Feature Poet

Matthew Paris
Luis Reyes Riviera

At least a few organizations posted some passing notice on the Internet of the demise of Luis Rivera when he had perished in 2012. He had had after all an active life among the local institutions. He had published a few volumes of excellent poetry, a book on grammar he was particularly proud of, and was in the vague language of these polite obits “a social activist. One mentioned he was born in Brooklyn and was of Puerto Rican descent. One could also find a few videos of him reading on YouTube. I thought these sendoffs were pretty pallid stuff.

Luis was a lot more than that. He had been the host of a weekly radio program on WBAI, was one of the great performers reading in person, was a sensational and profound poet on the page, was a heavyweight philosopher, had as well co-founded and co-ran a central Black Poetry scene on 127th Street and later in downtown Brooklyn with Richard Bartee, and had lived a rich private life in a project in New York with his wife over decades. Luis was indeed of Puerto Rican descent but he identified much more as a Black man than as a Latino. He ws a product of the turbulent 60s and its social unrest; after 1960 he found himself confronted by the lack of interest in young people of color in any politics or rebellion altogether. It made him feel that he had led a movement that didn't have much staying power with the very populace he had wanted to reach and speak for.

Luis lived 32 years beyond 1980. His later life was much more philosophical and broad in its interests. He wrote a book on how to teach English. He was a master of that subject. He's the only poet I know who wrote about the craft and grammar of language. He was both a firebrand and in some ways very happy to use structure and institutional means to achieve moral ends.

Early in his life from the late 60s to 1980 he founded a seperate spa for Black poets to read on the second floor of a a building on West 127th Street , one that was legendary for its feeling of being among some very intriguing but dangerous people. It aimed to set a direction for Black writing that was native to the traditions of streetwise mid-century urban Afro-Americans. I think some of the premises that Luis and Richard Bartee had set up were brought downtown to the Nuyoricans by Reggie Goines in the 70s. People at this joint didn't read from pieces of paper; the poets usually memorized their material and acted it out very dramatically. The style was sometimes close to rap or pre-rap. It had a male anger and much virtuoso command of boulevard rhetoric.

Richard Bartee attributed this style to 'Bama , the Village street poet. Whatever its origins it was quite a departure from the way poetry reading was done in spas that were mostly White. Nobody fumbled for the right poem among pieces of paper. Richard and Luis I can say had an incredible memory for their material of great length. They could work their way through a half hour or more of material easily and probably had hundreds of pages of verse committed to memory. Beyond that both of them had something to say. Richard of the two was the more genial, elegant and virtuosity in his beautifully carved lies based at least in part on clever Harlem street talk. Richard would stay out to all hours of the night talking with people. He'd come home of Brooklyn bus at six o'clock in the morning. Luis wasn't that sort of urban wanderer. Luis ws grave, sublime, august. They were the perfection team for co-hosts of this venue. Luis was more detached than Richard ever was. He called Richard "Bartee" as if they were in the army together.

There was always the feeling of possible violence in the umbras of at these gatherings; anyone could come and go there. Richard once said to me he felt like a bouncer sometimes as he let people in at the door. Since Richard was a former All-American high school football player, former policeman in Syracuse, and big guy he hash the physique to be that sort of keeper of order. Luis at four and half felt tall, slender and looking eccentricity was never going to be the enforcer among this duo. I never heard either Richard or Luis ever used any Anglo-Saxon invective. Both men in their way were focused consciously on doing moral deeds

There was a later emanation of the same scene in downtown Brooklyn near Bed Sty for a few years. It might have been called the Gotham; I'm not sure. It dissipated after that because in general the cultural scene shifted way from the confrontational style of the previous decade.

Richard never wrote down any of his verse. He left a legacy of hundreds of tapes of the material. Luis was much more conventional. Both were poets who had done their extended stint in college

Above all Luis was one of the more sensational performers on the New York Poetry scene. He had his own style. Luis wouldn't be introduced as a reader while he stood in front of his audience waiting to be offered the podium. He began his readings at the back of the hall. He would prowl through the aisles of the chamber like a wild animal growling out his verse. Since he was four foot six, limped, had a cane, and looked with his wild but scanty beard like somebody who had come from living in the rough or the woods somewhere he frightened everybody in the room even before he reached the stage.

In person Luis was a very well spoken if august presence. Luis was a master of English he also had substance that was even more impressive than his performance style. I think he was one poet who had the largest political visions of any readers I've heard. Luis was an expert at how political systems control people. “First they take over the food supply," he once said to me. He had Euclidean sense of how such systems work. That one might assume came from his meditations on how the United States ran its neo-feudal fiefdoms in Latin America.

