The Problem of Seduction: Willie Perdomo's reading at Cornell

It’s coming around to December, we’re well in the heart of a beautiful Ithaca fall now, and my first term at Cornell is coming to an end. It has been a lovely term. I’d like to close the circle by the returning to the very beginning of the semester, and recall Willie Perdomo’s fall poetry reading on August 30. In some ways this piece has been difficult to write, in some ways, the language falls short of what I really am trying to say, because it is difficult to go into political terrain without often being misinterpreted as being over-the-top.

Seductive, but problematic--is how I would describe Perdomo’s fall reading.

How can one not be seduced by Perdomo? He emanates a certain electricity, his voice transmits physicality and desire, when he breaks out into Spanish, every word he touches (for one who can’t understand Spanish) sounds surprising and foreign. He is funny and sexy, and lines like “if you want to be loved on the/ first night in more than one / position you have to help with / the cooking” (“Ten Pound Draw”) are immediate crowd-pleasers. The audience seemed a little drunk that night on Perdomo, certainly helped by Professor Ernesto Quiñonez’s generous speech: “Perdomo will use curse words. He will use Spanglish. He will use slang. But he will not corrupt the language.”

What is an uncorrupted language? What political implications are there in this obsession with a notion of “purity”? What are the implications of saying that a “pure language” is that of “ghetto” poetry (to borrow Perdomo’s own words in “Spotlight at the Nuyorican Poets Café)? The attaching of certain values (like “pure”) to certain types of identity poetry can encourage a type of poetry that promotes an us versus other split within the poetry community, and the larger community.

Of Smoking Lovely, The Nation writes, “Perdomo isn’t talking about the self-imposed exile of an artist, but a whole community that’s been disenfranchised against its will.” By exiling itself from the mainstream, does Perdomo’s work champion its position at the periphery or reinforce own marginalization? Does Willie Perdomo commit himself to self-exile and when his poetry becomes inextricably linked with East Harlem, where he is “home/ in the streets of this poem/ where I’m stuck” (Smoking Lovely, “Papo’s Ars Poetica”)?

I wished I were in some smoky, tired, slam poetry café in New York City, rather than in the imposing Hollis E. Cornell auditorium. When the initial energy and sense of novelty dissipated, I felt uncomfortable for Perdomo, as though he was on exhibit, a subject to be studied for race studies, Latin-American studies or some critical theory class. When the poet speaks, something takes place in the exchange between the poet and the audience. Academia is not entirely guiltless in this process by which a poet becomes compartmentalized and commodified. I felt uncomfortable for Perdomo because I know he was aware that that audience of Ivy league kids were just seeing how they could place him into nice literary theories they’d learnt in class:

I was just a poet
Wanting to read a poem
The first night I came here.
Since then
I have become a street poet
Then somebody’s favorite urban poet
A new jack hip-hop rap poet
A spoken word artist (“Spotlight at the Niyorican Poets Café”)

When he said “but…my spit is ready made real,” there was an odd moment of power and defiance against society’s and academia’s commodification of him as a poet. In that moment, Perdomo could belong to himself. Not a “ghetto poet”, not a “street poet.” But one wonders whether the audience allowed him to be himself.

Willie Perdomo was exciting and seductive, but how Willie Perdomo was framed was ultimately very problematic.