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Since writing my Master’s Thesis on the poetry of Pedro Pietri and Bob Kaufman in 1994, a number of scholarly articles on Pedro’s poetry have appeared. The most articles appeared in 2004, the year Pedro passed away and focused mainly on his amazing life, but notable critical articles by Robert Wadell, Urayoan Noel, plus a perceptive introductory essay by Mario Maffi to the Italian edition of Out of Order offer insight into Pedro’s craft, writing process, influences, concerns and tricks.

I’m going to cover some of the same ground here, but hopefully with some fresh insights and ways of looking at Pedro’s work. I think it’s generally accepted that Pedro Pietri is one of, if not the most influential voices in Nuyorican Literature. The popularity of Spoken Word definitely has something to do with Pedro. I believe he has influenced everyone on this panel, and certainly know that he’s influenced my writing and thinking about poetry.

I also believe that Pedro Pietri needs to be seen as a major American poet whose worked should be studied in college classrooms and written about in scholarly journals alongside the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, and yes T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes and Robert Frost. If we look at books such as The Best American Poetry of _____________, you pick the year, what do we see? What trends do we notice? I know I’m generalizing here, but the poets who appear to be favored write poems that are often complex, serious in tone and purpose, follow established poetical forms, shy away from politics, maintain authorial distance between poem and subject and are allusive to Greek and Roman mythology, the bible, Shakespeare, or suburban middle class culture of the 60s, 70s, or 80s. Well, Pedro’s poetry doesn’t do those things, and of course you won’t find his name in any Best American Poetry for any year. Who knows, maybe it was the journals he chose to publish in. For that matter with the exception of Heath, you won’t find Pedro’s poetry in too many anthologies of American Literature used on college campuses.

In regards to Pedro’s poetry there’s so much to discuss. I’m going to talk about the influence of music on his poetry. Pedro was born in 1944 and came of age in the 50s and 60s in New York City. The music of the streets at this time was doo-wop, and the influence on his poetry is unmistakable, after all, he named his son Speedo. You know the song by the Cadillacs. “Well they often call me Speedo/ but my real name is Mr. Earl. Let’s look at the second verse: 

Well, they often call me Speedo

'Cause I don't believe in wastin' time

Umm-hm-hm

Well, I'm known some pretty women

And that's caused them to change their minds

Sounds like Pedro right? In a 1993 interview Pedro told me “My original goal was to be a rock and roll singer in the acapella tradition like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers who lived in our neighborhood. “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” is one of the greatest poems ever written” (Pietri 8/93).

We can see Doo Wop phrasing in the poem “The Last Game of the World Series” (P.R.O.) which intermingles fragmentary images of a soldier’s war memories with media images surrounding him in his hotel room. The tv is turned on to a baseball game, the radio is tuned to an “oldies but goodies” station. Occasionally the nonsense syllabification of Doo Wop breaks through the narrator’s consciousness, giving him pause for reflection on his past history.

RAMA LAMA RAMA DING DONG 

RAMA LAMA RAMA DING DONG DONG

Is all you can put down

on the examinations they give you

every time you apply for a job.

He goes on:

ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM ZIP ZIP

…everybody tuned into something

else while you blew a lifetime

listening to those oldies but goodies

from spanish harlem to times square…

In 1996 we did an issue of Long Shot with a special section devoted to Jazz which was edited by Zoe Anglesey. Pedro gave us a poem entitled “Smokin’ Ocean” that he insisted was a jazz poem even though we all new it wasn’t really. But it was a kick-ass rock and roll poem, even though we put it in the jazz section. Let me recite the 1st 4 short stanzas”

