HELIOLITH

I used to hang out at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe when I was a teenager. Specifically, you could find me sitting atop the overstuffed red wing chair in the balcony, perched over a poetry slam on my boyfriend’s lap, holding a can of beer in a paper bag that he’d smuggled in from the bodega on the corner. (Ooh. Cringe over that dangling modifier! Too bad. The sentence stays. I like it.)

We watched all kinds of poets get up and spill their words into the microphone. (Both my posts have had to do with microphones–how fitting, now that I am finally piping up.) I remember the judges, randomly selected members of the audience, holding up numbers as if they were in an Olympic podium judging athletes. People booed and whistled, hissed and shouted. These performances were not for the weak of heart. If you recited bad poetry, the audience let you know.

I had the book with a picture of Algarin on the back, and in college a friend of mine had a vinyl record of Maggie Estep reciting “I am the Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere”. (I was thrilled years later to recognize Algarin from that photograph and wait on him in a bar in Alphabet City. The same bar, incidentally, where I was to run into the high school boyfriend years later. Apparently we both still had connections to the neighborhood.) These poems, the Spanglish, the pride, the gripping honesty inside the words, all shaped my literary world. Often one generation of activists will claim that the next younger generation does not appreciate the changes that the first one fought for. I do not belong to the second generation of spoken word poets; I am on the other side of this first generation, in so much as I study and read what they carved out and perform. But the poets I saw at the Nuyorican were such a part of my adolescence and developing literary understanding and identity that I am now able to internalize this literature and not view it as foreign, other, belonging to a special “Latino Literature” category, but living word. (Waxing religious–but if poetry doesn’t merit worship, I don’t know what does…for more on the power of words, read Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series; I’m on the third book now…exult in the tangents!)

This all has been inspired by an article I saw in http://indypendent.org/webnews/ today about the death of Pedro Pietri. I couldn’t say it better. Read it for yourself.