NO-ONE KNOWS) 6
Upon listening to the poem it becomes immediately apparent that the poem is performed by blending four voices. There is a repeated base-line of ‘No-one knows’, underneath the mid-line, ‘Running a race, heading nowhere, looking to share a little love along the way.’ These sounds are further layered with beat boxed rhythms and a top layer of spoken narrative. The poetic lyrics spoken as the narrative are phonetically framed by the musical layers of this poem. The narrative is also thematically framed by the base-line and mid-line—the poem explores themes of isolation, the rushed pace of life and lack of communication at each of the three layers of sound. All three layers therefore work harmoniously on a musical level, as well as a thematic level. The poem uses political rhetoric to explore these themes:
…wondering how many battered voices is it going to take to make a word, to make a sentence, to make a phrase, to make a manifesto, to make a difference…7
The usage of a rhetorical question and repetition here are examples of traditional oratic techniques, which, when coupled with diction such as ‘manifesto’ and ‘make a difference’, call the listener to action. This call is further reinforced as the poem closes, “…joining in solitude simply by accepting the fact that isolation only exists in ones thoughts.”, urging the audience to understand and engage in his shared humanity. The call to collaboration by the lyrics of the poem is mirrored in the layered form of the poem itself—the poets utilize the effects of the individual human voice to create a polyvocal performance piece, skirting the boundary between the genres of music and poetry, creating Newness. The poem, then, in both its form and content calls for collaboration and breaks down boundaries. This might be compared to the Vintage Nuyorican exploration of living between two locales using Spanglish, as explored in Segment 1. The thematic content of life in diasporic New York was explored through the medium which best befit its description—the hybrid language form of Spanglish. Both this example of Post-Nuyorican poetry and Vintage Nuyorican poetry are shown to engage with the poetry’s thematic content through its formal qualities. Additionally, both employ a code switch, generating Newness. Algarín might ask, what do we ‘learn’ as this experimental aesthetic of Newness ‘grows’? The voices in this poem are used as musical instruments, each one contributing an essential layer to the poem as a whole. The usage of voices in this way challenges the canonical concept of the relationship between the poet and his written poems. Primarily it disrupts the notion of the solitary poet—this poem is profoundly collaborative, with each poet performing their own role contributing to the whole. Additionally, this collaboration renders the authors and their poetry as inextricably linked—only in the moment of performance (and re-performance as we listen to the recording) does the poem take form, as it is impossible to represent the effect of the layered voices outside of the performance. Classical poetry scholar, Albert B Lord argues of oral poetry:
For the oral poet the moment of composition is the performance. In the case of a literary poem there is a gap in time between composition and reading or performance; in the case of the oral poem this gap does not exist, because composition and performance are two aspects of the same moment…An oral poem is not composed for but in performance.8
“Running a Race (No One Knows)” is composed in collaborative performance—outside this performance the poem arguably does not exist, renouncing the notion of the immortalized solitary poetic genius, as promoted by canonical figure Emily Dickinson, for example. The layered performance endows the poem with musical and theatrical qualities, pointing to another prominent aspect of Newness in the Post-Nuyorican aesthetic—the seamless blending of different artistic genres.
