1990s: Assimilation

1990s

1990 – Keith Haring dies, from HIV/AIDS, age 31.

1990 – The Nuyorican Poetry Café re-opened at its present location on East 3rd Street. The character of the place and of the poets themselves had changed significantly, mostly down to the influence of Algarin’s entrepreneurial partnership with poet Bob Holman. Holman had sought to expand the venue beyond its traditional base, as Cyrus Patell writes:

According to Holman, a Kentucky native and veteran of the Chicago Poetry slam scene, “New York Puerto Rican” is “the narrow definition of Nuyorican… anyone who calls himself or herself Nuyorican is a Nuyorican.” Holman infused the café with new ideas, designed to attract attention and audiences, including the weekly poetry slam, an idea developed by construction worker and poet Marc Smith in 1984. Every Friday night, poets would compete against one another for the grand prize – the princely sum of $10 – reciting poems under three minutes in length and judged by a panel of three usually drawn from the audience. Holman acted as host.

The entrepreneurial reconfiguring of those original Café Metro readings aside, what’s striking here is the oblivious re-appropriation of the movement itself. The Nuyorican movement was, after all, originally established as a response to the conditions of urban abjection facing New York City Puerto Ricans, and the original language of the poetry reflected that – an amalgam of Spanish, English, and L.E.S. vernacular. Holman, in trying to save the organization, arguably helped strip it of its reason for being.
    
1992 – Nuyorican poet Bimbo Rivas dies, of a heart attack, age fifty-two.

1995 (May) – Police in riot gear clear the 13th Street squats.

1997 (April) – Allen Ginsberg dies, of liver cancer, age 70. He dies in his apartment on East 13th Street. Among his final visitors are Patti Smith, actor Johnny Depp.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1960s: Community

Image
“I’m not arguing that writing is therapy … [but] what interest me in it is that testament can occur in no specious sense, that we’re not writing simply to exercise ourselves but … it’s lovely to give witness to what you have as experience of the world, no matter what the terms of that experience may be.” – Robert Creeley, speaking at St. Mark’s Church, 1967 *      *     * LeRoi Jones and Diane DiPrima, Cedar Tavern 1960 1960 – Donald Allen edits “The New American Poetry: 1945 – 1960,” published by Grove Press. It is seen as a response to Donald Hall’s “New Poets of England and America” and showcases the poetry of the New York School, the Beats, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Black Mountain Poets.       In the spring of 1960, Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review published  The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 , an anthology overseen by Frank O’Hara’s editor Donald Allen. The anthology brought together fo...
Read more

1950s: Agency

Image
1951 – Paul Goodman’s essay “Advance-Guard Writing in America, 1900 - 1950” appears in the Kenyon Review. Goodman advocated for the formation of small counter-communities based on familiarity, sensitivity, and shared aesthetic concerns. Through the process of localized and community-specific artistic creation and consumption, these communities would together withstand the nullifying effects of Eisenhower’s America.         In the summer of 1951, critic Paul Goodman’s essay  Advance-Guard Writing in America: 1900 – 1950  appeared in the  Kenyon Review . In the same vein as Clement Greenberg’s essay from 1939, Goodman used the essay to argue the case of a cultivated counter-elite at odds with an increasingly intolerant mainstream majority, now less under threat from the fascist totalitarianism than a post-war American hegemony Goodman assessed as “shell-shocked” and alienated. In the aftermath of war, and in the face of new Cold War real...
Read more

1940s: Impetus

Image
This resentment towards culture is to be found where the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and Puritanism, and latest of all, in fascism. Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood's health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-smashing commences. - Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch 1930s 1936 – The first of Stalin’s Soviet Show trials take place, creating an international schism between Stalinists and Trotskyites. 1936 – Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in Paris while exiled from his native Germany. In 1936, Benjamin had written  The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction  while exiled in Paris. He used the essay to examine the role of mass art, and particularly film, by charting the historical uses of art in relation to (and service of) the stat...
Read more