[Photo taken at Nuyorican Poets Cafe (2013) at Jesus Papoleto Melendez book party. Photo: Vagabond.]
I remember the poetry scene during the 1990s in New York City. Poetry scenes come and go, but I don’t think there will ever be another one quite like it again. It was the best of times. The town was one big slam and we were slamming: making poetry, writing, publishing, and performing. We were creative creatures. The gatekeepers. Your ticket to get in? Good poetry or how you be with the poetry. Can’t meet those requirements? Door slam.
The poetry of that era was happening in an increasing number of places and spaces in increasingly diverse ways, from the new creative writing departments, local venues, and small presses. While poetry has always been an oral art form, we witnessed the rise of the spoken word movement, with the explosion of the rap music scene. Multiculturalism – the idea that varied cultures can coexist peacefully and in equality – prompted different camps and schools of poets to mingle and intermingle with each other. It really was an exciting time.
Actually, New York’s literary scene of the 1990s picked-up where the Black Arts movement petered off during the late 1970s. When the Nuyorican movement erupted onto the literary landscape during the mid-1960s, the literary works of young Puerto Rican poets and writers from El Barrio (East Harlem), Loisada (the Lower East Side of Manhattan) and sections of the Bronx and Brooklyn, developed a dynamic literature based on the folklore and popular culture of Puerto Rico with a New York sensibility. The literature was as hip as salsa. By the late 1970s, with Nixon and Vietnam gone, the scene during the 1980s was a Reagan-snoozefest; the city at its worse, culturally. It was when the Nuyorican Poets Cafe reopened on East 3rd Street, around the same time when hip hop and slam culture emerged during a Nuyorican renaissance, the literary scene in New York became very interesting.
Why am I saying all of this? Because the person who was there for the birth of the Nuyorican movement and remained committed to it his entire life was Sam Diaz.
It’s no secret Sam’s wife, Carmen Pietri, was legendary Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri’s sister. Carmen’s brothers, Joe, Willie and Frank were no slouches either, so when Sam got together with Carmen he became entrenched in the literary scene, with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe serving as their base of operations.
We grew up during the emergence of the Nuyorican Movement during the 1960s. It was an era of self-awareness for many mainland puertorriqueños; an awakening of our true identity; and a re-learning of our native culture infused by the politics and teachings of radical groups such as the Young Lords and the Black Panther Party. By the early 1970s, a number of prominent Nuyorican poets and writers took center stage, which shook the foundation of American literature as we knew it.
— Samuel Diaz and Carmen M. Pietri-Diaz
Forward, “Celebrating the Poetry of Jesús Papoleto Meléndez,” Hey Yo! Yo Soy! (2012)
But I didn’t know Sam back then. During the 1990s, you didn’t have to personally know someone to know of them. It’s like you hung out with your crew, but everyone knew all the players. While I hung out with a few Nuyoricans back in the day, I didn’t hang out with Carmen and Sam, nor did I hang out at the Cafe (I hung out at Tribes up the block). I actually hung out once or twice with Pedro by way of Papo (actually attended one of Pedro’s infamous New Year’s Eve parties), and because of Papo’s close relationship with Carmen and Sam, knew a bit about them, as I assumed they knew about me. Our paths would cross from time-to-time but we really didn’t get into it until 2006 and into the thick of it in 2012.
I was associated with friends, artists, and activists of the Nuyorican Arts Movement of the early 1970s and later read, performed and attended events at the East 6th Street Nuyorican Poets Cafe until it moved to East 3rd Street. After this, I took a long break from the arts to address community issues in my neighborhood in the Bronx. In the late 1990s I was asked to help out at the Cafe, first as an office services consultant and then as an employee.
— Samuel Diaz Carrion, AFTER : WORDS, Our Nuyorican Thing (2014)
Sam was quiet, but if you paid attention, he wasn’t just being quiet, he was scoping the scene. And he was funny in that he didn’t easily open up in front of just anybody, so he often let people assume that he had nothing to say, which suited him just fine. But in reality, Sam had a lot to say. And he said a lot of it in his writing.
