Harlem’s High-tech Homeless: Poet communicates through rhyming couplets and email
Their eyes met for little more than a second. “Cool” J.C. Rocwell acted instinctively. He sprang from where he sat and fell into step with the white-haired passer-by. At 6’2”, Rocwell towered above his new friend.
“Hello buddy,” he said as he intercepted the man’s path and pulled papers from the black Polo Sport bag slung around his shoulder. He thrust the bundle towards the captive observer. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you like poetry?”
When Rocwell returned to the bench outside the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building on West 125th Street, he clutched a crisply folded bill. He smiled, showing an expanse of pink gum and the quarter inch gap between his two front teeth. Then, just as spontaneously as his grin had appeared, his jaw slackened, his lower lip drooped and the smile vanished. His eyes recovered their former seriousness as he peered over the small, oval spectacles that rested midway down his nose.
“Did you just see that?” he said. “That guy just gave me ten dollars. You know why? He wanted to make a human connection.”
Rocwell has been making connections like this for years. It’s the way he’s been able to make ends meet and defy the stereotype of a homeless man in Harlem as a bum or a drug addict.
“I don’t hang around with the homeless because I’m not like them,” he said. “I know how to take care of myself.”
* * *
But, at 61, Rocwell allows it is getting harder and harder to continue the life of a poet on the street.
In his native New Haven, Rocwell had sat in on some classes at Yale University where he had a job scouring dishes at the college’s cafeterias. Lessons he learned at Yale helped his career as a street poet in New York. “I learned how to take a theme and create a story,” he said.
“I had a concept in the ‘70s. It was a big hit in the subway,’ said Rocwell, continuing in his own staccato rhyming style, “Everybody’s high on faxes! / Commuters are high on the daily news/ People who like music get high listening to the blues/ Midgets get high in elevated shoes/ I get high on different peoples’ views and listening to the blues too, and I get high on you.”
In 1972, Rocwell arrived in New York, age 26, to pursue a career as a poet and musician. There he met “D-Train” poet Rich Bartee and together they founded the “Poettential Unlimited Theatre.” Located on the third floor of a commercial building on West 125th, the theater became Rocwell’s first home in New York City.
“He and Rich Bartee were very closely associated in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” said poet and essayist Louis Reyes Rivera, who described Rocwell and Bartee riding the subway preaching about poetry and love.
Rivera emphasized the importance of the Poettential Unlimited Theater as a platform to showcase talent in the early ‘70s.
“Black poetry took a resurgent stand in the ‘70s with institutions like Poettential,” said Rivera. “Poetry has always proliferated in spite of politics.”
However, for Poettential, economic realities prevailed. No longer able to keep up with the rent the theater closed its doors for good in 1978. With nowhere else to go, Rocwell became a drifter, renting cheap rooms when he could or relying on friends to let him sleep on a couch. Often he sought shelter on buses, subway trains and in abandoned buildings.
For a stint, Rocwell got by as a saxophone player in the subway before money got tight and he pawned the instrument. For a while he dressed as a clown and earned a living as a children’s entertainer using the name Chili Pepper Pearl-Lee Winkle. More recently he has returned to poetry, which he sells on the street or in the subway for a donation.
“When people pay for something, they pay attention to it,” he said. “If they didn’t pay for it, they’d throw it away.”
When he’s not selling his poems, Rocwell spends his time writing them at various city libraries, or, three times a week, at the Verizon Technology and Education Center in Harlem. James D. Carter, the center’s director, recalled that Rocwell had a functioning email account before coming to the center.
Since printing is not free at the Verizon Center, Rocwell must go to a library to avail of the free printing. Often he takes the bus to the library at Morningside Heights, swiping himself onboard with the metrocard bought with his poetry money.
“Normally on a Saturday I’m one of the first people in there so I can use the computers before it gets crowded,” he said. “I’m homeless. I haven’t got no place else to go. Sometimes when it rains, I come in the library.”
Experts say homelessness is becoming an increasing problem in New York. Lindsay Davis of the Coalition for the Homeless estimated that more than 35,700 people sleep in city shelters each night.
* * *
A 2007 report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimated that the older population will mushroom between 2010 and 2030 when the “baby boom” generation reaches “older age.” Rocwell will be one of the estimated 40 million Americans age 65 or over in 2010.
