Nuyorican Poets Research Articles

“The Queer Nuyorican”: Reading Downtown Poetry and Performance Through a Queer Lens

“The Queer Nuyorican”: Reading Downtown Poetry and Performance Through a Queer Lens

Bodegas, Baseball & Ballads: The Democratization of Puerto Rican Identity

Evident within many diasporic communities is a group consciousness and organization that operates in non-institutional spaces outside the realms of government agencies. The case of Puerto Ricans is no different and beyond collective organization, islanders in the diaspora went further in redefining the very criteria of Puerto Rican identity. This paper focuses on the migrant communities located in New York and the ways in which informal activities and non-institutional venues served as community centres. Food traditions, sporting competitions, and poetic practices all acted as cultural bases. Such activities fostered a democratic and participatory formation of Puerto Rican identity and played a critical role in the socio- economic development of migrants. These spaces also provided room for the complex nuances of Puertoricanness that were overlooked or purposely excluded from dominant ideologies by both the American and Puerto Rican government. Looking at bodegas, athletic clubs, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, we can observe the vital role of spaces outside the state’s control in facilitating an egalitarian and communal process of identity-making.

Patricia Herrera. Nuyorican Feminist Performance: From the Café to Hip Hop Theater

Patricia Herrera fills a void in scholarship on the Nuyorican Poets Café. Her focus on women performers ( performeras) and their writing and performance challenges these artists’ marginalization and erasure, while the Nuyorican feminist aesthetic she proposes, as situated within intersectional feminism, underscores the work’s critical intervention in feminist performance theory.

Smudge by Mahogany L. Browne

Reviewed by: Smudge by Mahogany L. Browne Sean Morrissey Mahogany L. Browne. Smudge. Button Poetry, 2015. With her 2015 chapbook collection Smudge (Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press), poet, activist, and performance poetry champion Mahogany Browne explores the cruel complexity of inter-racial discrimination, familial strain, and anxiety within the African-American community. The “you,” to whom so many of these poems are addressed, might just as well be written back to another knowing reader who, too, has been the victim of bullied insults and ever-present reminders of a socio-cultural “ideal”: light-skinned, “good” hair, perfect curves. Consider, for example, the following passage from the collection’s opening poem, You brown dirty dark black blackest night midnight bluebl___k girl y o u soblk somehow you forgot your name. The full use of “black” and “blackest” are weaponized. They become two words within a string of abusive descriptors and quick alliterative pacing that read more like fisted jabs. One feels pummeled and picked apart, reduced to abbreviated shorthand (“blk”) or in pieces, incomplete (“bl___k”) as the speaker laments her unrequited “desire to be wanted.” Even the physical layout itself (Smudge is set in landscape, not a traditional portrait style) can be said to represent the speaker’s own sense of self, uniquely different and apart from the common shape of her contemporaries. It also provides ample room for Browne’s ranging, spatial forms to flow across the page, as in this excerpt from “When 12 Play Was on Repeat”: When you are a deep amber & your jheri curl is a distant memory & your shape is swollen in the perfect places & the boys remember your name & your first and last crush sings to you come here with a lilt in his walk & his tongue wags you towards him with its pale pink and you smile because you remember the sun wrinkles your darkness— Here, the page-spanning lines and foregone punctuation pull our eyes from left to right, building suspense and anxiety with each new detail. The scene comes together as memory itself, an associative collage of indelible detail and emotionality that feels absolutely present. The intimacy of the poem is further enhanced by its narrative structure, using interior monologue to reveal the speaker’s inner voice. “When 12 Play Was on Repeat” reels [End Page 24] in the sexual anxiety of adolescence, of first loves and wanting “a story for the cold tiles when there are only bra straps & lip gloss & hair brushes and smiles,” to be more than—quoting the speaker—a “blk girl mistake.” Browne’s poetry is a kick in the chest, immediate and natural as the spoken word. With five LPs, countless performance awards, and a longstanding role as the Friday Night Slam poetry program director at the Nuyorican Poets Café in the Lower East Side, Browne’s spoken word bona fides are stone set. And where poems written for the page make use of stanzaic structure, enjambed line breaks, and literary forms to greater effect, spoken word is ethereal by design. The audience must be made to see and feel every beat of the piece in real time. There is no room for pretense or encumbered prose to overwhelm the listener; rather, it highlights the unique emotional resonance of lyric storytelling. With Smudge, Mahogany Browne underscores the full range of her artistic power in poems that feel equally at home on the mic as they do on the page. Consider, for example, the opening stanza of this untitled poem: Cause you ain’t seen none of them praying/whenThey crack/baby skull/open wide/on the side-Walk/call it jump in/like a black child need toKnow/how destructive a leap can be/like hisBlack skin know what “in” mean/in the firstDamn place/they say family and gang/ beThe same/so it ain’t mean nothing different/ It is impossible to ignore the aural quality of these lines, from the speaker’s vernacular to Browne’s phrasal pacing. The piece nearly reads like something found, a moment of living poetry overheard and fused with all the nuance of written verse. The repeating trochees and Browne’s...

