The Nuyorican Poets Cafe

It did not invent the slam, which was invented in Chicago, but it is where the format acquired the audience, the style and the international reach it still has.

Two things about it are usually collapsed into one. It was first a home for a specific group of writers who had nowhere else to read, and only later a competition venue. The second could not have happened without the first, and the order matters if the place is not to be mistaken for a franchise that happened to start early.

How the Cafe started, in a living room

It started in 1973 in the living room of Miguel Algarín, a poet and Rutgers professor, who opened his apartment on East Sixth Street to writers with nowhere to publish and nowhere to read. The regulars included the playwright and poet Miguel Piñero, the poet Pedro Pietri and Lucky CienFuegos, and the gatherings outgrew the flat quickly. The group rented a bar on the same street, and in 1980 the Cafe bought the building on East Third Street where it has been based since.

The name came from an insult. Nuyorican described Puerto Ricans born or raised in New York, and it was used dismissively on the island about people whose Spanish had changed and whose experience was of the Bronx and the Lower East Side rather than of Puerto Rico. The writers took the word and used it as a description of a distinct literature, which is what it now means. The 1975 anthology Nuyorican Poetry, edited by Algarín and Piñero, set the term out in print.

What the Cafe was for

The Cafe was for writers who were outside two literatures at once, and that is the founding fact rather than a piece of context. Its programme was never only poetry: it staged theatre, showed film, ran music nights and hosted visual art, and the poets in it were also playwrights, actors and organisers. Its audience was local, mixed, bilingual, and largely made up of people who did not go to poetry readings anywhere else.

That combination made it an institution rather than a venue. The Cafe closed for several years in the 1980s and reopened at the end of that decade, and it has since been run as a non profit arts organisation with a board, a programme and an archive rather than as a bar with poets in it. Algarín, who held the whole thing together for decades, died in 2020.

The slam years, and what happens on a Friday night

The slam arrived at the Cafe after the reopening, brought in by the poet Bob Holman, who had seen the scored format that Marc Smith had started in Chicago in the mid 1980s. Put in front of a Lower East Side audience on a Friday night, it became the version of the slam that television, film and touring poets carried outward.

The mechanics are the standard ones and have changed very little.

• Sign up on the night, with the running order drawn rather than curated.
• Perform one original poem inside three minutes, with no props, costume or musical accompaniment.
• Get scored by five judges taken from the audience, on a scale of zero to ten.
• Lose the highest and lowest scores, so that the three that remain give a maximum of 30.
• Come back for a second round if the field is cut, with a different poem.

An open mic runs on a separate night from the slam and has always been the way in for new writers, which is worth knowing for anybody who assumes the Cafe is competition only.

The Grand Slam, and the team

The Grand Slam is the annual final that the weekly winners feed into. Poets who win a Friday night qualify for a semi final and then for the Grand Slam, and the outcome historically chose the team that represented the Cafe at national competition. It is the same structure that hundreds of rooms now use, and it is one of the few parts of the poetry world with an explicit qualifying ladder.

For a young writer the ladder is worth understanding and worth keeping in proportion. A team place is a real achievement and it is also the outcome of several evenings of scores given by strangers, which What a poetry slam is sets out honestly. The Cafe itself has always run more open nights than competitive ones.

Is the Nuyorican Poets Cafe still open

Yes, but not at 236 East Third Street. The building closed in November 2023 for a rebuilding project and the open mics, slams and Grand Slam have been running in other venues since. The Cafe publishes its own calendar and its own announcements, and that, rather than any reference work, is the place to check a date, because a printed answer to this question goes out of date within a season.

What is not in doubt is the address and the status. The Cafe holds its building, it is a long established non profit, and its archive of recordings, photographs and papers from five decades is part of what it exists to keep.

What the Cafe changed about how poems are said

The Cafe changed three things about how a poem is said aloud, and all three are audible in a school hall in Britain tonight. It made switching between languages inside a single poem ordinary rather than a special effect, since its poets moved between English and Spanish the way the neighbourhood did. It made the audience a participant, first through response and then formally through judging. And it established the three minute poem as a unit, which is now the default length of a spoken word piece almost everywhere.

Metaphor carried most of the political weight in that room, because a poem about a landlord, a block or a father could say what a speech could not. The Black Arts movement had made the same argument in the previous decade for a different community, What a griot is describes a much older version of a poet attached to a named public, and The lineage of the form sets the whole sequence out in order.