Lois Griffith

"1973, 74…when the Lower East Side landlords were letting buildings burn down just to get the insurance."

"the Cafe opened almost, how would you say, organically. That’s something I really learned in working with the Cafe and working with Miguel Algarín. Certainly you have an idea of something you want to create, but allow it to happen organically. Don’t try to force it into being. And it will happen if you, and this may sound corny, if you have a certain kind of spiritual alignment to the universe where you can see, you feel, you think, you speak to manifest. And it was like that. It really was."

"The concept behind the Cafe was to allow everyone who wanted to speak to have time and an audience to speak in public…hearing what Latino, Puerto Rican poets, artists, declamadores were doing made me value my own culture, my West Indian culture, that I had always kind of shoved to the back, wanting to be just like all the other Blacks here, no one to single me out."

"Those were the people who saw the need. Marvin and Mikey and Miguel. They were the people who started it."

"when you think about what theater really is, you can’t do theater alone. Theater by its very nature is a collaborative effort. And that’s how we were. Everybody has a part to play, either on stage or behind."

"Some people are either unable to or unwilling to take responsibility for where they are. They have a past. They have ancestors. Here in the States, we don’t pay too much homage to our ancestors. And at the Cafe we were always very conscious that we don’t come from nothing...There’s something in Latin American culture and Native American culture—and Caribbean culture too—we have no problems in conversing with the dead. We have no problems in talking about the ancestors and the blood in conversation. That is not comfortable in American culture."

"I think that’s one thing, too, about the Nuyorican. The desire for people to want to come together to be in community, to want to be a part. In those early days, on 6th Street, there were some poets that used to get there early, before the place even opened, to trade their words off in a very serious way. “I wrote this last night. You have to check it out!” That kind of passion, and it wasn’t something to joke about. And everyone understood, “Yeah, this is our community. This is what we do. We’re serious about this poetry, about these words. Yeah, I want to hear that poem! No, I don’t like that poem you wrote. Let me tell you the line that doesn’t work.” In really serious ways like that. And I don’t see that anywhere now. And especially in the last years where I was really active at the Cafe, everyone came in and just wanted to be a star. And I shouldn’t lay blame, but Russell Simmons who came around with the Def Poets and all that. “Come with me. I’ll take you to Broadway! I’ll put you on TV! Everyone will see you on TV!” It kind of polluted the intent of what we were doing. That kind of twisted the mindset, just undermined the real purpose and value of the writing, of the creative act. Because you don’t do it to be on TV. You do it for you, because you have to do it! Initially, that was the intent. We have to have this community! We have to share our voices. Nobody else out here is listening, so we’ll make our community. And that’s what it was about."

"One of the things that really prompted my retirement from the day-to-day work, after 35 years or so at the Cafe, was seeing young people, especially coming to the Slam, with stars in their eyes thinking, “Oh! Here is a mecca of poetry. Here is a place where I can recite and there will be agents in the audience! And they’re going to hear me! And I’m going to be a star!” I got sick of young people not reading. Not only the young people that I encountered at the Cafe but those I taught. I was teaching at Borough of Manhattan Community College. I taught there for 27 years. English Composition, Introduction to Literature, and such. They don’t read! It drives me crazy! How can you come into my creative writing class, and one of the first questions I asked the students was, “What was the last book you read?” And some of them had never read a book through cover to cover...Ever. Or if they did, it’s because they had to do it in high school. None of them ever picked up James Baldwin. James who? Or Amiri Baraka. Who? They don’t know the artists, the writers, whose heads they have their feet on. And it drove me bananas! And you come into my creative writing class and you’re telling me, “I’m going to write a book.” And I’m going, “Where’s your journal? Where are your entries every day?” That kind of sensibility that this writing thing kind of happens overnight, “I’m just going to sit down and write my autobiography.” All well and good. But you have to learn the craft. It’s an art."

"And there is Lois Griffith just inside, the spirit of the place."