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The Passing of Pedro Pietri

By Carol Amoruso

The firmament of the Nuyorican community was rocked in March by the death of poet, playwright, polemicist, Pedro Pietri. He died in-flight, on his way back to New York from Mexico where he had sought alternative treatment for stomach cancer.

Pietri was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1944; he came to New York with his family when he was three, and was raised in East Harlem. The family was part of an early wave of migration that would insinuate the “Gran Manzana” into the “Big Apple”. He served in the Army in Vietnam and returned radicalized. Shortly before his death, Pietri told La Prensa San Diego (Feb. 6, 2004) that, by serving, he was proud to have helped the United States lose its first war. From the time of his discharge, he dressed only in black in remembrance of "the victims of that invasion".

A job at Colombia University was also pivotal, for it was here that he met Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets as well as the poets of black resistance. He began to write, poems mostly, but plays as well, of the life and plight of his Puerto Rican community. His writings in Spanglish, the Nuyorican vernacular, gave literary legitimacy to the idiom.

In 1973, Pietri founded the Nuyorican Poets' Café along with poet Miguel Algarín (the Café was actually born in Algarín's living room) and playwright Miguel Piñero. Soon a landmark of the east East Village/Lower East Side--the neighborhood would be rechristened in Spanglish, Loisaida--the Café became a mecca, not only for edgy Latino intellects, but for righteous, wrastling, cutting edge poets of all stripes. Poetry slams were hatched at the Café. Poets with mettle came to recite before a public as raucous and unforgiving as the Elizabethans; they come still for their punishment and reward.

Pietri split time between the two great signposts of Nuyorican life,  the Loisaida and East Harlem, reborn as el Barrio. The barrios circumscribed his work, his struggle with the system and alienation, his need to give voice to those with no pen in hand. He became the declaimer of despair, the bard of the run-down walk-ups, the squalid tenements that incubated hard drugs, hustling your ass, your mother's ass for a dime. Spawned here as well were feisty Young Lords, Pablo Guzman and Felipe Luciano to name two, Pirri Thomas, and Charlie Palmieri.

Pedro Pietri, the irreverent iconoclast, baptized himself el Reverendo, of the Church of Our Lady of the Tomatoes. He was also one of the founders of the “Puerto Rican Embassy”, a state, if not geographical, at least of the mind. He traveled everywhere with this passport, validated by the exit stamp placed on it by Cuban customs. On Sunday, March 7, the Reverendo was memorialized where he spiritualized, at the First Spanish Methodist Church in El Barrio, the “People's Church”. It was here that he first read his epic, “Puerto Rican Obituary”.

From "Puerto Rican Obituary" (1973)

...Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
All died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
Dreaming
Dreaming about queens
Clean-cut lily-white neighborhood
Puerto Ricanless scene
Thirty-thousand-dollar home
The first spics on the block
Proud to belong to a community
of gringos who want them lynched
Proud to be a long distance away
from the sacred phrase: Que Pasa...

...Juan
died hating Miguel because Miguel's
used car was in better running condition
than his used car
Miguel
died hating Milagros because Milagros
had a color television set
and he could not afford one yet
Milagros
died hating Olga because Olga
made five dollars more on the same job
Olga
died hating Manuel because Manuel
had hit the numbers more times
than she had hit the numbers
Manuel
died hating all of them
Juan
Miguel
Milagros
and Olga because they all spoke broken english
more fluently than he did...

... Here lies Juan
Here lies Miguel
Here lies Milagros
Here lies Olga
Here lies Manuel
who died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
Always broke
Always owing
Never knowing
that they are beautiful people
Never knowing
the geography of their complexion...

Morbid and mordant, “Puerto Rican Obituary” portrays five faceless sufferers, "born dead" and living in shame and delusion, poor, hapless, alienated, waiting for their number to come up, waiting for the "winning lottery ticket", waiting for the "welfare check", for the "five dollar raise," waiting for Pietri to deliver them with death. He creates poetry of clichés, both mundane--"under new management", "drop dead" --and exalted "the hereafter", "garden of eden".

Remembrances

In fitting irreverence, the Old (Avant) Garde and Young Turks of Nuyorican letters gave el Reverendo a send-off at the Café. The event was a sanctified circus, a literary bembé, as much a celebration of his life as a mourning of his death. Many people spoke, and eloquently. Some read. Some danced, sang, played instruments. Underlying all was a sense of gratefulness in his passing. He apparently suffered greatly in his later days.

Papoleto Melendez, a long-time friend and collaborator said, gently, "He left as if he had somewhere to go." Others echoed those words, finding it providential and not accidental that the poet died 37,000 miles aloft. At the same time, a petition was circulated that, like Haitian leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was deposed in the air, Pietri be brought back to his rightful turf.

Melendez characterized his compañero:, “He was a motafuckin’ humanitarian and a great big pain in the ass.” These words found resonance, especially with former wife, poet Nancy Mercado.

Others spoke of his work, how ground-breaking it had been, how it inspired them, alluding to the unlettered literariness of his "spilled verbs and split adjectives".

Willie Colon somberly recalled events when they’d shared the stage in the 70s, Pietri’s eloquent activism a sparkplug to his own grit. The great bandleader regretted that his words that night couldn’t speak as righteously of el Reverendo as his horn could.

Pedro Pietri's vision from a dim vantage point may have been bleak, but his eyes were opened over 30 years ago, and he may have been short-sighted. Without the poets of the street, with Pietri in the forefront, and the foot soldiers, like the Young Lords, one would not witness, in the barrios and in the academies, the gratitude of later-arriving Latinos: Mexicans, Central Americans, Dominicans, that their way had been paved, albeit jaggedly with heavy stones, by the Boricuas.