{"id":141090,"date":"2019-11-25T09:00:41","date_gmt":"2019-11-25T14:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=141090"},"modified":"2019-11-27T16:45:33","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T21:45:33","slug":"the-lost-found-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/25\/the-lost-found-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lost & Found Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Rev. Pedro Pietri, AD\u00c1L, 1990<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/a>, 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\u2014and whom Robles is studying. Together, we were visiting his collection.<\/p>\n

These days, most people don\u2019t remember Pietri. Not just a poet but a playwright and early performance artist, he spent the AIDS<\/small> era hand-packaging his \u201ccondom poems\u201d: 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<\/small> 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.<\/p>\n

Now, they are being revived. In November, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative<\/a> 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. \u201cA lot of the writers we think we know, seventy or eighty percent of their work is still in the archives,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Alcalay envisions his project as a subversive one. As Jacques Derrida noted in his formative 1995 essay \u201cArchive Fever: A Freudian Impression<\/a>,\u201d the keepers of an archive don\u2019t just guard its physical security: \u201cThey have the power to interpret the archives.\u201d Alcalay wants to undermine that power by reinterpreting the canon and the stories that surround it. Had he not uncovered Audre Lorde\u2019s syllabi and classroom notes, we might have forgotten the astonishing fact that she taught race theory to aspiring cops at John Jay College in the seventies. And until his student Rowena Kennedy-Epstein looked, no one knew that the poet Muriel Rukeyser had kept an unpublished novel from 1937<\/a>, topped with a rejection letter; today, that book is in print<\/a>. There are dozens more examples.<\/p>\n

Pietri is a case in point. Where mainstream American poetry is concerned, he is often \u201cinvisibilized,\u201d as Robles puts it. Yet he is an important writer, one who made early entries into conceptual art as a means to advocate publicly for Nuyoricans, queer people, and downtown artists during one of the darkest and deadliest periods in New York City\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like a mime,\u201d Robles said as his white-gloved hands gingerly lifted a piece of sheet metal onto which Pietri had printed the maroon cover of a book called Invisible Poetry<\/em>. I had thought we might enter a hangar-size storage area, like an FBI evidence warehouse, full of boxes to pick through. But instead we stood at a conference table piled with boxes in a cozy, carpeted room hung with art and photos of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Using an elaborate printed \u201cfinding aid,\u201d Robles had preselected artifacts from among Pietri\u2019s eighty-odd boxes of plays, manuscripts, flyers, paintings, photos, vinyl records, and what Robles calls \u201cmutant gadgets,\u201d since some of the works are uncategorizable handmade props.<\/p>\n

Robles leafed through a manuscript called \u201cOut of Order,\u201d which Pietri had photocopied and distributed at readings but never published. The source for most of the condom poems, it contains thousands of short works that dissect the disordered and racially unequal New York City of the seventies and eighties. City officials had abandoned black and brown enclaves like Harlem and the Bronx, trash towered on the sidewalks, and heroin and crack ravaged whole neighborhoods. \u201cNew york new york \/ you are your own undertaker,\u201d Pietri wrote. Some of these poems have been collected\u2014City Lights Books published a selection of thirty poems<\/a> in 2015, and an out-of-print 2001 Italian volume holds about 350 more\u2014but most exist only at the Centro.<\/p>\n

Pietri\u2019s works are both morbid and playful. His preoccupation with the AIDS<\/small> epidemic was a natural outgrowth of a poetics of grand metaphysical decline\u2014his interest in the way we\u2019re all dying all the time, some of us more so than others. \u201cIt\u2019s raw,\u201d said Robles of the collection, his dark eyes shining with contained excitement. \u201cIt\u2019s sexual. It\u2019s about drugs, it\u2019s about alcohol, it\u2019s about wayward lives, it\u2019s about street life, it\u2019s about difficult feelings, it\u2019s about broken families. It\u2019s about fun, as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The manila packets of Pietri\u2019s condom poems were smaller, and more pleasingly assembled, than I had imagined from a description alone. Some Pietri had hand-painted black with tiny gold insignia. Typewritten onto the back of each packet is a short poem in Spanish, English, or Italian, with warnings like \u201csocializing can be fatal\u201d and \u201cIs no longer safe \/ to screw Every place,\u201d and encouragements to \u201cMasturbate slowly\u201d instead. Though I looked through dozens, Robles told me there were likely thousands in the world.<\/p>\n