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

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.

Spell, and: I Name Gyal

Spell, and: I Name Gyal Cheryl Boyce-Taylor (bio) Spell I carry my big-up self to Trinidadhoping the sea water could wash waythe bitter taste of mal yeux blightthat not so good woman leave in my house a nasty wind blow in my face when I reach Tunapunafish market it nearly make me faintI rush off the damn put-put taxi and ask the womanin the pretty guava sari and the blue henna painted hands how much it does cost to light a white candlefor broken hearts hereshe look at me good and with a serious face she saycandles eh go help yuh nah missy but here what and follow me good get a brasso tin and put yuh private business in itbury it on the first river bank yuh seetake two rum and wine yuh waist like it ha springfor three days drink tea bag black no coffee take two sea bath it go cut that mal yeux blightI giving yuh two cigar light one for every sea bathI go give yuh a small bag ah vetivee grasshang it round yuh neck then guava say six hundred miss-ladysix hundred for whatI is the cheapest round here ask anybody [End Page 38] I don’t want to fight this early morningmiss-lady just pay me my moneycash only nocreditcardamericanexpressnoting like that just cash four weeks pass and nothing workingthe veti making me sneezethe spring in my waist so rusty it breakand the rum giving me bad feeling to tell the truth I fraid sea waterand I was hoping to work half the spellcause half the heart readythe other half still pending I Name Gyal I name gyalI am the daughter I always wantedI grow tropical crotons in my kitchen long crimson and yellow stemsthat look like they can danceI name gyal I got tall orange and red balisier in my bedroomtheir bright mouths red as Shango’s shoutmy straw mat is strewn with guavas purple cowry shells and Oya candles I remember who I am my home name is gyalmy study is wild with stray fernsBoston, Jamaican, English and stink Mexican marigolds [End Page 39] I rise at five start my dinnera pot of curry chicken and rice on the stovefresh corn from the yard my home name is gyalin summer I plant wild pumpkin vine and blue dasheenlay sorrel in the yard to dry sweeten ginger beer with molasseschurn Guinness stout into ice creaminvite friends, play reggae and soca loud I am my own midwife, I birth myselfthe daughter I always wantedI am my best selfbraided gyal drinking cocoa tea [End Page 40] Cheryl Boyce-Taylor Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a VONA fellow, and the founder of the Glitter Pomegranate Poetry Series. She is the author of three poetry collections, Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows and Convincing the Body. She is also a graduate of Stone-coast MFA Poetry Program. Her poems are published in numerous anthologies including: ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Bowery Women, The Mom Egg Review, Callaloo, Pank, and Killens Review of Arts & Letters. Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press

Violent Effects: Domestic Violence and Poetic Subversive Discourses

Processes of sociosexual geo-racialization consistently render Latinas in the U.S. vulnerable to domestic abuse. Engaging this issue, third space feminists have adapted testimonio as a means for exposing domestic abuse while striving to craft transformative discourses that humanize these women’s experiences of oppression. The dusmic nature of poetry, as defined by Nuyorican poets, lends itself to this task. “Violent Effects” synthesizes poetry’s dusmic nature with third space feminists’ development of testimoniando —or testimonio as an agentic process—to identify how Maria Luisa Arroyo’s poetry exposes, dignifies and humanizes survivors’ experiences of domestic violence and thereby subverts dehumanization’s violent effects.

Counter/public address: Nuyorican poetries in the slam era

The new generation of Puerto Rican performance poets affiliated with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe 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 Pinero, Pedro Pietri) and singers (Hector 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.

