Segment 3: Performance

“Why not submit to our print culture and stay at home with a cup of tea—or a few inches of whiskey—and open a book?” Marc Smith, the Founder of Slam Poetry, familiarly known as SlamPapi.

 

The Nuyorican Poets Café, located at 235 E3rd Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan is a location for the performance of many genres of art—the Café exists as a site for artistic and cultural exchange in the broadest sense. Founded as part of the Nuyorican movement in 1973 by Miguel Algarín, and originally hosted Algarín’s living room, the Café re-located to this space in 1980 and has existed there ever since. Originally the Café was a forum for poetry exchange between members of the group of writers I refer to as the Vintage Nuyorican Poets—the founding members of the Café include Miguel Piñero, Pedro Pietri and Tato Laviera. Today as a non-profit organization, the Café has become a forum for the performance of spoken word poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy and theatre, with programming including live performances, workshops and educational events. Having surveyed the aesthetic trends of Nuyorican Poetry in Segments 1 and 2, this segment will examine the role of performance in Nuyorican poetry. As has been shown by the variance between the Vintage Nuyorican Poetry aesthetic and the Post-Nuyorican Poetry aesthetic, many aspects of this art form have changed over time. However, performance has remained integral to the poetry throughout. Why is performance important in Nuyorican poetry? Firstly I will argue that performance is essential to Nuyorican poetry aesthetically, and secondly I will argue that performance is necessary to promoting the ideology associated with the Nuyorican Poets Café.

 

Performing the Nuyorican Aesthetic

 

Segments 1 and 2 explore the qualities of Nuyorican poetry which demonstrate the aesthetic of Newness. I argue that Newness is primarily manifested in the code switch—in Vintage Nuyorican poetry the code switch is bilingual, whilst in Post-Nuyorican poetry the code switch is transgeneric. Code-switching poses a challenge to both the boundaries of language and of genre. While the aesthetic of Nuyorican poetry has changed over time, the challenge to dominant structures has remained persistent. In this segment I will argue that another aspect of Nuyorican poetry that has persisted over time—performance—is fundamentally intertwined with this aesthetic of Newness and the challenges it presents.

Newness is created by performance poetry as it challenges the limitations of a genre currently dominated by print culture. While poetry is rooted in oral storytelling, the Homeric epic for example, the oral aspect of the genre had diminished with the rise of literacy rates and the invention of the printing press, and had remained dormant before the resurge of performance poetry in the 1990s with the Slam Poetry boom. Nuyorican poetry performances undermined the authority of the printed poem, representing the experimental spirit of Newness. However, could a challenge to print culture been forged by integrating visual art into the poetry, for example? What is it about performance in particular that has rendered it a consistent part of the Nuyorican aesthetic throughout the movement? By closely examining the differences between the experience of the poem in performance and the poem in print, I will argue that the features specific to performance poetry are closely aligned with the Nuyorican project as a whole. Frances Aparicio argues in her essay, “Loisaida Literature” that the characteristics of Nuyorican poetry are:

 

...the oral expression of selfhood, a discourse of survival and public poetry that heals the community.¹

 

In order to examine how performance contributes to these characteristics as Aparicio argues, I must outline the defining features of performance poetry. Performance poetry, when juxtaposed with poetry read in print, has several distinct qualities. Firstly, the poet’s delivery of the poem becomes an inextricable part of the words of the poem themselves—I shall refer to this as the voice of the poet. Secondly, the reader’s control when reading a poem as opposed to watching it in performance is vastly different, as the performer pulls the listener along whilst the reader takes the poem at his own pace. Thirdly, when attending a poetry performance the audience members automatically become engaged in two exchanges; firstly they respond to the poet and his performance, and secondly they respond to the other members of the audience, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. Using my anecdotal evidence of the debut performance at the Nuyorican Poets Café by Magdalena Gomez that I attended on 29th August 2009 (featured in the pictures on the left of this page) as a case study, I shall examine these definitive features of performance poetry more fully, and consider how each of these attributes fits in with Aparicio’s summation of the Nuyorican aesthetic. Please note that the sound recordings included on this page are my own, hence the quality is somewhat low. The echo and sounds made by the audience in the recording does help to re-create the authentic experience of the performance, however.