Contained within these kinetic poems is Pietri\u2019s attempt to protect his community, which was uniquely vulnerable to AIDS<\/small> infection<\/a>. As we spoke, Robles unfurled a banner, with ransom-note letters reading \u201cCONDOMS & POEMS 4-SALE,\u201d that Pietri displayed during readings. It was tattered and coffee-stained in places, and taped to it were handwritten notebook pages. Often, Pietri would improvise performances as the Reverend Pedro, his barefoot-prophet persona, tossing condoms from hand-painted suitcases that bore slogans like \u201cUNDERTAKER POET.\u201d When Robles carefully removed these suitcases from their Bubble Wrap chrysalides, they still smelled sharp, like paint and musty leather.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dynamic was always to emphasize the importance of safe sex,\u201d said Robles. \u201cFor him, it wasn\u2019t about moralizing. It was about protecting yourself from AIDS<\/small> and other STDs.\u201d In Robles\u2019s introduction to the Lost & Found volume, he shares a story from Nuyorican poet Mar\u00eda Teresa \u201cMariposa\u201d Fern\u00e1ndez, who recounts that she was a twenty-year-old freshman at New York University when she first saw Pietri perform. \u201cHe threw condoms at us, something our school administrators should have been doing,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought it was genius.\u201d Filed carefully away in the archives, these artifacts are a monument to creative community action at a time when authorities stood mute in the face of suffering and death. \u201cIt\u2019s documentation of a period of Nuyorican history that is, for the most part, erased,\u201d said Robles.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The Lost & Found chapbook, Condom Poems 4 Sale One Size Fits All<\/em><\/a>, contains a tight selection of thirty poems\u2014enough to open a window into that little-known moment in history. In a special envelope, Alcalay\u2019s team has reproduced personal photos and hand-painted performance flyers from the archive, including one of the Reverend Pedro laughing, standing barefoot before a \u201ccondom cross.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Pietri volume is part of the eighth series<\/a> Lost & Found has published. Other new materials include notes from Diane di Prima\u2019s lectures on Percy Bysshe Shelley\u2019s Prometheus Unbound<\/em> as a \u201cmagical working\u201d; Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s translation of Arthur Rimbaud\u2019s A Season in Hell<\/em>, completed in the early thirties while she was a student and involved in the Scottsboro trial; newly translated excerpts from Argentinian exile Julio Cort\u00e1zar\u2019s little-known first book\u00a0Imagen de John Keats<\/i>, revealing a companionship between the poets; and the former Dominican nun Mary Norbert K\u00f6rte\u2019s 1967 response to Ghost Tantras<\/em>, by Michael McClure.<\/p>\n

Much of Alcalay\u2019s output is as niche as this. For years, his academic community saw him as a \u201cwacky poet\u201d tinkering in the recesses of the Graduate Center, he told me. You can see why. His office is cluttered with books and posters and bags of papers; one pities his future executor. \u201cI\u2019m a lunatic,\u201d he told me from behind a sagging pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses. \u201cI keep everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

More recently, though, the project has found a measure of legitimacy. It\u2019s quietly influencing the field and finding its way into classrooms, books, and dissertations. In 2017, the Before Columbus Foundation presented Alcalay its American Book Award. Lost & Found also appears as an example in Jean-Christophe Cloutier\u2019s new book Shadow Archives<\/em><\/a>, which argues for the importance of archival research in historicizing African-American literature. And not long ago, another powerful endorsement reached Alcalay\u2019s ears: shortly before Toni Morrison died, a mutual friend told him that the writer was an admirer of the project\u2019s Toni Cade Bambara volume, \u201cRealizing the Dream of a Black University,\u201d & Other Writings<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Alcalay is fond of saying that Lost & Found is about relationships. By this, he means the unexpected ones among poets that his students uncover. The most obvious examples are in the surprising creative correspondences they publish, like that between Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn<\/a>, or the odes, like Kathy Acker\u2019s to Leroi Jones<\/a>. \u201cTo me, it\u2019s like fine weaving,\u201d said Alcalay, of revealing these connections. \u201cIt\u2019s like weaving this very complex pattern.\u201d Doing so binds familiar figures together within an expanding creative fabric, pleasantly exposing the notion of the great solitary artist as a myth.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Pietri, too, was bound to better-known contemporaries, kindred downtown spirits like Baraka, Ishmael Reed, June Jordan, and Ntozake Shange. But the strongest connections that emerge from his archives are those he forged with his public. During his life, he nurtured the language and longings of a fiercely dedicated subculture. His poems abound with street talk, slang, informal conjugations. \u201cThat was the aesthetic proposal,\u201d Robles told me. \u201cHe was validating Spanglish, he was validating the English that Puerto Ricans were speaking, he was validating Black English.\u201d It was not for the academy, said Robles, it was for the people. It may be part of why he\u2019s often ghettoized as a Latin American poet and overlooked in the canon. But it\u2019s also why he served so aptly as a community advocate and provocateur.<\/p>\n

A thrilling part of the new Lost & Found volume is that it extends Pietri\u2019s public provocation. Its afterword, written by Cristina P\u00e9rez D\u00edaz, the student who began the Pietri project before Robles took it over, is preserved in untranslated Spanish, like many of Pietri\u2019s archived poems. \u201cIf you can\u2019t read it, tough luck,\u201d said Alcalay. \u201cLearn some Spanish.\u201d<\/p>\n

After all, the archive\u2014the existence of certain collections and the absence of others\u2014is always a matter of politics. What gets chosen and surfaced depends wholly on who is doing the choosing. We tend to think of it as a rarefied space, the province of scholars and authorities. \u201cThe meaning of archive<\/em>, its only meaning,\u201d wrote Derrida, \u201ccomes to it from the Greek arkheion<\/em>: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.\u201d<\/p>\n

But public archives are everywhere, in libraries across the country. Anyone can visit and decide what\u2019s important, as I discovered at the Centro. Think, too, of all the uncommanded archives, in cluttered homes and offices. \u201cSome stuff ends up in dumpsters,\u201d said Alcalay. To his mind, Lost & Found is an invitation to non-scholars to join the process, to become editors and archivists themselves. \u201cIt\u2019s creating a consciousness and awareness that these are the materials of our culture, and they\u2019re going to disappear if we\u2019re not vigilant.\u201d He hopes some minor archons will think to rescue these materials\u2014or maybe spirit them his way: \u201cIf you don\u2019t take charge of your culture, who will?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michael Friedrich<\/a> is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn who covers culture and social justice. His work has appeared in the <\/em>Washington Post, <\/em>The Nation, and <\/em>The New Republic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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