Legendary Poet Fights Cancer

Felix Cortes, left, and poet Pedro Pietri talk at the office of his Manhattan acupuncturist Monday after Pietri received treatment. Pietri, who lives in Yonkers and New York City, believes, his exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War led to his illnesses, including cancer (Photos by Ricky Flores/the Journal News)

Legendary Poet Fights Cancer

Before poetry slams were televised and Def Poetry Jam hit Broadway, before urban poetry won over the MTV masses, there was El Reverendo Pedro Pietri, the godfather o Nuyorican verse.

Dressed in his trademark black clothes and toting a condom filled briefcase, Pietri, a self-styled barrio eccentric, was one of the first to turn the wounds of the New York Puerto Rican, or Nuyorican, experience into poetry and theater, inspiring a generation of young writers.

Now, they are hoping to repay the favor by trying to save Pietri’s life. Pietri, who lives in both New York City and Yonkers, is battling advanced stomach cancer, and needs to raise at least $30,000 to cover alternative treatment at a hospital in Mexico.

The poet underwent surgery in December to remove a malignant tumor, but cancer cells still remain. Since the Mexican specialists nontraditional methods, including enzyme therapy, are not covered by insurance, artists both young and seasoned have organized benefits for Pietri throughout New York City in recent weeks.

“He is the light for us,” said Luis Chaluisan, a writer and musician who performs as “El Extreme Chamaco,” or the Extreme Kid. Chaluisan remembered seeing “Jesus Is Leaving,” a Pietri play performed in the mid-1970s at the original Nuyorican Poets Cafe, back when the Manhattan theater’s stage was about “the size of a chair,” Chaluisan said.

Despite the inelegant quarters, the impact on the young writer was colossal. “I was enamored,” Chaluisan said. “There was a nun breaking a balloon on stage. It gave me permission to be out there.”

Much of Pietri’s best work, both in life and on the page, came when he invoked the surreal, using humor to speak the bitterest truths. Faced with the reality of Puerto Rico’s colonial status, Pietri set up his own Spirit Republic de Puerto Rico embassy in New York and issued domino embossed passports to any Boricua, or Puerto Rican, who applied.

At other times, he called himself a member of the Latin Insomniacs Motorcycle Club Without Motorcycles Inc. and the Reverend of the Imaginary Church of the Mother of All Tomatoes. “We decided to be free without anyone’s permission,” Pietri said last week while resting at a relative’s apartment in the Bronx.

That freedom, of course, meant the ability to expose the harsh experience of the 750,000odd Puerto Ricans who migrated mostly to New York’s toughest neighborhoods in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

The first Hispanic group to arrive in the city en masse, they soon discovered the bankruptcy of their American dream, as they worked low paid jobs and crammed into decrepit tenement apartments. “Puerto Ricans were not exactly first-class citizens,” Pietri’s brother Jose, 62, remembered.

Pietri, born in 1944 in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and brought to West Harlem about four years later, became part of the earliest “Nuyorican”—New York Puerto Rican—generation raised here. Inspired by a nationalist uncle, a theater enthusiast aunt, black doo-wop singers and Spanish radio novellas, he began composing poetry in his head as a teenager, after failing the post office exam 13 times, he said.

A stint on the front line in Vietnam with the Army’s 196th Light Infantry from 1966 to 1968 added deeper rage and sorrow to the creative mix, erupting in his 1973 classic, “Puerto Rican Obituary.”

“Wall to wall bad news was playing/Over the radio that last week was stolen/By dying dope addicts looking for a fix/To forget that they were ever born,” Pietri wrote in his searing post Vietnam poem “Broken English Dreams.”

For many younger Hispanic poets coming of age in the city’s barrios, Pietri’s verbal battle against loss of identity and the death of hope was deeply evocative. “My teenage self felt like I wasn’t alone in the world anymore when I read Puerto Rican Obituary,” said Vincent Toro, 28, a poet and educator whose first reading, at 17, was held in Pietri’s apartment. For most, Pietri’s was the first Hispanic work they had encountered. “My friend Greg said it best—‘I didn’t know we wrote,’” Toro said.

But if much of Pietri’s Vietnam and barrio pain was bled out onto the page, some remained bottled in his body. His exposure to Agent Orange during the war, Pietri believes, contributed to his glaucoma, ulcers, high blood pressure, a skin condition known as vitiligo and, ultimately, his cancer. Still, if he can make it to Mexico, friends said, they remain hopeful.

And the young poets, for their part, will not let Pietri go without a fight. “There is a Puerto Rican saying that goes, every person has a bit of poetry and a bit of madness in them,” said poet and playwright Maria Teresa Fernandez Rosario, who performs as Mariposa.

“El Reverendo Pedro Pietri is a master poet whose work is universal because he has cracked open social taboos such as madness,” Mariposa said, “and by having, the courage to do so, has inspired others to do the same.”

Love Poem For My People
do not let artificial lamps
make strange shadows out of you
do not dream
if you want your dreams
to come true
you knew how to sing
before you was issued a birth certificate

turn off the stereo
this country gave you
it is out of order
your breath is your promised land
if you want to feel very rich
look at your hands
that is where
the definition of magic
is located at

they exchanged original
over-proofed rum
with the indigenous
inhabitants of the moon

one of their children
will grow up to save
the oral tradition
of not punctuating