He was always thinking, thinking, writing, writing, writing. He was researching small ideas and remaking them into big ideas, always focusing on the smallest details. About people. About life. About culture and history. About you. About me. About us and we. In fact, Sam was a philosopher. A poet-philosopher. It would seem that no two creatures could be more dissimilar than the poet and the philosopher. Who else but a philosopher is disturbed by the deepest questions of meaning, and wishes to make a vocation out of solving the knottiest problems of truth and knowledge, morals and logic, existence and death? And who else but a poet could declare himself exempt from the strictures of conceptual thought, free to tamper with words to achieve any musical and playful effect his mood requires? But Sam managed to be both. He was mindful of method and paid careful attention to assertions, evidence, arguments, ambiguities, and facts. And he did it with words. Sam loved language and loved playing with words.
it’s about an old story
without end & no moral within
told in languages long dead,
inscribed in genotypic memories,
inherited by the wind
— Samuel Diaz Carron, “It’s About”
My father died on April 1, 2006. That date is relevant because it was the day of the street naming of Reverend Pedro Pietri Way, East 3rd Street in front of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I had become involved in that event and was responsible for creating a video with Dylcia Pagan. The week leading up to the event, I had to meet Dylcia at the Cafe and had a chance to deal with Carmen and Sam up close. When my dad died at about 1:00 am the day of the event, after my sister and I went to the hospital to see him before they took him to the morgue, I returned home to finish the video. By 6:00 that morning, I made arrangements to get the video to Papo so that they could have it in time for the event. I found out much later that Carmen took note of this and never forgot that instant.
For some time I have been considering the idea of ownership as much as death. Death seems so final, but life continues on. The Poet dies, and poetry goes on, but the work he creates belongs to him, no matter what.
— Samuel Diaz Carron, AFTER : WORDS, Our Nuyorican Thing (2014)
I often wondered what it would be like to live in the shadow of greatness. While Pedro was a great poet, he unfortunately had the ability to swallow people whole, if you let him. Sam lived within that realm, but he never let it devour him, never allowed it to become part of his being, and he was never bitter. Two reasons: One, he was deeply in love with his wife Carmen, and was totally devoted to her. Second, his love for her extended to the Pietri family, in total. Carmen’s brothers became his brothers, including her nieces and nephews. He was just that kind of a guy. Fame and fortune was not his agenda: his relationships with family and friends, and his ongoing search for truths through the written word and social justice is where his focus lay. While his work was not known to many, Sam Diaz was a friend and contemporary of many of the Nuyorican writers, musicians, artists and activists of the 1960s.
My relationship with the Cafe goes back to its inception. I was there when a small group of poets, writers and activists like Miguel Algarin, Miguel Piñero, Bimbo Rivas, Pedro Pietri, Lucky Cienfuegos, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, Sandra Maria Esteves and others came together to create a space to meet and perform. The Cafe was founded during the height of the Nuyorican Arts Movement in the early 1970s. It was a cultural and intellectual movement that validated and documented the Puerto Rican experience in the United States, particularly for poor and working-class people who suffered from marginalization, ostracism and discrimination.
— Samuel Diaz Carrion, “PREFACE, Before the Beginning,” Our Nuyorican Thing (2014)
Sam’s activism and the pursuit of social justice were key themes throughout his life. He had an unwavering sense of Nuyorican identity and its connection to the African American diaspora. He never stopped reminding people of the Puerto Rican experience (a viewpoint he held both as an Islander and New Yorker), the trials and tribulations of being betwixt and between and being colonized, as well as the gifts, resources and contributions that Puerto Ricans have brought to the arts and especially, to American literature, or as he would probably put it, “a literature of the Americas.”
Sam, who was born in the South Bronx but raised in Puerto Rico, returned to New York in 1970 and quickly became involved in the poetry scene by hosting and participating in poetry readings throughout New York City. Our circle of friends were an extension of similar groups of artists, musicians and poets that developed into a “Nuyorican” thing, which included progressive political activism on both a personal and social level, and addressed various issues that were intertwined with identity and the community.
— Samuel Diaz and Carmen M. Pietri-Diaz
Forward, “Celebrating the Poetry of Jesús Papoleto Meléndez,” Hey Yo! Yo Soy! (2012)
When I decided to publish books, I wanted to keep a promise I made to Papo some years ago to publish his book. Papo asked Carmen and Sam to contribute something to it, which became the Foreword. As the publishing became more involved than I initially anticipated, Papo suggested Carmen’s involvement with the project for which I happily accepted whatever help she could provide me.
Carmen was ill and couldn’t do nearly as much as she would have liked, but she did have some long lasting input with the press. It was her, Vagabond and Lisa Sánchez González that came up with the idea of THE NUYORICAN WORLD SERIES, and Carmen was an advocate for several poets that I published, including Sam’s work. Nepotism? It can only be called that if the work is bad. In this case, it was not.