Ocean smoking/ Clouds are hoping/ Something strange/ Will happen soon

Don’t remember/ Return to sender/ Night time blues/ In the afternoon

Doesn’t matter/On the platter/ What you see/ Ain't being served

& the next thought/ Will then get lost/ As the dream/ Runs out on words

This poem goes on for 64 more verses or stanzas, whatever you want to call them. The continued consistent rhythm is amazing and relentless. It’s certainly not jazz, but like I said it is rock and roll. I do need to tell you something more about this poem. The first time I heard it was in Pedro’s apartment on 43rdStreet. The poet Jack Micheline who had helped me enormously on the Bob Kaufman section of my Master’s thesis was in town. Jack Micheline was a poet who originally came from the Bronx, but made a name for himself in San Francisco. He was somewhat associated with the Beat Poets and with Charles Bukowski, but he was most well known as a self proclaimed “street poet.” Pedro had to meet him. So it was on a humid August day that Pedro, Jack Micheline. Nancy Mercado and myself went to Pedro’s apartment with a big gallon jug of red wine. Needless to say, we finished it off. Pedro told us he had this new poem he was working on, which was written in a spiral notebook. He proceeded to read all 68 verses of Smokin’ Ocean. It was as if he was in trance, he swayed to and fro, dripping with sweat, spitting the words out in his drunken baritone. Nancy and I watched entranced, Jack Micheline fidgeted distractedly. When he was done, Nancy and I were speechless, we had just witnessed genius. Jack Micheline said something to the effect of “nice poem. Now listen to this” and then proceeded to recite a poem about the dead that he new by heart and had recited about a 100 times. Urayuan Noel wrote eloquently about the influence of punk rock on Pedro’s work and it doesn’t take a literary scholar to see that Pedro and punk rock in general shared the same DIY (Do It Yourself) ethos. So, rock and roll particularly doo wop influenced Pedro Pietri.

There are other influences as well. After graduating high school in the early 1960s, Pietri took a series of low paying jobs, including one as stock boy at Klein’s department store at 14th Street. Pietri described his first encounter with the poet Jorge Brandon in Union Square:

"He’s holding court, very serious, he’s got everybody’s undivided  attention, then all of a sudden he gets incoherent. Everybody starts  laughing and he comes out with the supreme contradiction and I  say this guy is great. He was my favorite speaker. Jorge Brandon  influenced the whole Nuyorican poetry scene… He is like our  mentor and our father."

We see Pedro voice his indebtedness in a poem entitled “Traffic Misdirector” from his 1983 collection Traffic Violations.

The greatest living poet

in new york city

was born in Puerto Rico

his name is Jorge Brandon

he is over 70 years old

he carries his metaphor

in brown shopping bags

inside steel shopping cart

he travels around with

in the streets of manhattan

he recites his poetry

to whoever listens… (TV 103)

Pedro next got a job as a page at the Columbia University library. He cited his years in the library as the beginning of his real education. It was here that he encountered the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes, Arthur Rimbaud, Leroi Jones and Ted Joans. Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) remained a lifelong friend and influence, perhaps not so much stylistically, but definitely politically and in terms of subject matter; the idea that the political could indeed be the poetical. Pietri’s later poems such as “Get the Fuck Out of Vieques” (Long Shot 25) and “Poets Opposing War” (LS 27) are overtly political. Listen to the opening lines of the former poem: 

Get the fuck out 

of Vieques motherfucker

you have no fucking business

being in Vieques

in the first fucking place

using our impeccable tropical beaches

for goddamn fucking target practice

you fatalistic fucking bastards

And I wonder why he’s not in Best American Poetry 2002 or 3 or 4? The other Joans, Ted was also a major influence on Pedro. Ted Joans who was called by Andre Breton “the most important American surrealist” was known for scrawling BIRD LIVES across surfaces throughout Manhattan in honor of his friend and former roommate Charlie Parker, and for his Rent a Beatnik business where he did precisely that, rent himself and a couple of friends out as token beatniks for parties that needed that hipster caché. He also said “Jazz is my religion and surrealism is my point of view.” The idea of poet as performance artist which we see in Pedro in numerous ways, carrying the cross, distributing condoms, the black suitcase, the tuxedo tee shirt can probably be attributed to Ted Joans. 

Pedro never really considered himself a surrealist, but of course he was. During a conversation he reluctantly admitted to using surrealist phrasing in his poems but was clear that he was not a surrealist. 

