Pedro Pietri (March 21, 1944-March 3, 2004), a Nuyorican poet and playwright who co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Café was a guest on phatLiterature during the 2002 season on Episode 10: Poet-to-Poet: The Image & the Spoken Word.
Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Pedro’s family immigrated to New York City in 1947, when he was only three years old. They settled down in Spanish Harlem/El Barrio of Manhattan where he and his siblings received their primary and secondary education. Pedro was greatly influenced by his aunt, who often recited poetry and on occasions put on theatrical plays in the local church. He began writing poetry while attending Haaren High School in Manhattan.
After graduating from high school, Pedro worked in a variety of jobs until he was drafted into the Army and sent to fight in the Vietnam War. The experiences he faced in the Army and Vietnam plus the discrimination he witnessed in New York, coupled with his disillusionment of America surrounded by suicides, racism and poverty, became the main factors that would forge his personality and style of poetry. From the time of his discharge, he dressed only in black in remembrance of “the victims of that invasion of Vietnam.” Pedro also held a strong nationalist position on Puerto Rico, but in order for one to understand his sense of nationalism, which is evident throughout all of his works, one has to understand why.
The political status of Puerto Rico has been in debate since it became a commonwealth of the United States in 1952. While commonwealth status gave Puerto Ricans some of the rights granted to citizens of the fifty states, such as the right to travel freely within the U.S., it withheld others, such as the right to vote for a U.S. president unless one has established residency in one of the fifty states. Reflecting the island’s ambiguous political identity, various groups have lobbied for one of three traditional options: continued commonwealth status with greater autonomy, statehood, or independence from the United States. This political condition has had psychological consequences for many Puerto Ricans: although Puerto Ricans are citizens of the United States, they are often compelled to live as virtual foreigners in their own land – a situation that produces a sense of psychic fragmentation, of being split between two identities, which is reflected, for example, in “Spanglish,” a mixture of English and Spanish that would later become identified with the “Nuyorican Movement.”
Upon his discharge from the Army, Pedro joined a Puerto Rican Civil Rights activist group called the Young Lords. The First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem, which he attended in his youth, became the stage for his first public reading of “Puerto Rican Obituary” when the Young Lords briefly took over the church in 1969. Pedro, who read his poem as an act of solidarity, tells about the dashed dreams of five Puerto Ricans: Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga and Manuel, who come to New York in search of a better way of life only to find hardships and suffer heartbreaks. They never questioned, never complained and died waiting for raises that never came or bickering over who spoke better broken English. Angry, heartbreaking yet hopeful, “Puerto Rican Obituary,” which eventually published in 1973, was embraced by young Puerto Ricans who were imbued with a sense of pride and nationalism. Although the Young Lords were destroyed by U.S. government provocations in the mid 1970s, Pedro continued on as a radical activist and poet, as he saw no distinction between these roles.
Pedro wore many hats in the struggle for the liberation of the minds of people and poets everywhere. A job at Colombia University was pivotal for it was here that he met Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets as well as the poets of black resistance. He began to write poems and plays on the life and plight of his Puerto Rican community. His writings in Spanglish, the Nuyorican vernacular, gave literary legitimacy to the idiom.
In 1973, Pedro together with playwright Miguel Piñero and poet Miguel Algarín, helped found the Nuyorican Poets Café. The Café became an institution – an acclaimed center for oppositional arts and literature – where many Puerto Rican intellectuals performed and would later become a mecca not only for edgy Latino intellectuals, bur for cutting edge poets of all stripes. Poetry slams were hatched at the Café; poets with mettle would come there to recite before a public as raucous and unforgiving as the Elizabethans. Even today, any emerging poet worth his or her salt goes to the Café as a right of passage. They come still for their punishment and reward.
Having self-proclaimed himself “El Reverendo de la Iglesia de la Madre de Tomates,” Pedro played the part of Spanglish Metaphor Consultant for the Latin Insomniacs Motorcycle Club Without Motorcycles Inc., and while building cross-cultural relations in visits to California, he became an honorary member of the Royal Chicano Air Force. He traveled around the world and supported a number of worthy causes, and notably, was an active participant in the effort to remove the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico.