The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature by Ilan Stavans

maintained. Women had limited educational andprofessional opportunities ; husbandshad controlof thematerial resources ofthefamily; womenwereexpected tobearchildren ,consentto polygynous familyarrangements , and be shunned and replaced ifthey couldnotbear children. Therecent anarchy initiated by "government-sponsored militants and foreign mercenaries" has militarizedmaleyouthculture and,in turn, negatively impacted women's status.Womenhave experienced thebruntof humanrightsviolations ,includingrapes, "custodial disappearances" and murders, and brutalinterrogations. Thus,a class ofwomen hasbeencreated whoare victims ofthese violations. I highly recommendIslam, Women,and Violence in Kashmir. Nyla Khan has writtena very vivid, engaging,and insightful book analyzingthe development of theKashmiri crisisthrough literature , history, and ethnography whileforegrounding thestatusof women.She leads thereaderto a deeperunderstanding ofthiscomplex , continually unfolding crisis andclarifies issuesthat willneedto be addressed as Kashmir moveson itsfuture path. Betty Harris University ofOklahoma The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature . Han Stavans, ed. New York. W.W. Norton.201 1. Ixxi+ 2,489 pages + A1-A177. $59.95. isbn 978-0-39308007 -0 Thislong-anticipated volumeaptly represents theextraordinary scope of scholarship and aesthetics that one expectsboth froma Norton anthologyand fromthe Latino literary tradition. More than450 yearsofwriting bysometwohundred writers is organizedin five principal sections: Colonization: 1537-1810, Annexations: 1811-1898, Acculturation: 1899-1945, Upheaval : 1946-1979, and IntotheMainstream : 1980-Present. Inchronologicalorder - beginning withHispanic colonialwriters (Las Casas,Cabeza deVaca,ElIncaGarcilaso, andelevenothers ) andending with themost contemporary writers (suchasJunot Diaz andMariposa) - aretheessentialworksofLatinoliterature inall genres.(About one-fourth of the material istranslated from theoriginalSpanish , although hybrid Spanish -English textsare unaltered.) A sixthsection, PopularDimensions, introduces some folkand popular genres.The generalintroduction ("TheSearchforWholeness"), sectionand authorintroductions, endpapermaps showingexploration and immigration patterns, and threeappendixesunderscore issuesofhistory, identity, andliteraryhistory thatinform bothLatino expression and thecreation of the anthology.(The appended materialisa chronology ofliterature and history, 1492-2010;a selectionof treaties, acts,andpropositions; and translations of "influential essays" by Rodó, Vasconcelos,Paz, and Fernández Retamar.) Here we find foundational textsand otherworksofChicano, Puerto Rican, CubanAmerican, and Dominican American literature, alongwith a few contemporary writersfrom different backgrounds (Isabel Allende,ArielDorfman, Jaime Manrique, Francisco Goldman, DanielAlarc ón, andFelipeAlfau). Other interesting authorsand selections are ArthurSchomburg,William CarlosWilliams, a scholarly essay by Luis Leal, César Chavez, "De colores/'a narcocorrido, a merengue song by Lin-ManuelMiranda from theBroadwaymusicalInthe Heights, and several completetexts,including Tomás Rivera's This Migrant Earth(in Rolando Hinojosa's translation ), Carlos Morton's The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales,and Nilo Cruz's AnnaintheTropics. Severalwell-recognizedor otherwise noteworthytopics appear as discrete categories (Frontier Memoirs, Southwestern Newspaper Poetry,the Chacón Family, the Nuyorican Poets, San Antonio Women Poets,PuertoRican Young Lords,and Writers ofLatinidad),an arrangementthatleaves one wondering why otherissues were not treated similarly.Also somewhat puzzling is theselectionofsayings, jokes,comics,folktheater, folktales, and songs in the Popular Dimensions section.Eleven sayings,three jokes, and one example of popular theaterhardly seem representative ofthosegenres,and the"cartoonistas "and CultureClash mightbe betterappreciatedin theirappropriate chronologicalcontexts. These concernsaside, TheNorton Anthologyof Latino Literature will be the anthologyof choice for English-languagereaders.Bilingual readers would be well advised, though, to consult Nicolás KaneUos 's Herencia: TheAnthology ofHispanic Literature of the UnitedStates and En otravoz: antologíade literaturahispana delosEstadosUnidos(see WLT,Oct. 2003, 156) as well. And we can continueto hope thatone day we will have a single-volume anthologyof this literaturein the original languages, whetherSpanish ,English,orSpanglish. Catharine E. Wall Claremont McKennaCollege THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF LATINO LITERATURE Büifl ^^bXChhT ^ ^^^^^H ^Hi be ^^^^^b MB HHHH wHvBrlMBkr"nP ^^^^^^^^^^^H BMH UÊ*9JÊB ■■■■■■■■■■ ILAN STAVANS GENERAL EDITOR ■■HUB Alejandro Zambra. No leer: Crónicas y ensayos sobre literatura. Santiago, Chile. Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales. 2010. 153 pages. CH$9,000 / US$20.49. ISBN 978-956-314-105-4 In the generationalscramblingfor positioningwithinthe "new" new Latin Americannarrative,one brilliantwritercares only about lucid, truly novel prose. He is Alejandro Zambra (b. 1975,Chile), author of the sedulous and well-received novella diptych Bonsai and The PrivateLives of Trees.His subtlety for combining what Perec called the "infraordinary"with actually innovativemetafiction is boundless. No leer,a selection of his nonfictionprose from2003 to 2010,some 781WorldLiterature Today ...

