Poetry News

Urayoán Noel’s In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam is Here!

Originally Published: March 30, 2015

Urayoán Noel’s new book, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, documents the history of Nuyorican poetry from the 1960s to the 1990s. Although the number of Nuyorican poets has "dwindled," Robert Waddell writes in his review "Noel chronicles and records the work of people who have always refused to become invisible or remain voiceless." From Virtual Boricua:

Let us begin at the beginning – the front cover. Can anyone recognize the orator – proudly proclaiming his Puerto Ricanness as he stands in a rubble strewn Loisaida lot – on the cover of Urayoán Noel’s new book, “In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam?”

Noel’s clever title “In Visible” refers to marginalized Puerto Rican poets who are and were very visible on the New York and American landscape for the last 60 years.

[...]

Noel writes in his introduction: “Although not a history in the conventional sense, in the juxtaposition of various poetics this book seeks to tell a story about the changing roles of poetry, from the social movement of the 1960s to the market movements of the 1990s and beyond.”

The poet and scholar seeks to understand and explain the value and importance of New York Puerto Rican poetry and writing as it moved from oral poetry to revolution to slam, and how it all makes sense to poets – the Ivory Tower and to Puerto Rican culture. [...]

Learn more at Virtual Boricua.