Harlem-based writer Latasha Natasha Diggs is no “remedy poet.” She hears them all the time at readings, poets whose “personal remedy is to get up on the platform and read some of their pieces. Someone who’s just releasing their opinions and emotions, who’s in it for the moment. They just want to tell about which man left them or why the system is so fucked up towards the black man or just some straight-up pussy shit. Everybody writes from a personal perspective, but it gets out of hand. OK, I see you’re angry.”
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“I grew up partially Dominican and partly Puerto Rican,” she says. “There’s a lot of animosity between those two groups within the Latino community, to the point where they can’t stand each other. When I was growing up, before high school, my friends and I didn’t acknowledge it. I knew Elizabeth was Dominican and Denise was Puerto Rican and Toni was Puerto Rican, and they knew I was black. Yet we saw our similarities, not our differences.”
Diggs joined a poetry collective called Soup, whose members performed monthly with a band and addressed a different topic each time. “Those shows were wild,” she recalls, “and there was a freestyle off-the-head segment. Here I was reciting poems, and this person scatting, and behind was Ad-Rock on the bass and some cat on vibes.” After Soup she joined the more hip-hop-oriented Speechcraft 101, in which members read their work instead of relying on drama and memorization. It disbanded last year, and now Diggs is part of SuperNovae, a performance art collective.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Aaron Fineman.