“Ragan Fox is a Gay Slam Poet”: An Autobiographical Exploration of Performance Poetry's Performative Implications

This essay reflects on and features poems representative of my decade-long involvement in performance poetry, which includes a third place finish in the individual competition at the 2005 National Poetry Slam, two published collections of performance poetry, and hundreds of featured performances, in venues ranging from the Nuyorican Poets Café to Air America radio. The artistic statement is an autobiographical consideration of the performative and poetic dynamics of specific performance poetry and academic contexts.

Encyclopedia of Hispanic-American literature

Hispanic-American literature has a venerable history and has dramatically increased in importance and popularity in today's literary circles. Encyclopedia of Hispanic-American Literature is a comprehensive new encyclopedia covering authors and works that are an integral part of the high school and college literary canon, as well as those that are historically significant and gaining a reputation. This comprehensive one-volume resource contains approximately 250 entries on some of the most popular Hispanic-American authors and their works.Coverage includes: Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez, Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima, Chicano literature, Junot Diaz, Dominican American literature, El Bronx Remembered, Cristina Garcia, Oscar Hijuelos, Hispanic American journalism, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Jose Marti, Pat Mora, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Richard Rodriguez, and more.

Angel Hair Magazine, the Second-Generation New York School, and the Poetics of Sociability

Angel Hair Magazine, the Second-Generation New York School, and the Poetics of Sociability Daniel Kane (bio) The Granary Books publication of Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy in My Head: The Angel Hair Anthology is both cause for celebration and an invitation to assess the significance of the poetry and overall scene associated with those writers representing the so-called second-generation New York school.1 This appraisal is a necessary step for literary and cultural history, as TheAngel Hair Anthology recovers a decades-old avant-garde movement whose influence continues to be felt in New York and national avant-garde circles. Poets associated with the Language writing phenomenon, spoken-word culture, and younger contemporary American innovative writers have all pointed to the poets and poetry scene of the second generation as especially significant. The contributors' notes to the St. Mark's Poetry Project anthology Out of This World are telling in terms of the debts owed to the second-generation scene. Regarding the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church reading series when Angel Hair editor Anne Waldman was [End Page 331] serving as its director, Charles Bernstein writes that it "provided an important alternative to the low energy, formally inert poetry of official verse culture" (qtd. in Waldman, Out of This World 621). Bernstein and Bruce Andrews went on to publish Bernadette Mayer's celebrated "Experiments" list along with essays on or byMayer, Clark Coolidge, Lorenzo Thomas, and other second-generation affiliated writers in their collaboratively edited The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Andrei Codrescu remembers, "Ted Berrigan, who enjoyed my rudimentary English, taught me the poetry of the New World. It was a whole new kind of poetry: alive, anti-academic, bohemian, streetwise, political, open" (630). Amy Gerstler recalls: "Dennis Cooper . . . also introduced me to 'New York School' writers, and St. Mark's Newsletter, and numerous East Coast small-press magazines and anthologies. Those introductions provided me with what felt at the time like a direction"(642). Michael Palmer gave his first reading at St. Mark's and recollects "Berrigan's barking laugh, half challenge, half support, in the background" and "a reading with Charles North and a Sunday 'conversation' with Clark Coolidge and audience about desire, silence, narrative, subversion, loss, subject, Sade, Bataille, Blanchot, Olson, hymns, and fragments"(669). Punk legend Richard Hell credits Anne Waldman with inspiring him to start CUZ magazine, which would go on to publish work by Ron Padgett, René Ricard, and Eileen Myles (646). Showing the influence not just of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch but also of Padgett and Berrigan, David Lehman in his book The Last Avant-Garde demonstrates how second-generation poets inspired younger writers including Paul Violi, Alice Notley (who was married to Berrigan during this period), Tim Dlugos, and Eileen Myles (359-79). Bob Holman, one of the main impresarios of the "spoken word" performance poetry community, has stated: "I remember when Jim Brodey did Howl in five languages at the Poetry Project. They were read simultaneously—unrehearsed, just to do it. The performance dynamic at the church has been nurtured and important and was what allowed me to go down to the Nuyorican Poets Café and start my thing there" (qtd. in Kane 206). In Statutes of Liberty, Geoffrey Ward draws a link between contemporary avant-garde publications [End Page 332] and their predecessors: "Imprints such as Burning Deck, Roof, The Figures or Potes & Poets Press are the intrepid contemporary heirs of Corinth Books, Tibor De Nagy Editions, The Poet's Press, C, Angel Hair Books and other small-scale outfits that published the new American poetry of the 1960s" (179). It is clear in light of these references that we must take a critical look at the writing affiliated with the second-generation New York school in order to understand and historicize the contemporary innovative poetry scene more fully and properly. Many writers associated with the second generation—including Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, and Dick Gallup—certainly deserve to be considered as significant individual poets. TheAngel Hair Anthology nevertheless reminds us that second-generation poetry was in many ways produced...