Pedro’s poetry, which centered on the competing cultural tugs of New York and Puerto Rico, was often playfully absurd. Though often humorous, his work was also deeply political, like the performance piece “El Puerto Rican Embassy,” which he staged throughout New York City with the photographer Adal Maldonado. A free spirit whose performances were nontraditional, Pedro often sang “The Spanglish National Anthem,” and distributed Puerto Rican “passports” filled with pages of poetry with images of dominoes and roosters. This idea of an embassy for an island that is neither independent nor a state captured Pedro’s own nationalist beliefs. In reaction to the romanticism of the community by groups like the Young Lords and others on the left, he wrote that “The Masses are Asses.” He would throw condoms at audiences during some of his performances. He was a nonconformist, constantly reminding the Movement of the importance of tolerance, intellectual freedom and not losing its humanity. His was a unique voice, both in substance and style.
Other poems, like “Suicide Note from a Cockeroach in a Low-Income Housing Project” and his extended series of “Telephone Booth” verses have been acclaimed as first-rate examples of urban street poetry. Over the years and through countless poems and plays he defined the Nuyorican experience, inspiring a new generation of Latino poets, including the streetwise slam poets who have become so prominent in the poetry community today.
His noted works include: Invisible Poetry (1979), Traffic (1980), Plays (1982), Traffic Violations (1983), and The Masses are Asses (1988). His writings have been published and included in the following anthologies: Inventing a Word: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Puerto Rican Poetry (ed. Julio Marzan, 1980); Illusions of a Revolving Door (1984); The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (ed. Alan Kaufman, 2000); The Prentice Hall Anthology of Latino Literature (ed. Eduardo del Rio, 2002), and many others. His writing has been included in numerous anthologies and translated into more than a dozen languages.
When phatLiterature launched in 2002, José Angel Figueroa, who co-produced Episode No. 3: Poet-to-Poet: The Image & the Spoken Word, contacted Pedro and asked him to appear on the program. Figueroa wanted to create an episode that connected Puerto Rican writers and the Nuyorican movement to the spoken word. Nuyorican writers such as Figueroa and Louis Reyes Rivera who appeared on the program with Pedro, were not only instrumental in the Nuyorican Movement, they were also crucial in the formation of the multicultural performance poetry movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their engagement with a pan-cultural nationalism, their continued location on the Lower East Side during the 1960s, and their connections with the New York Black Arts Movement (uptown and downtown) encapsulated the similarities and differences between the Afro-American and Puerto Rican experience, which connected to the multiracial bohemian communities of the Lower East Side (from Beats to post-Punks). Their reach extended to the West Coast multiculturalists who were also active in or influenced by the Black Arts Movement in the Bay Area; and they also connected with Caribbean people from the islands and the hip-hop scene (itself marked by the Black Arts Movement), which emerged from the heavily Puerto Rican South Bronx. All of these connections contributed to the creation of what might be thought of as the “rainbow” end of multiculturalism, that today has become a major element of what we often refer to as the “spoken word.” Puerto Rican writers from the Nuyorican movement had a tremendous influence on the literary community.
Because he was an activist and avid supporter of innovative literary arts programming, Pedro agreed to participate in phatLiterature, and recited one of his famous “Telephone Booth” verses:
Woke up this morning
feeling excellent,
picked up the telephone
dialed the number of my
equal opportunity employer
to inform him i will not
be in to work today.
“are you feeling sick?”
the boss asked me
“no sir,” i replied:
“i am feeling too good
to report to work today.
if i feel sick tomorrow
i will come in early!”
Telephone Booth #905 1/2 by Pedro Pietri
No one knew at the time that Pedro’s participation in phatLiterature would be marked as one of his last public appearances. By 2003, Pedro was diagnosed with stomach cancer, an illness that was a result of his exposure to the mysterious chemical known as Agent Orange that the U.S. Government used during the Vietnam War. When doctors told him he had inoperable cancer, he sought alternative treatment in Mexico. Within a few weeks his friends and fans had donated $30,000 for his care, and he went to Mexico to receive an alternative treatment for a year. On March 3, 2004, Pedro died en route from Mexico to New York.
Funeral services were held in East Harlem at the historic First Spanish Methodist Church, the same church his family attended, the same church which was taken over in 1969 by the Young Lords and renamed at the time as “The First People’s Church” to provide free breakfast and other programs to the poor and working people of El Barrio; and where, fittingly, Pedro first read in public his classic poem, “Puerto Rican Obituary.”
As representative of the literature of protest in Nuyorican culture, Pedro Pietri’s work is a strong denunciation of the American system and of Western capitalism. To struggle against these forces, Pedro Pietri wrote in the tradition of Walt Whitman in that he brought an epic voice to the Puerto Rican experience, inviting puertorriqueños to acquire a sense of dignity and pride in their heritage, and to avoid complete cultural assimilation. While his spirit and his works live on, Pedro Pietri remains sorely missed by the poetry community at large.