It took a while for me to get into Sam. Sam sent me tons of poems, and while many of them were quite good, I couldn’t get a bead on him, so compiling a collection was a bit tough at first, plus, I was swamped with other projects. And then Sam had this idea about publishing his email communications and the blog he had developed when working at the Cafe, calling it Our Nuyorican Thing, a concept that really grabbed my attention. When I began re-reviewing his poetry, it made more sense to me because it was rooted in the historical and cultural issues he raised about the Nuyorican community. About art and community service. About self-identity. And when I finally got it, it became easier for me to compile and edit his book.
At the bottom of the page you see my signoff: “In the Service of Poetry, Art and Community.” The reason why I say this is because I believe that poetry and art are not only important ways for people to express themselves creatively, it is the responsibility of the poet and the artist to connect with each other as a unified community. So for the sake of these comments, think of community as: “Unity in common, or common unity,” a bonding between members of a group based on its relationship to the arts. Sounds simple, but it’s not. For as much as language and identity are open-ended concepts, community also requires a claim, a recognition, an acceptance, and therein lies the complexity.
— Samuel Diaz Carrion, “Art and Community,” Our Nuyorican Thing (2014)
I spent a lot of time with Sam and Carmen during this period. I would come over and hang out, we held meetings at their house, and in the process, I learned firsthand about Carmen and Sam’s dedication to community and the arts. We also shared our frustrations about politics (the more things change, the more they remain the same), and about not having access to money and resources to help elevate awareness in our communities. Sam would hang out a bit, but always ended up doing what he always did, retreat to his office to write and think in front of his computer.
[Check out Sam’s book videos by Vagabond here]
Our Nuyorican Thing is a slim volume of work that packs a wallop. As one reviewer noted on Amazon, “At first I thought it may not be a good book, but when I started to read about, how Newyorican [sic] culture came about it is a book to hold as priceless in its content.” As it turns out, Our Nuyorican Thing has become one of my favorite books.
I don’t want to sound like an aesthete, but an artist, a true artist, has to be true to the art. And that means not only being true to the tradition of art, but also being true to your own artistic vision. That’s a little high sounding, but I think writing and creating are expressions of an epistemological position — that is, how you look at the world, that slant you look at it from. And that’s why I believe Sam’s work is so important in the Nuyorican literary canon, because in a palpable way he was using that slant to get at some truth or a little smidgen of beauty. To be true to the vision. To be artistically responsible.
As a poet I lay claim to my poems. I use words that existed long before I did to create prose and poems, using a name that was given to me by my parents and forbearers (that has been officially accepted by the proper civilian authorities), which are signed by me (with writing implement made by someone else), to attest to the fact that I am who I claim to be.
— Samuel Diaz Carrion, “After:Words,” Our Nuyorican Thing (2014)
When I re-read Sam’s book this week, especially the poetry interwoven throughout the book, the work reveals a bittersweet lens on life and the human condition. Ironically, Sam deals with death as a recurring theme throughout the book, not in a sad or creepy way but rather, in a straightforward and semi-ironic way that challenges readers to live with the knowledge of it. This kind of discourse can make one feel uncomfortable, but as Sam explored joy, fate, destiny, illusion, and pain without reason, he manages to philosophically deliberate this cruel element of life in a soothing kind of way.
Add another stone
to the forever hereafter
I remember you path
that leads us
all back home
in the buy and bye
when we meet again
— Samuel Diaz Carrion, “The Long Goodbye”
Or maybe in some sort of existential kind of way, he was taking inventory of his life and was preparing for death. There’s really nothing morbid suggesting this. The fact is, poets and writers have been known to do this for centuries, some more often than others. Since Sam is no longer with us, we would have to engage in a philosophical debate that he would no doubt enjoy.
When Carmen passed away in 2015, it was no secret that Sam suffered greatly from this loss. I had only spoken to him a couple of times since her passing; and as word got out that he was keeping to himself, I did not want to be intrusive. I was shocked when I heard of his passing, but not surprised. Ironically, my father’s death was sudden and shocking, but not surprising: after the death of my mother in 2001, it was difficult for him to move forward. I think the same could be said of Sam. But in his passing, he managed to leave a piece of himself behind, on his own terms. For those of us who knew him, he resides within us forever. For those of us who have read his work, he lingers still. And I have no doubt that the hundreds of pages of Sam’s poetry, prose and articles will be read, explored and discussed for years to come, leaving a lasting mark in the Nuyorican literary community that he loved dearly. He will be truly missed.
In the Service of Poetry, Art and Community,
Rest in peace, Sam. Rest in peace.
Gabrielle David, Publisher
