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. C… - Lois Elaine Griffith

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.

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

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.