 

The oral expression of selfhood…

 

             Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, comments on one of the most significant differences between the experience of spoken word poetry and the experience of printed poetry in his essay “Poems on the Page, Poems in the Air”:

 

What the live reading and the recorded reading provide, then, is voice. Surely, we hear an inner voice when we hold a book of poetry in our hands and reading silence, but it is not the voice of the poet.²

 

Here Collins points to the audience’s heightened experience of poetic voice when listening to poetry being performed, as opposed to reading it silently. In performance poetry the poet’s ‘self’ is inextricably infused into the poetry. Neither Collins nor I are here suggesting that all spoken word poetry is autobiographical in that every performed poetic “I” is a reflection of the poet’s inner self, but rather I am attempting to draw attention to the personalization of poetic delivery to the audience. The poet’s performance of the words—his voice, his mannerisms, his intonation, his pace and so forth—becomes an inseparable part of the audience’s experience of the words themselves. A journalist writing for The Economist commented on performances at the Nuyorican Poets Café:

 

It’s a moot point whether it’s the quality of the performance or the quality of the verse itself that matters most—in this low light, there’s no separating the dancer and the dance.³

 

The writer’s dance analogy is pertinent here—the poet’s present, physical ‘self’ is used expressively in his performance of the poetic words in the same way that the body of the dancer is used expressively in his performance of a choreographed routine. To turn to my case study, Gomez’s performance of an un-published poem which I will call ’Story’ told of the experience of a white Puerto-Rican woman growing up in Loisaida. The poem included a narrative voice as well as several other voices, which Gomez characterized by changing her own voice as she performed. She emphasized these different characterizations through her bodily movements, simultaneously telling the story to the audience through the words themselves and her physical delivery of the poem. This audio clip records the moment where Gomez enacts a caricature of what a Spanish-speaker’s recount of a story sounds like, demonstrating her change in voice.

 

Magdalena Gomez: Voice Change

 

 Spoken word poetry is therefore distinct to print poetry as its integral nature extends beyond the printed word. In synthesizing the written word with its live delivery, the poet ‘orally expresses his selfhood’, and the audience’s experience of the poem is intimately tied to this performance. The transcribed versions of these performance poems, including simply the words which were performed, can be considered incomplete or stunted, perhaps comparable to a screenplay or dramatic script. (An example of the differences between experiencing a poem in print and a poem in performance can be found in the ‘Defense of Websites’ page of this site.) Gomez’s performance at the Nuyorican Poets Café provides one example of the importance of the delivery of the poem to its meaning, underlining the essentiality of performance in achieving the ’oral expression of selfhood.’

 

...a discourse of survival...

 

             Billy Collins also draws our attention to the power dynamics that performance creates between the poet and the audience. The listener is forced to consume the words at the same pace that the poet delivers them in performance, whilst the reader is accustomed to exercising control over the text. He comments here on the creativity of this type of listening:

 

Paying attention approaches being a creative act when we realize that the poem is being enacted beyond our control—the control we exercise with a text by pausing, reading and skipping.⁴

 

The reader, arguably, controls his experience of the text, as well as contributing to its meaning through the use of his imagination whilst reading. The audience at a poetry performance, however, is stripped of readerly control. The poet drives the pace of the poem’s delivery and therefore ultimately dominates the audience’s interpretative field. As Marc Smith aptly stated, “A reader walks at his own pace; a listener travels downhill by sled.”⁵ The listener must surrender to the drama of the performance and the speed, intensity and frequency of the words. Gomez emphasized the power that she exercised over the audience in her performance as a drummer in the background mirrored the pace of the delivery of the poem, adding to the audience’s sense of being controlled by the poet’s pace. An emotional reaction was solicited in the audience as her delivery of the poem became faster, mirrored by the drum,  building to the delivery of the ironically climactic phrase, slowly enunciated “...you don’t speak English.”.

 

Magdalena Gomez: Climax

 

 It is perhaps due to the poet’s control over the audience that performance poetry has often thematically addressed ‘a discourse of survival’. Performance allows for a particularly emotive rendition of the poetry, as the performer provokes a reaction in the audience, illustrated by Gomez’s performance. Much of the Vintage Nuyorican poetry solicited emotional reactions from the audience—an example considered in the Vintage Poetry segment of this website is Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary”. Poetry that engages in a ‘discourse of survival’ delivers a message to the audience—in Pietri’s case an evocative call to the audience to take pride in their Puerto Rican heritage and reject the idea of the American Dream. The poem is both provocative and powerful, and rendered more so due to the oratic talents of Pedro Pietri. The control that the poet has over the poem’s delivery, then, facilitates the power of its ‘message’, and allows it to be complicit in forwarding a ‘discourse of survival’.

