In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Contemporary North American Poetry) - Softcover

Noel, Urayoan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609382447 ISBN 13: 9781609382445

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2014

Synopsis

Since the 1960s, Nuyorican poets have explored and performed Puerto Rican identity both on and off the page. Emerging within and alongside the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the foundational Nuyorican writers sought to counter the ethnic/racial and institutional invisibility of New York City Puerto Ricans by documenting the reality of their communities in innovative and sometimes challenging ways. Since then, Nuyorican poetry has entered the U.S. Latino literary canon and has gained prominence in light of the spoken-word revival of the past two decades, a movement spearheaded by the Nuyorican Poetry Slams of the 1990s. Today, Nuyorican poetry engages with contemporary social issues such as the commodification of the body, the institutionalization of poetry, the gentrification of the barrio, and the national and global marketing of identity. What has not changed is a continued shared investment in a poetics that links the written word and the performing body.

The first book-length study specifically devoted to Nuyorican poetry, In Visible Movement is unique in its historical and formal breadth, ranging from the foundational poets of the 1960s and 1970s to a variety of contemporary poets emerging in and around the Nuyorican Poets Cafe “slam” scene of the 1990s and early 2000s. It also unearths a largely unknown corpus of poetry performances, reading over forty years of Nuyorican poetry at the intersection of the printed and performed word, underscoring the poetry’s links to vernacular and Afro-Puerto Rican performance cultures, from the island’s oral poets to the New York sounds and rhythms of Latin boogaloo, salsa, and hip-hop. With depth and insight, Urayoán Noel analyzes various canonical Nuyorican poems by poets such as Pedro Pietri, Victor Hernández Cruz, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Sandra María Esteves, and Tato Laviera. He discusses historically overlooked poets such as Lorraine Sutton, innovative poets typically read outside the Nuyorican tradition such as Frank Lima and Edwin Torres, and a younger generation of Nuyorican-identified poets including Willie Perdomo, María Teresa Mariposa Fernández, and Emanuel Xavier, whose work has received only limited critical consideration. The result is a stunning reflection of how New York Puerto Rican poets have addressed the complexity of identity amid diaspora for over forty years.

About this title

About the Author

Urayoán Noel is an assistant professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, and a visiting assistant professor of English at NYU. He is the author of various books of poetry, including, most recently, Los días porosos (The Porous Days), and he has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and CantoMundo, among others. Also a performer and translator, he has published or has essays forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, Latino Studies, and Small Axe. Noel is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and lives in the Bronx, NY.

Review

“An exceptional and much needed contribution to literary scholarship, this book will be of interest to anyone interested in the shape of contemporary U.S. literature. It brings together―with clarity, insight, and sophistication―a wide variety of poetic voices in order to weave a compelling analysis of major developments in Nuyorican poetry.”―Rafael Pérez-Torres, author, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, against Margins

“A crucial contribution to our literary history, In Visible Movement charts the evolution of an increasingly visible movement in the literary arts, shedding light on many related poetries of the past six decades in the process. Noel proposes ‘an understanding of poetry performance as revisionism: operating across and along page and stage,’ an understanding that proceeds from the poets themselves.”―Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1609382447
• ISBN 13: 9781609382445
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 230