Abstract
The new generation of Puerto Rican performance poets affiliated with the Nuyorican Poets Café during the slam era (post-1990) develop self-reflexive poetics that both depart from and continue the foundational Nuyorican poetries of the 1960s and 1970s. Willie Perdomo revisits outlaw poets (Miguel Piñero, Pedro Pietri) and singers (Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe) in an effort to reflect on the paradox of a neoliberal city that commodifies Nuyoricans while perpetuating their historic exclusion. Mayda del Valle mines the rhythms and sounds of salsa for a vernacular speech act that can found new modes of counterpublic relation, beyond discourses of recognition and visibility. Whereas recent debates among Latino Studies scholars have emphasized distinctions between the decolonial politics of the 1960s/1970s and a market-savvy “post-1960s” politics, these younger poets split the difference between pragmatic and oppositional poetics, instead rethinking the institutional space of both poem and body in a global context.
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Notes
Felipe Luciano was a leading member of the Young Lords and was briefly a part of the seminal spoken-word group, the Last Poets. While Luciano's poem embodies a revolutionary/nationalist pan-diasporic sensibility not unlike that of the Black Arts Movement Perdomo's poem is concerned less with realpolitik than with the cultural politics of representation, ironically embodying black and Puerto Rican identities so as to underscore their insufficiency.
To his credit, in his dealings with the media, and in his curatorial and editorial activities, Holman has repeatedly and emphatically underscored the Puerto Rican history of the Café, even as the media has focused on the slam phenomenon.
Diallo, a West African immigrant without a criminal record, was killed by plainclothes New York City police officers in 1999. The officers were later acquitted of all charges in the case. According to news reports, the unarmed Diallo was shot 41 times; hence the title of Perdomo's poem. The identification with Diallo dovetails with the poet's ironic self-identification as “Nuyorikistani” elsewhere in the book and as terrorist underscores Nuyorican identity in millennial New York City as radically other.
Journalist Mireya Navarro (2002) notes the distinctly multicultural vibe at the Nuyorican Poets Café's Friday night slams, and observes that the Café has “broadened its audience and core way beyond its bohemian Puerto Rican roots.” She cites as further evidence of this broadening the case of Mayda del Valle.
Of course, there are distinct measures of success in poetry. Publication is not necessarily the ultimate horizon, especially now that slam has helped establish performance poetry as a career in and of itself. Still, Aptowicz's take on del Valle reminds us that many slam-identified poets have not given up on print, and that the marginalization of slam (self-imposed and otherwise) risks reinforcing the parochialism of poetry that slam was meant to counter.
It is perhaps a sense of this paradox that animates Acentos, a South Bronx-based literary organization, founded in 2003, that ran a well-known weekly reading series and whose current projects include the online literary journal Acentos Review and a weekly poetry workshop, featuring emerging and established Latino/a poets.
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Noel, U. Counter/public address: Nuyorican poetries in the slam era. Lat Stud 9, 38–61 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2011.4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2011.4