All poets welcome: the Lower East Side poetry scene in the 1960s

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Community through Poetry 2. Oral Poetics on the Lower East Side 3. The Aesthetics of the Little 4. The Poetry Project at St. Mark's 5. Anne Waldman, The World, and the Early Years at the Poetry Project 6. Bernadette Mayer and Language in the Poetry Project Epilogue: Bob Holman, the Poetry Project, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe: I Learned That Poetry Could Be about Community Here Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments of Permissions Index CD Playlist: http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9278/9278.playlist.php

Yellowman (review)

In recent years, the delivery techniques and narrative structure of performance poetry, or spoken word, have infiltrated contemporary theatre, particularly in the works of black and Latino playwrights. This fruitful merging of performance poetry with theatre has its roots in the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement and, more recently, a new home at the Nuyorican Poets Café and at New York's Universes. In Yellowman, playwright Dael Orlandersmith, a performance poet, employs this tradition of rhythmic style and presentational delivery of spoken word. Previous productions earned the play consideration as a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets

Before the Caribbean-inflected spoken-word poetry of the 1990s, epitomized by poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Manhattan, there was reggae. In the past thirty years, most Caribbean poetry written in English has come to the shores of the United States on waves of music, in the lyrics of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Burning Spear. Kwame Dawes, himself a musician and poet, is not surprised by this phenomenon. The region's political and cultural awakening of the 1970s was fueled by a growing African consciousness, often in competition with the multiple traditions European, Indian, Chinese that have permeated many Caribbean nations for centuries. The influence of reggae has produced a poetry that is quite different from earlier work from the Caribbean, but this is only one more chapter in a tradition characterized by continuing tension with a diverse heritage.The interviews in Talk Yuh Talk reflect a range of Caribbean voices from several generations, from those poets influenced by a dynamic interplay between the popular culture of reggae, calypso, folk music, and yard theater to those whose work is closer to classical forms of literature and oral narrative. Kwame Dawes talks with many of the most important poets to have emerged from the Caribbean who are still writing today. The poets discuss their techniques, their situations as poets, and the challenges they face in the profession and in their craft. Well-known figures like Lorna Goodison, Grace Nichols, Kamau Brathwaite, Fred D'Aguiar, and Martin Carter share space with such lesser-known but equally important poets as Mervyn Morris and Kendel Hippolyte.In a specific introduction to each poet, Dawes offers a sense of what is important or meaningful about the poet's work. He explores detachment with Mervyn Morris, intellectual rigor with David Dabydeen, the struggles of obscurity with Cyril Dabydeen, the poetics of surprise and the erotic with Grace Nichols, the reggae escape motif with Lillian Allen, ambivalence about Africa with James Berry, and more, talking with eighteen poets in all. By allowing them to speak in their own voices and by directing the questions along the lines of creative process and aesthetics, Dawes makes a compelling case for the strength of Caribbean poetry while offering a lively source of inspiration and information for practicing poets as well as critics.