Transgeneric Newness
An example of transgeneric poetry will expand upon this concept of blending genres as demonstrated by the musicality of Running a Race (No-One Knows). The following performance of “Wind” by esteemed Spoken Word poet, Saul Williams, exemplifies the seamless blending of oral poetry, theater and music:
The theatricality of the piece becomes immediately evident as Williams provides an onomatopoeic imitation of the wind to open his performance—this same ‘shhhhhhh’ sound, mirrored by the swirling motion of his hands, also closes the poem. The thematic content of William’s poem, an extended metaphor likening the wind’s action on the surface of the world to the harmony of a piece of music, is reinforced by musicality in his diction including techniques of internal rhyme and dactylic rhyme (often used in hip-hop). This theme of music is more clearly mirrored by William’s incorporation of song lyrics as he sings, “Sunshine.. Folks get brown in the sunshine…”7. He calls the listener to:
Stop. Letting cities define you, confine you to that which is cement and brick we are not a hard peoples our domes have been crowned with the lights of steeples that which is our being soars with the eagles and the Jonathan Livingston seagulls, “I got wings, you got wings we all got wings…”9
This section is arguably the climax of the poem, reflected through William’s usage of different genres. Williams interprets his lyrics through mime, notably on the words ‘Stop!’, ‘steeple’ and ‘eagles’, whilst incorporating internal rhyme through ‘define you, confine you’, peoples’, ‘steeples’, ‘eagles’ and ‘seagulls’, followed by the sung rendition of song lyrics to close the section. This mélange of forms is synchronized behind the thematic crux of the poem—William’s call to the audience to appreciate his freedom and his commonality with his fellow human beings, as ‘...we all got wings…’. In this poem, theatricality and musicality are not peripherals designed to emphasize certain words simply for aesthetic effect, rather they are integral to the impact of the words as part of the poem. The significance of the word which is enacted by Williams becomes inextricably linked to its corresponding enactment; the meaning of each word is supplemented by William’s bodily interpretation, yielding Newness. Generating ‘new creative possibilities, new images’, and thus creating Newness, through supplementing one code with another is a trope which is also employed in the Vintage Nuyorican phase. Victor Hernández Cruz specifically pointed to the insufficiency of one language to communicate the meaning of certain moments as was discussed in Segment 1. In a comparable way, Williams is utilizing his transgeneric performance to enact the breaking down of boundaries that his poem calls for in everyday interaction, ‘Stop. Letting cities...confine you…’. What are the implications of this manifestation if Newness in the transgeneric code-switch? Saul Williams undermines the boundaries set by the labels of genre in art. Literary theorist and philosopher, Kenneth Burke, writing on Intrinsic Criticism, comments on the notion of genres in literature:
‘Poetic’ in the strictest sense deals with the poem as a member of a class. If the poem is a ballad, for instance, the critic formulates the principles of balladry and treats of individual ballads in terms of these principles. Casuistry can be employed for considering the unique respects in in which the poem embodies the principles common to its kind.10
Williams presents a difficult challenge for the critic; how would we class the poetry that he is producing? Can the critic call it poetry as poetry is understood today, given the theatrical, musical and elements of dance to the performance? Perhaps the critic can class it as ‘performance poetry including elements of dance, music and theater’. But how much of the elements of dance, music and theater? By prompting these questions, Williams undermines the very notion of genre. Burke also de-values the act of assigning an art form a generic label, as he comments on the work of the critic who attempts to define a particular work in relation to labels if genre:
...one would eventually reduce the concept of a class to the point where each work is a class by itself, going its own unique way, its special principles of generation requiring it to be considered sui generis.11
Williams presents a similar critique of the insistence on genre through his work—the only way to ‘class’ Williams’ poem would be to create a category for it. Arguably each performance of this poem may merit a different genre, assuming that in the spontaneity of performance the precise balance of musicality, theatricality and dance could not be re-created by Williams. By rendering his work evasive to the labels of genre, he prompts debate about the validity of the classification of art. This challenge to the structure of literary and cultural criticism represents the experimental aesthetic of Newness. Williams and the NYC Urbana Slam Team, then, are engaging in polyvocal and transgeneric code-switches, presenting Nuyorican Newness according to a Post-Nuyorican aesthetic. Through their creation of Newness, the Post-Nuyorican poets extend significant challenges to the institutionalized structures and concepts concerning poetry.
A Caveat
To draw a firm dichotomy between Vintage and Post-Nuyorican poetry as I have thus far and to claim that there are no exceptions to these aesthetic and ethnic trends would be to offer a superficial analysis of the Nuyorican poetry tradition. In fact, to nuance my analysis I shall engage with the poet Mariposa who challenges the trends I have drawn. Temporally, she is classed as a Post-Nuyorican poet. Her work does often incorporate music, which is typical of the Post-Nuyorican aesthetic as I have defined it. However, thematically she engages heavily with the condition of living in the diaspora as a Puerto Rican, and often incorporates Spanish and English into her poems, which are typical of the Vintage Nuyorican aesthetic. This combination of poetic tendencies from both phases is, in Mariposa’s case, an engagement with her particular national heritage and Vintage Nuyorican poetry as a poetic movement, as well as demonstrating the aesthetic trends of the Post-Nuyorican period in which she writes. She acknowledges the engagement with different identity labels and the avoidance to adhere to one in its entirety in her poem “Boricua Butterfly”:
I am the Not the lost Puerto Rican soul in
The rejection of the label of ‘lost Puerto Rican’ and ‘tragic Nuyorican’ underlines the poet’s commitment to being ‘free’. The emphasis placed on metamorphosis as it opens the poem, the act of changing one’s image yet remaining genetically identical, serves as a metaphor for changeable outer forms being presented by a consistent inner form. The creative, nuanced identity politic presented here is mirrored by Mariposa’s blending of Vintage and Post-Nuyorican aesthetics. Mariposa’s blending of the two phases of Nuyorican poetry is best personified in her sung performance of Pedro Pietri’s most famous work, “El Spanglish National Anthem”.