 

...public poetry...

 

The usage of poetry for political purposes emphasizes the importance of the audience to performance poetry. Performance poems are directed at an audience—upon attending the performance, the audience becomes complicit in an exchange between themselves and the poet. Algarín states in the introduction to Aloud that the Nuyorican Poets Café provides the audience with “prime time interactive literature”. Algarín here undoubtedly mocks the commercialization of mainstream entertainment by his usage of ‘prime time’, but nonetheless alludes to an important attribute of performance poetry—the poetry is rendered relational. In considering the Nuyorican Poets Café as a spoken word venue, one should consider American poet, Jeffrey McDaniels’ evocative description of the function of a spoken word venue:

 

A spoken word venue is a literary magazine you can wander into, where you read with your ears. The MC is the editor. The atmosphere is the typography. And whoever is onstage is the page you’re on.⁶

 

This analogy is a powerful one, and a useful way to conceptualize the experience of attending a poetry performance at the Nuyorican Poets Café. One does not read the poetry whilst it is being performed, as is common practice at poetry performances in more academic settings—at a poetry performance at the Woodberry Poetry room at Harvard University, for example, guests often bring an anthology of the poet’s work in order to follow along as it is being read. As the nature of the poetry being performed is often un-scripted or spontaneous, the audience relies wholly on their listening skills to absorb the poetry. The role of the MC is an important one as the MC ‘runs the show’, organizing the poets and their performances, selecting judges from the audience in the case of a slam competition, maintaining the energy of the crowd and often, responding via a rap or haiku to the poetry itself. An editor might respond in a comparable way in the editor’s note to a magazine volume. McDaniels also draws our attention to the atmosphere of the performance environment and the sequentiality of the poetic performances, as if one were turning the page from one poem to the next. Whilst his analogy is evocative and powerful, I find it to be incomplete as he does not address the importance of the audience in the performance itself. To extend his analogy to include the audience, one could say that the performance is reliant on the audience’s participation in the same way that an un-read literary magazine cannot share its treasures. Bob Holman alludes to the importance of audience interaction with literature, both written and performed, in the invocation to Algarín’s volume, Aloud:

 

Hear this book with your eyes!

The poem is not written until you read it!⁷

 

Here Holman addresses the readers of the anthology, but evokes the performative origins of the poems included in the collection through his use of synesthesia in ‘Hear this book with your eyes.’ He then explicates the essentiality of the audience in the existence of poetry, as he claims that without the reader, the poetry is ‘not written’. This becomes particularly resonant when we consider Magdalena Gomez’s performance—the poem that she shared with the audience was unpublished, and therefore inaccessible to anyone except Gomez herself. I could go as far as to say that until the poem was performed for the audience at the Café in August 2009, the poem did not exist. One might compare this to an un-read poem—without the reader, the poem ceases to exist in some way as it is not being consumed. However, the published print poem can be returned to as it exists permanently on a physical level, typed on the page in a book. Gomez’s performance only exists now in the minds of the audience that attended her performance and in my recording. The audience therefore plays an essential role in the production of poetry itself. This ‘public’ production of poetry would be impossible, of course, without live performance.

 

…that heals the community.

 

             The final definitive feature of experiencing performance poetry is the shared experience that the audience members enjoy. The audience becomes united by the communal nature of the poetry performance. The oral delivery of poetry allows for verbal play, punning and rhyming—language usage becomes particularly salient in the oral register, binding the community through their common appreciation of the verbal games the poet plays. During Gomez’s performance, audience members laughed at her puns and word plays, encouraged by the rippling laughter emanating from the people around them. An example of the audience’s laughter is captured here, as she introduces her poem, ‘Story’.

 

Magdalena Gomez: Audience’s Laughter

 

Before Gomez’s performance began, the lights in the Café were turned off, music began playing and the members of the audience were instructed to “feel the space… become one in the space” by dancing in the dark. This physically foreshadowed the intellectual sharing that occurred during the performance between the audience members, and underlines the relationship that audience members develop with one another simply by attending the same performance. To expand upon this concept in the context of Vintage Nuyorican Poetry, Glazner in his introduction to his 2000 volume entitled Poetry Slam; The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, describes the role of poetry performances in relation to poorly educated communities: “In a community plagued by illiteracy, poets emphasize public performance and delivery in locations such as the Nuyorican Poets Café…”⁸ Without labeling the Puerto Rican inhabitants of the Lower East Side as universally illiterate, Glazner’s suggestion points to the impact of increasing accessibility to poetry on a logistical level for this community, simply by sharing poetry in performance rather than in print. Performance poetry becomes, then, a way of healing the illiteracy of a community by bringing sophisticated verbal forms to a community that would otherwise be unable to have access to such material. As well as offering a ‘healing’ on an educational level, the identity politics that were presented to this demographic during the Vintage phase arguably fostered an emotional healing process as well, building community around the shared experience of living in the diaspora.