With population numbers going up across the economic spectrum, inevitably so will the number of older Americans — classified as those 65 or above — living under the poverty line.
The growth of this particular cross section of society poses new and complex challenges to policymakers, families, businesses and health care providers. In its most recent strategic plan, the Social Security Administration cited increased beneficiaries one of its major future challenges.
Sometimes Rocwell takes the M102 bus from 125th Street to Malcolm X Boulevard and West 139th Street. From here he can walk to the Central Harlem Senior Center.
Inside the center on 140th Street, Rocwell meandered down a corridor that smelled of disinfectant. A mop in a yellow bucket of sudless water provided evidence of the smell. At the end of the hall, he entered a large room through the already open door, and positioned himself at the table where four other guests were already seated. A television rested on a bracket above the doorway and showed a movie with close captioning.
“Whose movie is that?” said an elderly lady looking up at the television through her thick spectacles. “Too much cussing. Nobody want to hear that.”
A large woman who wore a plastic apron and thick braids leisurely walked around the table and deposited a lunch tray in front of a frail woman with thinning hair.
* * *
Lunch consisted of two slices of bread, meatballs, noodles, and a salad served with milk and tea and, for dessert, pineapple chunks in a polystyrene cup.
“Aren’t you sick of meatballs?” said the bespectacled woman to no-one in particular. “We had meatballs twice last week.”
Rocwell comes here because the food is good and lunch only costs a dollar. The center also offers nutrition seminars, recreational activities, and computer classes. His only complaint is that the senior center is “full of old people.” Rocwell’s lifestyle all these years has required him to stay active and alert — he said doesn’t feel old like them.
“That’s Ms. Campbell,” he said scooping up a plastic forkful of noodles and nodding in the direction of a woman who sat knitting in the corner. “And that’s Pierre — he’s been all around the world.”
Across the room, an elderly Pierre sat with Jack who had recently come into the room to claim his “cussing” movie. They talked about downloading movies from the Internet onto rewritable CDs.
At the library in Morningside Heights one afternoon, Rocwell selected a volume of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry and opened it at the first poem, “Mariana.” “Look at the way he writes,” he said. “So visual. Look how he rhymes ‘latch’ and ‘thatch’:
“The broken sheds look’d sad and strange/ Unlifted was the clinking latch/ Weeded and worn the ancient thatch,’” Rocwell read. Then he lifted his eyes from the page, “‘and then the flick’d match set the whole place a’ fire!’ That’s how I’d finish that poem. That’s the kind of poet I am.”
* * *
After he had replaced the book on the shelf, Rocwell used his library card — registered to an old address at a homeless shelter — to reserve a computer so that he could work on his poetry.
The 11-inch slips of paper that Rocwell prints his poems on are decorated with smiley-faces, hearts, stars, and musical notes. Occasional words of text are selected, and emboldened or the font changed, to make for a more interesting read, said Rocwell. A variation of Rich Bartee’s mantra “More Hugging, Less Mugging” ran vertically along the boarder of the poem: “More Hugging, Less Bugging.”
Even though Poettential Unlimited Theater it is no longer a physical space, and Rich Bartee — fellow founder and friend — has been dead since 2003, the theater continues to exist as a concept, a “theater of the mind,” as Rocwell is fond of telling his unsuspecting patrons.
But Harlem today is very different place to Harlem 35 years ago. If rents on 125th Street were expensive then, they are — many locals would argue — now extortionate.
While New York may have dispensed with its mean streets image, competition underground is tough. In the subway Rocwell must jostle with Mexican guitarróns for performing rights and compete to be heard over MP3 players.
“I’m older, everything’s changed. People have all sorts of devices over their ears now and more taken by other stuff,” he said. “In the ‘70s it was beautiful. They didn’t have all these other devices, they were looking for entertainment.”
Rocwell stood on Broadway, outside the Morningside Heights library, scanning the faces of passers-by, searching for favorable recipients to his poetry.
* * *
A young woman strolled past sipping coffee from a paper cup. Their eyes met for little more than a second. Rocwell acted instinctively. “Excuse me, miss,” he said as he fell into step beside her, “Do you have a minute? Do you like poetry?”
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