It would be a minutiae to think that Luis ever limited his reflections to politics. He was an exponent after all of the justified life. He never merely shrugged at anything that he felt was wicked. Heh was not merely a social activist but a founder various ways one could use the media and public assembly institutions of his age to make effective protests against some social evil. Richard Bartee joined a Baptist church in Brooklyn and led a a cadre to console people in in prisons. These were very ethical men with a kind of political focus one might associate traditionally with 1th century English Low Protestant dissenters.

Richard also made many visits to public schools in Brownsville and read in raucous school lunchrooms. The first poet a generation or two of kids coming out of these schools ever saw and heard was Richard Bartee. Richard also wrote metaphysical fables, one of which, Nothing, was his charming signature piece. Luis was never whimsical.

Nobody planning a mechanistic society that would have a predictable equity could have guessed that either Luis or Richard would have turned out to be the stalwart men they were. They were givers, men of measure who offered others a mysterious strength they had themselves. Where did they get it from? Luis couldn't have had it easy growing up in the Brooklyn streets as a virtual midget with a cane, walking with a severe limp. Richard who was originally from Florida told mebemusdly he hah seen ihsi father oncein his life, an afternnon that he ha come through town going somewhehre else . He wasn't complaining; these men never complained. They ahd a worker of counsel when they listen to other people's compalints. Richard always saw the good side of everybody. Luis was fair minded, ready to look for the nuances in people he might have otherwise deemed wicked.

Since one never sees a poet when they are writing poetry I'd have to infer from his achievements that Luis spent some very large portions of his life alone, taking up some exploration of everything from poetry to history. He was one very deep man. One had to guess parts of his thought from what he said and didn't say in his conversation. One of his initial presumptions obviously was that human beings are part of an immortal dialogue in which naturally free and independent people are constantly subjected to some institutional and legitimate corruptions from some system or other. This politics fitted in very well with the anarchist founders of WBAI but n the radio Luis was always content to let his guests do the talking. One rarely heard any long discourses from him unless he was being interviewed. Yet when I put him on television for two hours I had the feeling we could have done a four or six hours show and he never would have flagged in the focus of his discourse.

I would suspect though I never heard it from Luis directly that sometime in the 80s he realized that the confrontational style of the 60s and 70s was not going to fly with people who were in their way looking to get their slice of the pie from an empire they didn't want to question too much anymore than anybody else in the same imperium did. Luis did offer a lipless smile when he turned his attention to this turn in Black culture. He wasn't bitter about it. It seemed to him that embracing a political juggernaut that was based on making people dependent on it for their very survival wasn't going to do all that well even for its toadies and adherents

I hope this sketchy view of Luis and Richard suggest that both of them were something more than “social activists” a phrase that sounds more as if they took up such activities as a epicurean taste or hobby., or because they were born men of color they fell into some fashionable runs of au courant politics. Both of them tried to live a righteous life. Luis was more of a skeptic in spiritual matters; the genial Richard found some resonance in the more traditional means of focusing on righteousness. Both of them were very intelligent but of the two, Luis gave righteousness a more traditionally philosophic turn of thought Luis was very focused on the way organized human life tries to make people dependent on such implosive juggernauts.

If one took up the more expansive sides of this dependence in the West one made plenty of money but was always in debt, lived in places were one needed a car and paid out mortgage money and expense of having car, took up fashionable amusements one didn't want or have any hunger to explore, looked to make more money if they had garnered some lucre rather than how to spend it to make one's world more beautiful, attractive and so on. This is hardly a critique limited to describe people of color accommodating such a omnivore of a political machine. .

We do live in a country where righteousness and the usual Western corruptions live side by side without taking up war in a severe way. Such wars and accommodations have a long history of course. It's the theatre of the Bible, of Talmudic descriptions of living in Rome, of some sense of frustration at received ideas of humanism well known in the Heian Age in ninth century Japan.

The genius of the West as Luis would be the first to assert is to give some of this sense of being a punk bought off at a generous and fair price for everyone. The dependence itself. It had a different superficial character than cozening somebody picking bananas in the tropics, it was fueled by less muscle, but pitched hard by the system to be an embrace of a life that made one a slave of tastes one didn't have, amusements that were not one's choice, hungers that were all the more severe their autocratic commands because they were trivial and artificial. If one wants to live a righteous life in the middle of such an empire one might very well end up with the kind of existence Luis and Richard had. Both of them were frugal, had nothing much materially, and spent much of their waking hours promoting a universal kind of humanism, almost always for no pay at all.

It seems to me Luis should be remembered as a champion of that sort of righteousness. . ,

Home Planet News Online Feature Poet/Writer Matthew Paris

Home Planet News Online

Feature Poet/Writer Matthew Paris