By incorporating music into Pietri’s Vintage Nuyorican poem, Mariposa demonstrates that the Vintage and Post-Nuyorican phases can overlap and even enrich one another. Her decision to sing the poem underlines the title of the poem “El Spanglish National Anthem” and serves to emphasize the irony between the verbal content of the poem and the title, as implied by Pedro Pietri. Mariposa, in exemplifying the continuation of the Vintage Nuyorican aesthetic, engages with her condition of living in New York City and having ethnic roots in Puerto Rico. However what has become of the specificity of the ethnic roots of the Café and the Nuyorican movement? Has the condition of living as a Puerto Rican in New York simply been forgotten?
Nuyo(Rican)?
The condition of the New York dwelling Puerto Rican was not forgotten; rather the move to multi-cultural inclusivity was a deliberate one. As Aparicio explains, “In this context [of the rise of slam in 1990s], the NPC recast its mission as more global and multicultural.”13 In order to revive the Café, Algarín decided to incorporate other ‘under represented’ populations into the mission and therefore expand the reach of the Café. As Holman commented at the opening of the chapter, ‘multi-culti was energizing’, and Algarín took advantage of the openness of his own aesthetic to engage in the newly-popularizing slam tradition. As Aparicio points out, this decision was not without its tensions:
Indeed the conflicts over maintaining the Café as a space dedicated to the expression of the Puerto Rican nationalist version of selfhood or embracing other minority groups and voices, as Algarín has done, reveal the tension in this transition from cultural nationalism to a more multicultural and even global space.14
This decision, however, allowed the Café to engage with a wider community—both in terms of poets and audience. Algarín explains the decision in terms of the nature of the Nuyorican condition, “Our theater has reflected the international mentality of the Nuyorican.”15 It is interesting to note that Algarín here uses ‘theater’ to describe the Café, underlining his commitment to the transgeneric performances that occur in the second phase of the Café. Algarín also explains that, as the condition of living as a Puerto Rican in New York City is a diasporic one, their literally ’inter-national’ mentality is ‘reflected’ in the decision to open the Café to other minority groups who are traditionally also immigrant or diasporic communities.
Who is Nuyorican now?
After the Café was opened to the multicultural community, what became of the term ’Nuyorican’ as a signifier of identity? Literary critic Edrik Lopez, in his essay entitled “Nuyorican Spaces; Mapping Identity in a Poetic Geography” reports on one of Mariposa’s performances and her subsequent engagement with the term Nuyorican:
Mariposa, another poet in the Nuyorican tradition, performed in Berkely, California as part of a tour called Borikua Fest. After finishing her series of poems she talked to the audience, saying how happy she was to be back in the Bay Area, proud to see so many Puerto Ricans in attendance. She pointed out Piri Thomas sitting in the front row, and thanked him for initiating the tradition she is following. She also mentioned a list of Nuyorican poets in that tradition, including Willie Perdomo, whom she was performing with, but then added that such a name used to identify many Puerto Ricans in the United States, has to be used differently now.16
Here Lopez identifies one of the significant changes in the usage of the label Nuyorican. Rather than referencing the specific condition of being a Puerto Rican in New York City, this term was being used by a self-proclaimed Nuyorican poet to reference another self-proclaimed Nuyorican poet, Willie Perdomo, who has spent the majority of his writing life on the West Coast. This demonstrates that the spatial and ethnic specificity of the Nuyorican identity has been replaced by the individual’s commitment to the Nuyorican aesthetic, as Mariposa alluded to in her closing comment. How did I choose the Nuyorican poets featured in this section given the expansiveness of the label Nuyorican? I elected poets who either self-identify as Nuyorican, or who perform regularly at the Nuyorican Poets Café—these are the same matrices by which the Vintage Nuyorican Poets were elected. Another selection might have been more expansive, however. Arguably, any poet or artist who would choose to engage with the aesthetic of Nuyorican Newness could self-identify as Nuyorican. As Algarín commented, Nuyorican could apply to any experimental artist:
America is truly brought together into one from its myriad of ethnicities – 10,000 ethnicities become sharply focused into an art form, and ironically, the North American Puerto Rican, the Nuyorican, has become the mainstream of American poetry.17
Conclusions
In sum, then, it is evident that the aesthetic of Nuyorican poetry has changed between the Vintage Nuyorican period in the 1960s and 1970s and the Post-Nuyorican period that began with the re-opening of the Café in the late 1980s. As the New York Times reported in a 2002 article entitled, “The Poetry of the Nuyorican Experience”:
Today Nuyorican poetry can range from sonnets to frenzied verses of competitive slams, and its themes are universal: the politics of daily life, sex, love and the discovery of self. The poets function in a less cohesive, more glamorized setting than in Piñero’s days. This is now poetry promoted by hip-hop and delivered in a more theatrical, performance-oriented way…18
The change in the Newness aesthetic to a different code-switch, incorporating polyvocalism and transgeneric art forms demonstrated the change between the Vintage and Post-Nuyorican aesthetics, as Navarro suggests above. These changes represent an expansion of the original Nuyorican aesthetic of Newness, as prescribed by Miguel Algarín, beyond the boundaries of Spanish and English. In line with this expansive aesthetic, the ethnic significance of the Nuyorican label fell away in the Post-Nuyorican phase, alluding again to the experimental, open trope that Nuyorican Newness embodies. Post-Nuyorican poetry can be seen to undermine both labels of genre and labels of ethnicity, in a parallel way that Vintage Nuyorican poetry challenges the labels of language and nationality. If Nuyorican Newness presented a political challenge concerning ethnic labels in the Vintage Nuyorican phase, Nuyorican Newness arguably presents an aesthetic challenge in the Post-Nuyorican phase by undermining the authority of institutional methodology addressing art and its forms. I have demonstrated here that, while manifested in various forms, Newness has persisted throughout Nuyorican poetry. Is Newness the only aesthetic trope that has consistently been utilized in the poetry? I will argue in Segment 3 that performance is also an essential part of the Nuyorican aesthetic. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1:Bob Holman, “In and around the Scene” in The Spoken Word Revolution, Ed Eleveld, Smith and Collins, Sourcebooks MediaFusion, New York 2003), 165. 2:Miguel Algarín, “Nuyorican Language” in Survival Supervivencia (Arte Público Press, Houston, 2009) 9. 3: Frances Aparicio “Loisaida Literature” in A New Literary History of America, Ed Marcus and Sollors (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009), 977. 4:Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed and trans Caryl Emerson, (University of Minnesota, 1984), 6. 5:”Art forms that are transgeneric—that go beyond genre…” Term used by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé in interview with Elizabeth Brook, July 25th 2009. 6:NYC Urbana Slam Team, “Running a Race (No One Knows)” on accompanying CD to The Spoken Word Revolution Redux, ed Marc Smith (Sourcebooks MediaFusion, New York 2007). 7: Ibid 8:Albert B Lord, The Singer of Tales, Ed Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy (Harvard University Press, 2000), 13. 9:Saul Williams, “Wind”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLhMtmAm0tc, Accessed on 23rd February 2010. 10:Kenneth Burke, “Kinds of Criticism” in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Norton and Co., New York, 2001), 1275 11:Ibid 12:Mariposa, “Boricua Butterfly” at http://www.virtualboricua.org/Docs/poem_mtf03.htm, accessed 23rd February 2010. 13:Frances Aparicio “Loisaida Literature” in A New Literary History of America, Ed Marucs and Sollors (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009), 977. 14:Ibid 15:Miguel Algarín, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, ed Algarin and Holman, (Holt Paperbacks, New York, 1994), 5. 16:Edrik Lopez, “Nuyorican Spaces: Mapping Identity in a Poetic Geography” in Centro Journal, Spring XVII No.1, (City University New York, New York, 2005), 202. 17:Mireya Navarro, ”The Poetry of the Nuyorican Experience”, New York Times, January 2nd 2002. 18:Ibid |