“I’m most impressed by the filmmakers, Bunuel influenced me the  most. But Surrealism became a system, method, and structure. You  had to qualify to be a surrealist. Breton fucked it all up…suspending  people.” But all we have to do is look at his poetry. Take almost any poem from Traffic Violations:

Umbrellas open up inside your head

you start screaming backwards

your legs behave like flat tires

your mind melts in slow motion. (poem Traffic Violations, 20)

While Pedro was reluctant to admit the influence of Surrealism, he readily admits his indebtedness to Dada, an artistic movement that preceded Surealism.  Pedro once told me “you know we are guided by contradictions, if we do not contradict ourselves we’ll never meet our creator.” This sentiment is not a far cry from Tristan Tzara writing in his 1918 Manifesto: 

"I am writing this manifesto to show that you can do contrary  actions together, in one single fresh breath; I am against action: for  continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor  against and I don’t explain because I hate common sense.”

Pedro Pietri embraced the aesthetic of the “Divine Contradiction” as I call it, making it a signature trademark of his poetry. For example, from “January Hangover”: “To be with you is my desire/ To stay away from you is my ambition…/ You are a very simple person/ With a very complicated personality”. If you look, you’ll find the contradictions most everywhere in Pedro’s poetry.

Inside darkness there is light

Inside water there is fire

Black magic is out of sight

Inside darkness there is light

Turning left is turning right

Coming down is getting higher

Inside darkness there is light

Inside water there is fire (To Get Drunk you have to Drink)

While we’re talking about Dada, I should mention that Tuli Kupferberg was a major influence on Pedro. 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft was a forerunner of Pietri’s Illusions of a Revolving Door which might be called a play, a performance piece, or a poem. It begins with instructions for 500 actions can take during the time of the performance. For example, “1. You can leave before it starts… 60. You can play Russian Roulette… 333. You can talk in tongues in your seat… 500. You can forget about doing any of these 500 things.” Tuli Kupferberg an original member of The Fugs a 1960s proto-punk/ folk band also attached his own lyrics to popular tunes, something Pedro did with “The Spanglish National Anthem” which was put to the tune of “En Mi Viejo San Juan.”

There’s so much to talk about in regards to Pedro’s poetry, but really you got to read it and hear it for yourself. That’s why it’s essential that there be a Collected Poems published soon. Yes, his papers are housed at Hunter College, and yes his visage adorns the front of the Nuyorican Poets Café, but almost 6 years after his passing, we need more Pedro. We need to get his poems into the hands of anyone who has a desire to read them.

– NOVEMBER 4, 2010 AT POETS’ HOUSE

 **************************************************************************************************************

Pedro Pietri: Selected Poetry

– for Tribes 2015

I don’t write book reviews. Never did, until now. I’ll make an exception for el Reverendo Pedro Pietri. Ideally, Steve Cannon would have liked this review to be written by a Nuyorican. Didn’t happen, so Steve turned to the next best thing: me. Why me? First of all, I wrote my Master’s Thesis on the poetry of Pedro Pietri and Bob Kaufman. But before that undertaking, I was Pedro’s friend, first meeting him at the Life Café on Avenue B sometime around 1980. I also published a number of his poems in the pages of Long Shot, a literary and arts magazine I ran for 20 plus years. I have spoken at conferences and hosted events about Pedro, and with Pedro in New York, Chicago, and Hoboken. 

Around 1995, Pedro wanted to publish the collected Telephone Booth Poems with Long Shot, but I thought he could do better publishing wise, being as we did not have great (as inadequate) distribution nor the resources to promote the book properly. Pedro didn’t really care, he knew he’d sell the books at readings and with Long Shot as his only partner and no other middleman, he also knew he’d make a bigger profit than with more established poetry publishers. But I was more concerned with his reputation and legacy. I wrote letters to Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights and John Martin offering compelling reasons why they had to publish Pedro Pietri’s Telephone Booth Poems, or if they didn’t want that, a Selected Poems. Why these two publishers? City Lights and Black Sparrow were the publishers of Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski respectively, two of my favorite writers. I grew up dreaming of having my verse published within the simple black and white Pocket Poets series or between the simple orange vellum covers of a Black Sparrow edition. So, I wrote letters explaining to Mr. Ferlinghetti and Mr. Martin how it was a win-win situation for them to publish the work of this major American poet – namely Pedro Pietri. Within weeks I received polite, personalized and maybe even heartfelt letters from both publishers explaining the economics of the publishing world (as if I didn’t know), and about how they were booked up literally for the next few years. 

