In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

Four - Counter/Public Address: Nuyorican Poets in the Slam Era

​C h a p t e r F o u r Counter/Public Address Nuyorican Poets in the Slam Era In 1989, shortly after Miguel Piñero’s death and in honor of his memory, Miguel Algarín reopened the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in its present location, at 236 East 3rd Street between Avenues B and C. Soon, the Cafe was in the midst of a renaissance, having become the home for a younger, multicultural generation of poets. Fueled by the creative energies of poet, performer, and cultural worker Bob Holman, and in particular by his importation from Chicago of the competitive and interactive poetry events known as poetry slams—with which the Cafewould soon become synonymous (Aptowicz)— the Nuyorican scene began to cross over: its poets were soon performing on MTV, touring internationally, and even authoring successful books, while Algarín and Holman published the epochal, American Book Award–­ winning anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (1994). This Nuyorican crossover was by no means unproblematic. In Living in Spanglish (2003), journalist Ed Morales, himself a poet and 1990s Cafe fixture , recounts the controversy surrounding the cover story on the Cafe in the May 3, 1993, issue of New York magazine: with its headline, “The Beats Are Back,” the story framed the burgeoning Nuyorican scene as a rebirth of the midcentury poetry movement, underscoring the connection by featuring a photo of the bespectacled and goatee-­ sporting (prototypically “Beat-­ looking”) poet Edwin Torres. While providing some helpful context for the general reader, for whom the Beats may well be the sole recognizable exemplarof performed poetry, such a coding, Morales suggests, risks diluting what 124 Ch ap ter Fou r was in fact a stylistically and culturally diverse poetry community into little more than a neo-­ Beat revival. Morales rightfully notes the concerns voiced at the time by, among others, poet Tracie Morris, a leading voice of the 1990s Cafe, regarding the recasting of Nuyorican poetry as mass entertainment: “[Morris] objected strongly to the Cafe movement’s being compared to that of the Beats, and believed poets were compromising theirartistic integrity to get corporate entertainment approval” (Spanglish 110). Morales’s analysis also emphasizes the slippage that has taken place. Granted its internationalist and multicultural vantage point, the original Cafe was a community-­ oriented space, arising in the context of a need for Puerto Rican–centric institutions addressed in the introduction to the 1975 anthology. In the 1990s, though, the media spotlight obscured the Cafe’s history, while gentrification threatened the neighborhood’s Puerto Rican, multiethnic, and working-­ class character. At the same time, this new Cafe opened its doors to younger generations of poets attuned to hip-­ hop and (post)punk cultures; their poetics were formally and culturally diverse, from the sound experiments of Morris and the comic theatrics of Regie Cabico to the lyric narratives of Paul Beatty and the conversational pieces of Maggie Estep (both of whom would go on to acclaim as novelists). While some of these new poets were NewYork Puerto Ricans (Torres,Willie Perdomo, Morales himself ), the term Nuyorican was beginning to circulate globally as a metonymyof the physical space of the Cafe, decontextualized from community histories and cultural identifications. In a 1990 New York Times story Holman distinguished between Nuyorican in its narrow sense, as NewYork Puerto Rican, and a contemporary sense in which “[anyone] who calls himself or herself a Nuyorican is a Nuyorican” (Nieves). In Algarín and Holman’s anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Nuyorican poetry is understood in its doubleness, signaling both its New York Puerto Rican origins and its evolution as a multicultural poetics. By redefining Nuyorican poetry in terms of the physical space of the Cafe itself (“voices from”), Aloud succeeds in its leveraging of Puerto Rican– specific and open-­ ended senses of the term, even as it risks turning poetry into a manageable difference, a shabby chic entertainment (Nieves). This doubleness is already apparent in Algarín and Holman’s respective introductions. Both editors are committed to a moreor less populist concep- Cou nter/Public Address 125 tion of poetry that prizes its engagement with everyday life, but Holman’s “Congratulations. You Have Found the Hidden Book” is giddier in its evocation of a new avant-­ garde for the hip-­ hop generation. In a sense, Holman frames the anthology project as an extension of the hip-­ hop movement, specifically in its making...