             Having examined some of the prominent features of performance poetry, it becomes evident why performance has been a consistent feature of Nuyorican poetry from the 1970s to today. In addition to promoting the experimental aesthetic of Newness, the performance of poetry facilitates the essential qualities of Nuyorican poetry as forwarded by Aparicio, “the oral expression of selfhood, a discourse of survival and public poetry that heals the community”⁹, as examined above. Having demonstrated that performance is an essential aspect of the Nuyorican aesthetic, can we consider all live poetry performances to be Nuyorican?

 

Slam Poetry—Today’s Spoken Word Revolution

 

             Today’s most popular form of spoken word poetry is the Poetry Slam. The first Poetry Slam was hosted in 1984 by Marc Smith in the Get Me High Lounge, Chicago before he moved Slam’s home to the Green Mills Jazz Club in 1986. Smith comments on the popularizing effect that enlivening poetry had:

 

When I started, nobody wanted to go to poetry readings. Slam gave it life… I think when poetry went from the oral tradition to the page, someone should’ve asked, is that really poetry? I think slam gets poetry back to its roots, breathing life into words.¹⁰

 

Smith here emphasizes the importance of the oral nature of poetry, and the contribution that Slam competitions makes to achieving the goal of emphasizing this characteristic. Arguably an alternative mode of literary production, Slam has boomed in popularity in recent decades—the national Slam competition, founded in 1990 now hosts over 80 teams, and Slam competitions are facilitated in many countries around the world. Highly developed slam poetry networks, facilitating multiple slam competitions per week in most cases, exist in 15 states in the U.S. So what is a Poetry Slam?

 

The slam is a mock competition, emphasis on mock. Yes the poetry is serious—listen closely, quote great lines, point out new rhymes. The main goal of slam is to tune up the audience ear.¹¹

 

Slam is scored by 6 volunteers who are pre-selected from the audience. They might be regular spoken word fans, or first-time visitors as there is no qualification to be a slam judge except a willingness to engage with the performance. In order to be a good judge, however, and not elicit disapproval for poor judgment from the other audience members, the judge must be engaged with the intricacies of the performance and implicitly reflect in his score analysis of the linguistic sophistication of the poem, the theatricality demonstrated by the poet and so on. The slam might be seen, then, as a mutual training experience: the poets practice their performance, whilst the audience learns to improve their listening skills. The performance has a temporary quality to it in its fleeting nature, but permanent effects on the skills of the listener. The audience therefore becomes emphasized as an important element in the poem and poet’s art. How does Slam Poetry relate to the Nuyorican tradition?

             Slam poetry and Nuyorican poetry have many aesthetic qualities in common. Whilst Bob Holman suggests Slam’s engagement with performance, audience and community are differentiating factors when juxtaposed with other poetry movements, it seems that Nuyorican poetry is very much aligned with this aesthetic:

 

Slam Poetry is different from many poetry movements because it is performance, and community, and audience.¹²

 