Let’s start with the obvious; Pedro Pietri: Selected Poetry should have been published while he was alive. With that said, I am delighted that City Lights finally saw the light, albeit a late light. Editors Juan Flores (who tragically passed before the publication date) and Pedro Lopez Adorno have done a masterful job of assembling Pietri’s poems. If this is one’s first real look at Pietri’s poems, then this book is a revelation. The hits are here: Puerto Rican Obituary, The Broken English Dream, January Hangover, To Get Drunk You Have to Drink, Telephone Booth Number 905 ½ (first published in Tribes), and El Spanglish National Anthem, to name a few. Putting together a 244 page selection of Pietri’s poetry is a difficult task indeed, because Pedro had so many friends, we all feel we own a piece of him. Myself included. I would have included the poems Get the Fuck Out of Vieques, Smokin’ Ocean, P.O.W., and Telephone Booth Numbers 679, 72237, and 847, all originally published in Long Shot. Here’s telephone booth number 72237:

fuck the circus

i get my rocks off

seeing people going

to work in the morning

on my way to the bar!

Admittedly, this may not be one of Pietri’s greatest poetic triumphs, but the sheer exuberance and irreverence speaks to an essential quality of his work. I fully understand the editors’ decision not to include In Defense of Depression, For Jack Micheline, and Toilets Are For Making Love, because perhaps they are not among his best work.

However, I’d like to explain the connection between Smokin’ Ocean and For Jack Micheline because it illustrates what Pietri prioritized aesthetically. In 1996 we did an issue of Long Shot with a special section devoted to Jazz which was edited by Zoe Anglesey. Pedro gave us Smokin’ Ocean which he insisted was a jazz poem even though we all knew it wasn’t. But it was a kick-ass rock and roll poem, even though we put it in the jazz section. Here’s the first four stanzas:

Ocean smoking/ Clouds are hoping/ Something strange/ Will happen soon

Don’t remember/ Return to sender/ Night time blues/ In the afternoon

Doesn’t matter/On the platter/ What you see/ Aint being served

& the next thought/ Will then get lost/ As the dream/ Runs out of words

I would have liked to have seen one of my favorites from Puerto Rican Obituary, The Last Game of the World Series, as well as After the 21st Drink, Uptown Train, and some of the more crazy and joyous Telephone Booth Poemsincluded in the selection. But enough about the omissions, let’s look at what is in Selected Poems. Basically, the editors give us a generous helping of Pietri’s poems at different stages in his career. There are also some surprises, and these are what delighted me. The final third of the book, from page 153 on, contains poems that casual readers may not be familiar with. My favorites in the last part include The Party Continues, After the 11thDrink, El Spanglish National Anthem (of course), and El Puerto Rican Embassy/Manifesto. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I that I could not finish reading the final piece in the book, the rather prosaic Lost In The Museum of Natural History, but then again I already knew that Pietri is a better poet than a prose stylist.

Pietri’s influences: Jorge Brandon, Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes, Frankie Lymon, Bob Kaufman, Ted Jones, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Allen Ginsberg and Tuli Kupferberg are evident throughout the book. Pietri’s distinct musicality is also seen (hopefully heard) though showing this does not seem a priority of the book. An objective book review of Selective Poetry is difficult to pull off, because Pedro Pietri is a poet whom you either love, or don’t get at all. Like certain rock stars (Prince, Bruce), you have to see him perform to understand the full magnitude of his talent. But we can’t do that, so this book will have to do. And it does fine. Also this book does not, and really cannot address the cultural and social importance of Pedro Pietri to the Puerto Rican Diaspora and the whole Nuyorican movement. For that you’ll have to look into Urayoan Noel’s landmark study of Nuyorican Literature, Invisible Movement (University of Iowa Press) which is worth reading in its own right.

Pedro Pietri: Selected Poetry is an essential addition to the canon of American and Latino Literature. It is more than worth the price (18.95). I would like to see City Lights aggressively promote this important collection of poems, which should be on the bookshelves of each and every student, teacher, and lover of contemporary poetry. Pour yourself a glass of red wine, have yourself a smoke, open to any poem in the collection. You will enjoy.

https://www.tribes.org/web/2016/05/02/review-pedro-pietri-danny-shot

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