Rev. Pedro Pietri, ADÁL, 1990

On an unremarkable street corner in East Harlem, diagonal from a big gray battleship of new housing development, sits the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, which everyone calls the Centro. This fall, I went to the Centro to meet Rojo Robles, a student in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino cultures department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who had offered to show me the library where the archives are kept. We paused in a fluorescent-lit hallway to observe photos of leaders from the Puerto Rican diaspora, many of whose works are preserved at the Centro. Among them, mustache drooping over a smile, was Pedro Pietri, cofounder and poet laureate of the Nuyorican Movement in downtown Manhattan, who died in 2004—and whom Robles is studying. Together, we were visiting his collection.

These days, most people don’t remember Pietri. Not just a poet but a playwright and early performance artist, he spent the AIDS era hand-packaging his “condom poems”: bits of verse along with prophylactics in tiny manila envelopes, which he distributed during performances at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and other galleries, bars, and public spaces. Both artist and activist, he used his work to make the AIDS crisis visible while also providing protection to a community on the margins. As we reevaluate the horror and official inaction that surrounded the crisis, his actions are of particular interest. But they were ephemeral. The scraps that remain have been tucked away in the archives for decades.

Now, they are being revived. In November, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative published text and images from the condom poems as part of a new series of chapbooks. For ten years, the poet and scholar Ammiel Alcalay and his students at the Graduate Center have been trawling the archives of mid-twentieth-century poets like Pietri. Each year, using the print shop in the basement, they work with a team at the Center for the Humanities to publish a selection of the strange treasures they find. “A lot of the writers we think we know, seventy or eighty percent of their work is still in the archives,” said Alcalay, a gentle, gray-maned eccentric who uncovers letters, lectures, syllabi, translations, and other marginalia. Without the work of his team, it might all remain buried.

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Photo: Watson Perrygo. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archive, via Wikimedia Commons.

My first encounter with Paulé Bartón’s folktales came in the unlikeliest of places: trawling through the deep wilderness of HTML on the back end of The Paris Review’s website. I was an intern, dutifully scanning the archive for stories that had stumbled slightly on their way from print to the Web. Long before my time at the magazine, an error-prone computer program had been used to expedite the digitization process—a necessity for such a small staff and such a trove of pages. But the program occasionally made mistakes, and many stories and poems and essays, long forgotten to most readers, hung imperfectly online. The trick was to read a sentence on the page, then read the very same sentence on the screen, then return to the page. You could spend hours like this, swiveling your head, attempting to achieve parity between these warring formats, constantly searching for hiccups.

The discrepancies I found were usually minuscule: an extra space, a repeated word, an errant line break in the midst of a Merwin poem. There were those rare pieces, though, that looked like they’d passed through a cheese grater. Wading into the text, I’d find that every t had been replaced by an f, or vice versa; fhes and ots abounded. Spaces appeared at random, as though an ostrich had stood on the keyboard. Bartón’s “The Woe Shirt,” buried in the recesses of the Summer 1980 issue, was one such piece—or so I thought at first.

The story begins: “Bélem did tinker repair his bicycle by the stink-toe tree. Better to work there it smells so bad, work gets done no lazy quick.” I remember tracing these words with my cursor over and over, letting their music carve grooves in my head. What’s a “stink-toe tree”? Why the double verb in that first sentence? “Lazy quick”? And yet the printed page confirmed that all of this was correct, intentional. I read on. Despite initial appearances, most of it was intact. A few minutes later, as I arrived at the end, my eyes welled with tears. In the middle of a quiet, cold office in New York, in a matter of minutes, a Haitian folktale had leaped out of history, stolen my heart, and vanished. Read More