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    Smoking Lovely: The Remix
    Smoking Lovely: The Remix
    Smoking Lovely: The Remix
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    Smoking Lovely: The Remix

    By Willie Perdomo and Urayoán Noel

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    About this ebook

    Smoking Lovely's explorations of poetry and the neoliberal city at the intersection of community and commodity. In this radically revised new edition, Perdomo shifts the poem into mostly second person, thereby further accentuating its self-reflexive and complex exploration of self-and/as-other, and of the simultaneous othering, commodification, and spectacularization of Afro-diasporic bodies and cultural forms.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHaymarket Books
    Release dateApr 6, 2021
    ISBN9781642594843
    Smoking Lovely: The Remix

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      Book preview

      Smoking Lovely - Willie Perdomo

      SMOKING LOVELY: THE REMIX

      © 2021 Willie Perdomo

      Published in 2021 by

      Haymarket Books

      P.O. Box 180165

      Chicago, IL 60618

      773-583-7884

      www.haymarketbooks.org

      info@haymarketbooks.org

      ISBN: 978-1-64259-484-3

      Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International (www.ingramcontent.com).

      This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

      Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please call 773-583-7884 or email orders@haymarketbooks.org for more information.

      Cover artwork and design by Brett Nieman.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

      CONTENTS

      Introduction: The Embodied Spaces of Smoking Lovely by Urayoán Noel

      Mad Funny Style: A 10-Minute Play

      Smoking Lovely: The Remix

      I.Papo’s Ars Poetica

      Spotlight at the Nuyorican Poets Café

      The Day Hector Lavoe Died

      Papo’s Ars Poetica

      You Pay For What You Get, But You Never Get What You Pay For

      New Jack City

      Franklin Avenue Snack Box

      Should Old Shit Be Forgot

      Brother Lo and the Maxims

      Forty-One Bullets Off Broadway

      The Flood

      II.Stop Signs

      Tenderloin

      Smoking Lovely

      Oh Shit, Blues

      Seesaw Love Song

      Electronic Kites

      French Roast

      Ten-Pound Draw

      Black Boots

      Stop Signs

      Shit to Write About

      Word to Everything I Love

      Notes for a Slow Jam

      III.THE NEW BOOGALOO

      The New Boogaloo

      Poet Looking for Free Get High

      Open Mic at Make the Road By Walking, Inc.

      Crazy Bunch Barbeque at Jefferson Park

      Writing About What You Know

      Kicking

      Un Amor de la Calle

      Look What I Found

      Reflections on the Metro-North, Spring 1997

      Some After Words

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      INTRODUCTION:

      THE EMBODIED SPACES OF SMOKING LOVELY

      Back in 2003, I was at the book party for Willie Perdomo’s Smoking Lovely at Bar 13 in the East Village. In that venue, which had become a hub for a younger generation of poets of color associated with the slam community, Perdomo was already an icon: author of the seminal Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (1996) and the standout Afro-Puerto Rican voice from the foundational Nuyorican Poets Café slam scene of the early 1990s. My overriding memory of that night is the body heat emanating from the packed house giving way to laughter, cheers, and gasps as Perdomo dove into the riotous yet heartbreaking punchlines of his sophomore collection. It was a breath of fresh air and a punch in the gut at the same time.

      Reading the book over the next few weeks at home and on the subway, I was struck by its indomitable wit and its trademark tone: ironic, dark, abject, but also tricksterishly funny, soulful, fearless, and full of insurrectionary rhythms. Smoking Lovely was the first book of Nuyorican poetry (and indeed one of the first works of art, period) to document and critique the emergence of what anthropologist Arlene Dávila called in the subtitle to her 2004 book Barrio Dreams, the neoliberal city. This was the new, post-9/11 New York City of gentrification, privatization, global capital, and the so-called War on Terror all conspiring to displace, discipline, and/or disappear its most vulnerable bodies: Black and Brown, immigrant and diasporic, poor and working-class. Along with Ernesto Quiñónez’s novel Bodega Dreams (2000), Smoking Lovely is one of the foundational texts of antigentrification Nuy-orican literature, inspiring a whole generation of poets in their attempts to survive and subvert the neoliberal city.

      The imprint of Smoking Lovely is evident in the self-reflexive street poetics of Bonafide Rojas’s Pelo Bueno: A Day in the Life of a Nuyorican Poet (2004); in the hip-hop-coded mythic autobiography of Lemon Andersen’s Ready Made Real (2004), whose title is taken from Smoking Lovely’s Spotlight at the Nuyorican Poets Café; in the fusion of diasporic insurrection and dystopian irony in Not4Prophet’s Last of the Po’Ricans y Otros Afro-Artifacts (2013); and even in the non-slammer global punchlines of my own books Boringkén (2008) and Hi-Density Politics (2010). Beyond New York, the book was crucial in shaping the self-reflexive poetics of complicity in Guillermo Re-bollo Gil’s Teoría de conspiración (2005), with its autoethnographic insights into the raced and classed geospatial construction and commodification of poesía urbana (urban poetry) in Puerto Rico. It is also an important point of reference for Chicano poet (and veteran of the Taco Shop Poets collective) Tomâs Riley in his debut book Mahcic (2006), whose anti-capitalist barrio flow engages San Diego and San Francisco’s Mission District in ways that echo Perdomo’s Nuyorican lyric tableaux.

      As I note in my critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (2014), a poem like Spotlight at the Nuyorican Poets Café is essential in staging Smoking Lovely’s explorations of poetry and the neolib-eral city at the intersection of community and commodity. In this radically revised new edition, Perdomo shifts the poem into mostly second person, thereby further accentuating its introspective and

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