In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

Notes

N o t e s Introduction 1.Throughout this study, I use Nuyorican to refer to the poetryat hand, and either New York Puerto Rican or diasporic Puerto Rican to refer to the social identity. At times, though, when rhetorically necessary, I play off of the two senses of Nuyorican, as an aesthetic and an identity. With regard to performance, I sometimes use the term in a very broad sense that includes poetry on the page. For clarity’s sake, I use the specific term poetry performance , and I also refer to specific styles and forms such as jazz poetryand slam poetry. 2. In her still-­ relevant 1978 dissertation, Faythe Elaine Turner defines Nuyorican —or, as she calls them, Neorican—writers as “those Puerto Ricans who have been born or have spent their formative years on the United States mainland, who write in an idiomatic English influenced by Spanish and Black English, and who derive mainly from the working class” (vi). She characterizes their literature as shaped by the island’s colonial history and by the massive postwar migration (vi), and as “a Puerto Rican examination of their status on the mainland, the reality of their life here, and the traditions they consider to be part of their familial past” (9). 3. Throughout, I use code-­switching to refer to the mixing of English and Spanish. Infrequently, I use (Nuyorican) Spanglish to refer, globally and not technically, to a variety of non-­ monolingual language practices in a cultural context. For an authoritative study of New York Puerto Rican language practices and politics, see Zentella. By contrast, I use the linguistics term translanguage to refer to the numerous language strategies employed in Nuyorican poetry’s scoring of a non-­ monolingual reality. While the formal arsenal of many Nuyorican poets features some code-­ switching, translanguage as I am using it is much broader, encompassing language moves such as the redeployment of syllabic verse, the turn toward dissonant or disjunctive languages, and, most importantly, the ongoing exploration of language at the limits of page and body. For more, see my “Translanguage.” 4. Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Black Chant demonstrates that manyof the formal breakthroughs and techniques associated with innovative postwar American poetry—the recovery of historical avant-­ garde movements such as Surrealism, the turn toward 178 Note s to Pages xviii–xxx performance, orality and the vernacular—were in fact constitutive of Black Modernism , from the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude to the Umbra and Black Arts poets. I think the same is true in a Nuyorican context, as evident from my discussion of Puerto Rican modernists such as William Carlos Williams, Clemente Soto Vélez, and Julia de Burgos, and their influence on Nuyorican poets. 5. In Poetry on & off the Page, Perloff endorses an approach to poetry that rightfully foregrounds the “materiality of the text” against the conventional assumption “that poems are poems—lineated texts, usually divided into stanzas, surrounded by white space and designed to be read silently tooneself” (xii). Disconcertingly, Perloff appears to immediately foreclose the kind of culturalist-­ formalist reading I attempt here, inveighing against “increasingly restrictive identitarian categories” and the sort of criticism that thrives by “imposing external grids—nationality, race, gender, ethnicity —that serve as exclusionary markers” (xiii). It is worth asking, what would be the difference between an exclusionary marker and a heuristic critical handle such as postmodern or experimental? If for Perloff identitarian categories are always merely coercive and imposed from outside, then it would appear that her reading does not allow for the generative potential ofan identity term like Nuyorican, a creative appropriation intimately linked to poetic practice on and off the page and attuned to the shifting valences of identity across and along divergent institutional contexts.What is needed is a way of reading raced, gendered, and otherwise marked poetics that can move back and forth between formalist and culturalist concerns. 6. Fredric Jameson periodizes the 1960s so that it bleeds into the early 1970s and ends circa the oil crisis of 1973. My own periodization, which I owe partly to Lytle Shaw and Juan Flores, distinguishes between pre- and post-­ 1973 moments (roughly chapters 1 and 2 of this book), while arguing that we should also consider the Nuyorican poets of the mid- and late 1970s as an extension of the social energies of the 1960s. In a nationalist context, we might even consider the Puerto Rican sixties as beginning in 1954, with Lolita Lebrón and her peers’ assault on the...