Home and the Ruins of Language: Victor Hernandez Cruz and Miguel Algarin's Nuyorican Poetry

I have a small fence that surrounds my fair home where I propose and propound where I invent and discover. Tengo una verjita, que rodea mi lindo hogar, donde propongo y pongo, donde invento y encuentro. --Miguel Algarin, Donde / Where Y tampoco importa el lenguaje de metaje tantos verbos y adjetivos que? and neither does it matter the language of goalage so many verbs and adjectives what? --Victor Hernandez Cruz, Grafo-Mundo Nuyorican(1) writing has always been caught in the critical crossfire between two national spaces--Puerto Rico and the U.S.--and between their literary and linguistic borders? Because of this conflict, Nuyorican writers have created an apparent instability in their own writing as one of their literary concerns, trying either to carve out a space for their writing or to create a new space. It is in poetry that this crisis of space and language has been most deeply problematized, and yet where a possible alternative lies for these writers. The question of belonging to one tradition or the other (or the decision not to belong to any one tradition) is, in this case, entangled with the concept of home that Nuyorican poets have developed. In many instances, that home is necessarily Puerto Rico--the Nuyorican poet positions him/herself as, in some way, coming from the island. What results from this positioning is a fusion of images that conflates the concept of home with the imagery of the island. The relation that the poets have with that home/island is ambivalent, a sort of love-hate relationship towards a space that nurtures and frustrates them at the same time. This ambivalence is sometimes translated as an idealizing project--home turns into a space of ecstasy and love, a tropical Arcadia. Moreover, the poets have an equally important relationship with language. Their writing reveals the battle of choosing one language over the other, or of deciding to create a new language springing from both English and Spanish. The Nuyorican conflict within poetry includes both the representation of home and the selection of a language that recreates home and its corresponding identities. It is the purpose of this essay to trace a certain tendency that two Nuyorican poets--Miguel Algarin and Victor Hernandez Cruz--manifest towards home and language.(3) While, on the one hand, the home/island appears in some cases to remain intact and unperturbed within an idealized imagery that reproduces a series of fantasies,(4) language, on the other hand, is forced through phonetic, morphological and syntactical deformations that eventually produce a new language composed of the ruined remains of the two standard languages. This double gesture leads these Nuyorican poets into an apparent preservation of home combined with a brutal mutilation of the so-called original languages. The relationship that exists between these poets and home can be better understood if we approach it through the psychoanalytic structure of incorporation. In post-Freudian psychoanalysis, the mechanism of incorporation, along with the concept of the crypt--originally formulated by Ferenczi but later developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok--denies or refuses to recognize a loss and creates a scenario or fantasy that veils that loss. Incorporation is usually set in opposition to introjection, which is a process through which the loss becomes filled with a substitute object. Incorporation, on the other hand, can be seen as a device to refuse substitution for that loss; incorporation is triggered when mourning ... cannot be admitted (Abraham and Torok 9). The subject refuses to recognize the loss of his/her pleasure object, thus avoiding any feeling of mourning. What follows is the insertion of the object into a fantasy, in order to deny its loss. The fantasy is repeated again and again in an attempt to confirm the presence of the object, when what is really happening is the covering up of the fact that the object is lost forever. …

The Rise and Fall of Black Britain

As if to confirm the nostrum that all things cultural and economic are transnational, poetry's stock in the U.K. has soared in the nineties, much as it has here in the U.S. Individual issues are up, and the entire portfolio is performing well: small poetry presses are thriving, Penguin has revived its once-seminal Modern Poets series with great fanfare, and poetry has even been assigned various civic tasks, from humanizing the London Underground to (literally) reporting the evening news. There as here, established page-poets are along for the ride, and the odd performance poet of an earlier generation gets paid her ritual respects. But the real catalysts of the poetry boom are younger folks-grandchildren of Albion, in the words of poetry activist Michael Horowitz-who, like their counterparts in the U.S., work in a variety of styles across the line dividing hiphop from highbrow. Often reluctant to assume the mantle of poet, they crowd -some gratefully, some sheepishlyunder spoken word, the modish umbrellalabel the press has eagerly held aloft. The term has become so hip and hyped, especially since the triumphant I994 and I995 tours of Manhattan's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, that nowadays you can't swing a dead metaphor without hitting a poetry slam. As with their Nuyorican counterparts, part of the cachet of the new U.K. poken-word artists is that their skins and their voices cover a delicious range of tones. After an uneasy decade in which it was merely touchy, what's now called the black-and-Asian experience in Britain is once again hot, and Albion's grandkids are understood to speak authentically to it and for it. Fred D'Aguiar, a poet and novelist of Guyanese descent who's had occasion to track such trends, calculates that there are at least sixty poets of Afro-Caribbean or Asian descent currently living and working in the U.K.; many of them-including John Agard,Valerie Bloom, Jean Binta Breeze, Merle Collins, Lemn Sissay, and Benjamin Zephaniah-are primarily per-