They Must Be Re(pre)sented: Archiving Nuyorican Poetry's “Diasporous” Bodies

Abstract

Urayoan Noel’s In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam offers a literary history of Nuyorican poetics from the cultural ferment of the movement era to contemporary poets working in slam, hip-hop, and lyric traditions. Exploring how poets negotiate the tension between invisibility and abjected visibility that defines the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, Noel presents Nuyorican poetry as a collection of “out-of-focus” modes that challenge representational and documentary forms. The book examines how poems and performances by foundational poets such as Victor Hernandez Cruz and Pedro Pietri and contemporary poets such as Edwin Torres and Aracelis Girmay employ an aesthetic defined by humor, play, irresolution, irony, paradox, masks, personae, noise, and the absurd and surreal. In placing Nuyorican poetry under the “blurred” lens of diaspora, In Visible Movement effectively argues for a capacious, innovative tradition grounded in the embodied performance of identity in print and on stage. This approach facilitates Noel’s reading of Nuyorican poetry in relation to the New American Poetries and in the dual lineage of William Carlos Williams’s vernacular modernism and Jorge Brandon’s street poetry that influenced the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.