NY Times, Dec. 4, 2020
Remembering Miguel Algarín, a Founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
A fellow writer recalls Algarín, who once wrote that the poet was “the
philosopher of the sugar cane that grows between the cracks of concrete
sidewalks.”
By Ed Morales
Back in 1973, often remembered as the bad old days of the Lower East
Side, Miguel Algarín, focusing on the light he saw shining from an
emerging New York Puerto Rican community, began hosting a series of
informal poetry readings in his apartment on East Sixth Street that
brought together poets, theater types and musicians.
The gatherings soon outgrew his living room. Together with several
contemporaries, Algarín went on to found the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which
opened down the block from his apartment in a former Irish bar on East
Sixth Street. A new literary movement was taking shape.
Algarín, who died on Monday at age 79, helped forge that movement,
playing a central role in creating Nuyorican poetry, and in popularizing
the term Nuyorican to describe the bilingual, bicultural reboot of
Puerto Rican-ness blossoming in the neighborhoods of New York.
Born in San Juan and raised on the Lower East Side, Algarín attempted to
merge the highbrow culture of his working-class parents with a
Rabelaisian Everyman rebellion from below. He had a fearless sense of
pride and was a champion of the underprivileged. The passion for
Shakespeare he displayed as a professor at Rutgers University seamlessly
fused with the Africanist urgency of his own poetry, producing a body of
work that reflected his fluid use of Spanglish and shifting sexual identity.
That first incarnation of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe acted as the
headquarters of a generation of young poets who broke from the folkloric
stereotypes of islander passivity to be reincarnated as “Super Fly”
rhymers. The path was blazed by a cadre of poets including Miguel
Piñero, whose play “Short Eyes” was championed by Joseph Papp’s Public
Theater; Pedro Pietri, who read his epic poem, “Puerto Rican Obituary,”
in 1969 when the activists of the Young Lords occupied a church in
Spanish Harlem; Sandra María Esteves, who was one of the pioneering
women of the movement; Lucky Cienfuegos; and Jesús Papoleto Meléndez.
In an era that would soon give birth to hip-hop, the Nuyoricans embraced
a declaiming style that was shaped by contemporaries including The Last
Poets; many were influenced by Ntozake Shange, one of the cafe’s
founding poets, and her Obie-winning play “For Colored Girls Who Have
Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” The cafe also had visits
from beat writers, including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs,
whose “pale, inflected voice,” Algarín once told me in an interview,
“still could reach us through his humor.”
“The poet blazes a path of fire for the self. He juggles with words. He
lives risking each moment. Whatever he does, in every way he moves, he
is a prince of the inner-city jungle. He is the philosopher of the sugar
cane that grows between the cracks of concrete sidewalks.”
When I read those words, written by Algarín in his introduction to
“Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings,” in
a corner of St. Mark’s Bookshop, it was as if time had stopped for me. I
had become fascinated with beat poetry in high school and college, once
daring to read the work of Amiri Baraka at a campus cafe, but this was
life-changing. Here was that same spirit of rebellion and anarchic
emotion, translated through a code-switching working-class eloquence,
that spoke to me, and to a generation of New York-bred Puerto Rican
migrants.
In that 1970s period of identity-based nationalism, as sensuous salsa
mined nostalgia while the Young Lords reveled in the militancy of the
present, Nuyorican poetry looked toward the future — or, as Algarín
wrote, “the street burning up with its vision of times to be.”
I didn’t get to meet Algarín until years later, when I took part in the
Nuyorican Cafe’s rebirth in the 1990s, at its new home on East Third
Street. I expected to meet someone more like Piñero, whose wiseguy
Spanglish hipsterism had defined the genre for me. But if Piñero was a
Lower East Side Jean Genet, Algarín’s bellowing voice rang down on me
like James Earl Jones mixed with James Baldwin: imperious yet somehow
vulnerable.
His first lesson was about breathing and performance, when I had
expected a line-edit. And while he seemed ambivalent about my poetry, he
accepted me into his community, like the prince of the Nuyorican kingdom
that he was.
That second phase of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe had begun after Piñero, a
tragic figure who was very close to Algarín, died in 1988. It was during
Piñero’s wake at a funeral home on the Bowery that Algarín, already
reeling from the earlier death of Cienfuegos, was approached by Bob
Holman, who had been working with the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.
“Bob whispered, ‘Mike is saying, wake up, reopen the cafe,’” Algarín
later told me in an interview. The cafe reopened a little more than a
year later, and this time, things would be different.
Under the direction of Algarín and Holman, the cafe expanded its
mission, reflecting a time of change in the gentrifying East Village, as
well as a new era of identity politics. Holman brought in the idea of a
competitive poetry slam, which created packed houses and caught the
attention of MTV’s “Real Life,” which featured Kevin Powell, a cafe
poet, as one of its original cast members. No longer an ethnic-specific
venue, the Nuyorican Café embraced proto-hip-hop African-American poets,
N.Y.U.-ish white poets, feminist poets and L.G.B.T.Q. poets.
Today, spoken word theater is universal, and the legacy of Algarín and
the generation that founded the Nuyorican Poets Cafe has stretched
across the globe.
In a sense, Algarín — who tested positive for H.I.V. in the late 1980s,
writing, “Can it be that I am the bearer of plagues?” in his 1994 poem
“HIV” — was the ultimate survivor, outliving most of his contemporaries,
and maintaining a quiet presence on the Lower East Side, even as the
cafe became a nonprofit corporation with a new board of directors. With
a seemingly endless expression of varied sexuality, much of his work
centered on the body.
As Ishmael Reed wrote in his introduction to the volume of poetry “Love
Is Hard Work,” Algarín “believes with García Lorca that the poet is the
professor of the five senses.” Ennobled by an unbridled spark that
crossed borders, he left a legacy that will live long into the future,
his brash street edge now at rest alongside his gentle love for his people.
there is a pleasure in living,
there is no shame in being
full of love — From “Sunday, August 11, 1974”
Ed Morales is a Nuyorican poet, freelance journalist, author of “Latinx:
The New Force in American Politics and Culture” (Verso Books) and
teaches at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.
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