The primary difference between slam poetry and Nuyorican poetry is the element of competition—the audience members ‘score’ poetry slams, whilst the performance of Nuyorican poetry does not involve an evaluative component. Acknowledging this distinction between the two poetic traditions, there are many similarities between the Nuyorican aesthetic and the nature of the spoken word poetry which is performed at poetry slams—indeed the Nuyorican Poets Café hosts a weekly Poetry Slam competition which draws crowds so large that people line up around the block to enter, alluding to the synergy between the two poetic traditions. The Nuyorican tradition has not been credited with contributing to the rise of the Slam genre, however, with the exception of Bob Holman’s claim as quoted above, ‘The Nuyorican aesthetic was open, street, loud. It was the perfect patria dish for slam.’¹³ The significance of the similarities between the nature of spoken word poetry and the Nuyorican aesthetic is sizeable.  While little scholarly attention has been paid to this topic, and acknowledging that this claim lacks a thorough grounding in a comprehensive survey of the poetic genre of Slam, it seems intuitive to claim that the Nuyorican aesthetic has made significant contributions to the popularizing mode of Poetry Slam. A more thorough examination of this debate might prove that today’s artistic community which has been built around Slam Poetry could be paralleled to the politically driven community that followed the Vintage Nuyorican poetry in the 1970s and 1980s. In order for this debate to be furthered, it is imperative that critics engage in the multi-media experience of both Nuyorican Poetry and Slam Poetry—today’s accessibility to video recordings of performances online aids in lowering the barrier to this challenge. In suggesting that Nuyorican poetry has contributed to today’s burgeoning Slam tradition, I claim that Nuyorican Newness has had a significant impact on contemporary American literary culture. I will argue here that the aesthetic of Nuyorican Newness has become an ideology, expressed through the Nuyorican movement as a whole. 

 

Performing Nuyorican Ideology

 

What is the performance of an ideology? Philosopher and historian John Fiske’s exploration of ideology explains the following:

 

Ideology is not, than, a static set of ideas through which we view the world, but a dynamic social practice, constantly in process, constantly reproducing itself in the ordinary workings of these apparatuses.¹⁴

 

While Fiske references the ideology of the state representing itself through the ‘apparatuses’ of the law, the education system and so forth, we might consider Nuyorican ideology in these terms. This ideology is not a ‘static set of ideas’ concerning Newness through which the poets view the world, but ‘dynamic social practice’. Nuyorican ideology, I shall argue, is expressed through several ’apparatuses’ associated with the aesthetic movement—the poetry itself, the space of the Nuyorican Poets Café and the programming associated with it. I shall argue that each of these apparatuses embodies the dynamic social practice of the Nuyorican ideology, Newness; “Newness...grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before.”¹⁵ If Vintage Nuyorican poetry demonstrates Newness in its code-switch, Post-Nuyorican poetry exemplifies Newness in the hybridity of genres used in its performance. (The Vintage Nuyorican Poetry and Post-Nuyorican Poetry pages engage in depth with this claim.) Both pose a challenge to the accepted notions of what poetry can be. Nuyorican Newness is also represented in the very mode by which Nuyorican poetry is enacted—performing poetry challenges the limitations of a genre dominated by print culture. Each time a poem is performed at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, the ‘dynamic social practice’ of acknowledging and subsequently challenging the aesthetic status-quo is engaged, in order to produce Newness. Newness is also promoted through the ‘ordinary workings of [the] apparatuses’ of the Nuyorican Poets Café and its associated programming promote.

 

High-Low Art

 

To begin examining the apparatuses of Nuyorican Newness, I shall turn to the Nuyorican Poets Café. It is impossible to provide a totalizing description of the Nuyorican Poets Café. The name itself is deceptive. ‘Nuyorican Poets Café’ conjures ideas of a venue specified to self-identifying Nuyoricans who write poetry while drinking coffee. In fact, the Café’s audience is notably varied in ethnic, racial and socio-economic backgrounds, and far from exclusive to Puerto Rican residents of New York City. It is not limited to poets, either, as the name might suggest: poetry is one of many of the featured art forms that are hosted by the Café. A typical week includes some poetry performances, jazz, stand-up comedy and theater. This week’s calendar can be accessed here. Rather than being open regular hours each day as the word café might suggest, the Nuyorican Poets Café is exclusively open when events are hosted, rendering it a performance site rather than a restaurant facility. No food is served at the Café—one can purchase beer, wine, mixed and soft drinks before and during the performances, however no coffee is served. The characteristics of the Café itself challenge the ideas which its own name suggests. Undermining each of the parts of its own name by its demonstrable features is deliberate—the Café itself can be seen as representing Newness in the challenges that it poses to each of the labels which its own name suggests about the nature of the space itself.

How might one attempt to provide a one-sentence description of the Café? The space is perhaps best described, as on the Nuyorican Poets Café website; “…a forum for innovative poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy and theatre.”¹⁶ This seemingly factual description of the Café’s function is also loaded: ’high’ class art forms of poetry, theater and visual arts are intermingled with ’low’ class art forms of hip hop and comedy. This statement implies that the categories of high and low art are inherently flawed, and that art produced in any genre, or in a mixture of many, might exemplify high or low art, or even both in the same moment. The programming of the Nuyorican Poets Café can here be seen to exemplify Newness, as the Café itself evades categorization either by genre or by class of art form. What is the mission of this organization which promotes such a flexible, integrated forum for artistic exchange?

