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Poet Laureate of the Barrio

By Genevieve Leone

"I'm about to read my past. I'm going to go back through time, and I want you all to come with me: to hear the hears, see the sees and feel the feels."

Reading from a collection of unpublished poetry, as well as his autobiographical work "Down These Mean Streets,' poet Piri Thomas led his Press Club audience on a journey back through time to the world of Spanish Harlem-Thomas' home both as a child and as a teenager.

The journey taken by the self-proclaimed "poet laureate of the barrio" and his audience on August 14 was marked with poignant, and often painful, images: broken radiators and ice-cold apartments, gang wars, arms pockmarked with the scars of heroin addiction.

But the journey also included happier moments, such as Thomas' memory of his mother warming up a bitter winter day with tales of her native Puerto Rico.

To Thomas, the barrio was really three worlds. "There was the world of home, where we were loved," recalls Thomas. "Then there was the world of school, where you were lucky if you found a teacher not indifferent to the hopes and aspirations of children."

Then there was the world of the streets, a world that was "strong, wrong and very, very long."

It was also an isolated world, untouched by other seemingly monumental events. Pearl Harbor meant that Thomas' father could at last find work in an airplane factory, but otherwise World War II had little relevance to ghetto life. "I still copped girls' drawers, blew dope and wore a piece" recalls Thomas. "Nothing changed on the streets."

Thomas credits his family for providing a bedrock of loving support, but it was his own anger that helped him survive. "Get angry, get hating angry and you won't be scared," says Thomas in "Down These Mean Streets."

"What have you got now? Nothing. What will you ever have? Nothing-unless you cop for yourself."

But street life eventually caught up with Thomas. At the age of 20, Thomas was sentenced to seven years in Sing Sing for armed robbery.

Thomas says he was not born a criminal. "I was born beautiful from my mother's wound. But I was born into a criminal world, a world of hatred, racism and bigotry."

But there were lessons to be learned in jail. "In Sing Sing, I found out that the cruelest prison is one's own mind. A lot of people never went to prison but they do time everyday" says Thomas.

Thomas began to find his freedom through his writing, and through it he began to express not only anger but also his hope for a just world.

Fifty-eight years old, but with a child-like smile and loving manner, Thomas acknowledges his contradictory nature. "If I see danger approaching, I'll jump all over it with my fists out."

But his poems and prose reflect his literary pursuit of world peace and freedom from oppression.

"People say to me, 'Piri, what you want is utopia.' I say, what's wrong with that?"