The Bard of the Lower East Side Still Going Strong
By Robert Waddell, June 12, 2009
 One of the most striking inclusions in Miguel Algarin’s new collection of poems, “Survival Supervivencia,” is the poetry book’s cover. The image is of the author, round faced, youthful, cherubic with snowy grey hair. His mouth wide, laughing and he’s still proclaiming the savage beauty of Puerto Ricans to the world that’s reflected in his poetry and essays.
Miguel Algarin is to Puerto Ricans what William Butler Yeats is to the Irish. Algarin knows how the center does not hold for Puerto Ricans in American society, with all due respect to Judge Sonia Sotomayer.
Algarin writes with clarity pinpointing the emotional trigger point central to Puerto Rican life. Some of these are older poems but still Algarin’s language resonates today. He is, as author Ernesto Quinones writes in his introduction, “….Miguel Algarin’s poems were telling me, that by humanizing the seemingly inhuman you are thereby humanizing the reader….fueled by poems that take the reader to the Nuyorican struggle: to stay frosty, to stay cool and to love one another.”
The poem “Biological” tells of a child who creatively tells how he’s feeling but is humiliated by his teacher. In “Sunday August 11, 1974,” the poet juxtaposes church goers with the free exploration of one’s own body and not being ashamed. In “Baby Food,” the poet writes of a woman who unwittingly and scarily sacrifices her child. Algarin’s short pithy poems get right to the heart of the matter, almost like an urban hycou.
The story has been told and re-told, Algarin, his friend playwright Miguel Pinero and other poets hung out at Algarin’s home on East 8th street in the Lower East Side. The collection of poets became totally unruly and Algarin moved the party across the street. Soon, the party of artists got bigger and the Nuyorican Poets Café moved to 3rd street between Avenues B and C where it still lives today. After the introduction of Slam Poetry in the 1980s by poet Bob Holman, the café still enjoys new life.
 And still it is Algarin, a specimen of good health who continues to preside as bard of the Lower East Side in his Cathedral of poetry, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Although too many of his contemporaries have died or become ill, the one thing that can be said about all Nuyorican poets is that they may die but they can never be silenced. Algarin continues to yell high from his rooftop about Nuyorican struggles and it shows in “Survival Supervivencia.”
In his essay “Nuyorican Language” from 1975, Algarin’s ideas of creating community and creating a language of survival still resonate today. With most of his poems and essays, there is still a fresh and alive perspective that hasn’t gone away for 30 years ago. With clarity and definite definitions, Algarin illustrates with poetic aplomb the struggles of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, Mexicans, South Americans and other Latinos today.
The writing is never out of date. Even when Algarin writes short poems of imperialism, as with England and Argentina’s battle over the Falkland Islands, still today Jews and Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and gentrification of inner cities, Algarin has a clear understanding of living in a Capitalism system of exploitation and war. He has never been struck by the Cassandra effect (telling the truth but no one believed him), Algarin’s Nuyorican Poets Café was his way of creating his own for his own, or as Edward Said once said of the disenfranchised, the city within the city.
Algarin feels deep empathy for his environment because this is where he will find safety and his environment becomes a reflection of an internal and deeper landscape. His poetry represents great care taken for all who inhabit his Loisaida world because all are a reflection of the poet. And the poet’s language reflects his reality.
 In his essay, about Algarin becoming a poet and his own self-development, “The Politics of Poetry,” he writes, “…in Neruda, I found a teacher-friend. He wanted to tell me the events. He wanted to tell the truth so clearly that the poems he wrought are communications that seep into the neurological cells and nourish by arousing and nurturing the memory. Neruda’s verbal images are chemical messages that change the body’s composition.”
Algarin could easily have been describing himself and his influence on generations of poets and Puerto Ricans. Papo Swiggity of Capicu told me recently that Algarin recites from his emotional guts and deep from within his soul.
Today, still living in the Lower East Side, working and selling books from behind the bar at the café and retired as a professor from Rutgers University, Algarin stands as a pioneer and hero of the Puerto Rican community and his new collection of older works is a triumph. Not some trumped up cut and paste of old stuff by a grand old man of letters but still possessing a passionate poetic love for the people of his community, the junkies, the homeless, the infirmed and old; Algarin’s work stands as a majestic testament to the older and newer Nuyorican Poet. It’s in our DNA: we will survive no matter what. We will create, grow, become and live on forever.
Miguel Algarin has not won, but earned a place in our hearts. He is our father, our uncle, our grandfather. He soberly and ferociously speaks truth to the world. And the world takes notice. At a recent theatrical event at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Algarin pinned a black and white button with the Nuyorican’s logo on my label, a four star general awarding a foot soldier a commendation. I knew I was home.
This story was developed through the Education Beat Writing Fellowship at the New York Community Alliance. |