 

Mainstream Resistance

 

The Café’s mission is:

 

…to create a multi-cultural venue that both nurtures artists and exhibits a variety of artistic works. Without limitation, we are dedicated to providing a stage for the arts with access for the widest public.¹⁷

 

The explicit mission of the Nuyorican Poets Café has therefore expanded its range of performance art beyond spoken word poetry pertaining to the Nuyorican experience, as was the original activity of the Café. This does not demonstrate a break or change in its mission, but rather an extension of the flexible outlook that Algarín and other founding members took on artistic genres. They began by breaking down boundaries of what poetry could be to create poetic Newness, and continue today to, ‘without limitation’ break down boundaries of artistic genres by including every artistic medium that can be performed in some way as a contribution to the Café. Newness, therefore, can be seen as embodied by the programming that the Café hosts.

             The Café does have some specifications on the type of work they include in their programming. Nuyorican.org states:

 

The Café's purpose has always been to provide a stage for the artists traditionally under-represented in the mainstream media and culture; promoting their work while building an audience and providing an ongoing support system for them as they grow… We are proud that our ongoing effort to provide support for the creative life of hundreds of artists has given us a crucial role in the artistic life of New York City.¹⁸

 

This goal to serve the ‘under-represented’ population of artists in New York is one that perhaps is more nuanced than it may at first appear. Even without addressing the difficulty of defining whom is ‘under-represented’, this goal is complex. If these artists, by performing or exhibiting at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, gain some sort of legitimacy, is the Café serving as some sort of incubator for artistic success? This would only become possible because of the existing mainstream success of the artists who run and maintain the Café. It seems, then, that the Café dances between mainstream success on the one hand, and alternative motivations on the other. How does the Café, and the artists who perform and exhibit here blur the line between ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ success? Is it ironic that a poet can ‘represent’ his ‘under-represented’ group? As Professor Gayatari Spivak comments in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

 

When a line of communication is established between a member of sub-altern groups and the circuits of citizenship or institutionality, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony.¹⁹

 

By serving as an incubator of sorts, the Nuyorican Poets Café might be seen as this ‘line of communication’ between the sub-altern group and ‘institutionality’. One cannot classify the Nuyorican Poets Café, therefore, as either ‘alternative’ or ‘institutional’, representing another way in which the Café evades a label and can be seen to represent Newness or experimentalism.

             This dialectic is one of the many contradictions of the Café. How does the Café’s incorporation as a recognized non-profit organization affect the Nuyorican Poets Café? Does the Café running as a business affect its function as a platform for open artistic expression and cultural exchange? Does it undermine the authenticity of the organization in some way that the Café has a board and paid employees, including those MCs who perform the function of facilitating the performance events? Or is it simply an extension of the Newness that Nuyorican poetry promotes, that this business can constantly challenge the terms of the very mission it sets out to engage with? Glazner points to some of these tensions in his description of the Café’s function as, ”a 501(C)(3) cultural non-profit corporation disguised as a bar in New York City’s Loisaida.”²⁰ Does the fact that it is ‘disguised’ as a bar render the Café inauthentic? Or is this simply another layer of the performance of the subversive objectives of the Nuyorican movement – by enjoying non-profit status the Café undermines the capitalistic model, in many ways. Nonetheless, an argument can be made that the mainstream fame of the Café, coupled with its high-end cover charges of $10-$20 and the corporate framework within which it functions serve to undermine the originally subversive, underground motives of the Café.

 

Conclusions

            

             In sum, performance has consistently been incorporated into the Nuyorican aesthetic, both contributing to Newness and to the essential qualities of Nuyorican poetry, as defined by Frances Aparicio. Newness can be seen as both an aesthetic trope of Nuyorican poetry, and the ideological trope associated with the Nuyorican movement: live performance of poetry has been critical to the development of this ideology. Frances Aparicio comments here on the manifestation of the aesthetic and ideological tropes of Newness at the Nuyorican Poets Café:

 

Despite the changes that have transformed the Café from a space of considerable social and aesthetic marginality to a well-known space that markets itself as oppositional, the venue continues to present poetry to be recited out loud and in front of a listening public or audience.²¹

 

Aparicio points to the inherent tension implicit in the subversive aesthetic and ideology of Nuyorican Newness—in order to promote Newness, there must be an engagement with the status-quo, before a challenge can be posed. In order to be oppositional, one must engage with an object of opposition. As Dick Hebdige underlines in his ‘Subculture, the Meaning of Style’:

 

Contrary to the popular myth which presents subculture as lawless forms, the internal structure of any particular subculture is characterized by an extreme orderliness...²²

 

’Orderliness’ in the Nuyorican movement is characterized by the challenges it poses to the labels of art and the institutions associated with art, such as how ’poetry’ can be defined and what the characteristics of a Poetry Café can be. However, to be defined as oppositional to a certain movement in societal history is to accept an impermanence of the sub-culture—Hebdige’s own oppositional example, 1970s Punk Culture, is now a dated subculture. However, the Nuyorican ideology positions its object of opposition as literary and artistic trends which, by nature, are constantly evolving. As literary culture adapts to new trends, Nuyorican Newness can adapt accordingly such that it continues to position itself as oppositional. As Aparicio implies, is this insufficient as a subversive gesture? Does the Café simply ’market itself as oppositional’, rather than present a thorough challenge to a societal fact or unjust hierarchy? I hope I have demonstrated that, to the contrary, the challenge presented by Nuyorican poetry—the opposition to labels as totalizing definitions—is one that will only become more important in today’s globalizing world. The Nuyorican movement pushes against the categorization that is forced upon art forms and personal identities by constantly undermining these labels as demonstrably insufficient. I assert, therefore, that while being expansive and impossible to totalize, the Nuyorican movement in fact poses an important and significant challenge to cultural systems of identification as they stands today.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

1:Frances Aparicio “Loisaida Literature” in A New Literary History of America, Ed Marcus and Sollors (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009), 977.

2:Billy Collins, “Poems in the air, poems on the Page” in The Spoken Word Revolution, Ed Eleveld, Smith and Collins, Sourcebooks MediaFusion, New York 2003), 3.

3:The Economist, “Declamation of Independence” in The Economist, August 11th 2001.

4:Billy Collins, “Poems in the air, poems on the Page” in The Spoken Word Revolution, Ed Eleveld, Smith and Collins, Sourcebooks MediaFusion, New York 2003), 3.

5:Marc Smith, Prologue to The Spoken Word Revolution, Ed Eleveld, Smith and Collins, Sourcebooks MediaFusion, New York 2003), 1.

6:Jeffrey McDaniels in Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, ed Glazner, Manic D Press, San Francisco, 2000), 36.

7:Bob Holman, “Invocation” to Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, ed Algarin and Holman, (Holt Paperbacks, New York, 1994), 3.

8:Gary Glazner in Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, Manic D Press, San Francisco, 2000), 4.

9:Frances Aparicio “Loisaida Literature” in A New Literary History of America, Ed Marcus and Sollors (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009), 977.   

10:Marc Smith, Prologue to The Spoken Word Revolution, Ed Eleveld, Smith and Collins, Sourcebooks MediaFusion, New York 2003), 2.

11:Bob Holman, “The Room” in Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, ed Glazner Manic D Press, San Francisco, 2000), 20.

12:Bob Holman, “In and around the Scene” in The Spoken Word Revolution, Ed Eleveld, Smith and Collins, Sourcebooks MediaFusion, New York 2003), 165.

13:Ibid.

14:John Fiske, Chapter 8 in Channels of Discourse by Robert Clyde Allen, (University of North Carolina Press, London, 1987,) 257.

15:Miguel Algarín, “Nuyorican Language” in Survival Supervivencia  (Arte Público Press, Houston, 2009) 9.

16:Description of the Nuyorican Poets Café at The Nuyorican Poets Café, http://nuyorican.org/, Accessed March 2nd 2010.

17:Mission of the Nuyorican Poets Café at The Nuyorican Poets Café, http://nuyorican.org/history.php, Accessed March 2nd 2010.

18:Purpose of the Nuyorican Poets Café at The Nuyorican Poets Café, http://nuyorican.org/history.php, Accessed March 2nd 2010.

19:Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, (Norton, New York, 2001), 2193.

20:Gary Glazner in Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, Manic D Press, San Francisco, 2000), 4.

21:Frances Aparicio “Loisaida Literature” in A New Literary History of America, Ed Marcus and Sollors (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009), 977.

22:Dick Hebdige, “From Culture to Hegemony” in Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, (Norton, New York, 2001), 2448.

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