Poetry of the Americas

"The Poetry of the Americas offers a lively and detailed history of relations among poets in the US and Latin America, spanning three decades from the Good Neighbor diplomacy of World War II through the Cold War cultural policies of the late 1960s. Connecting works by Martín Adán, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Jorge Luis Borges, Julia de Burgos, Ernesto Cardenal, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, José Lezama Lima, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, Octavio Paz, Heberto Padilla, Wallace Stevens, Derek Walcott, William Carlos Williams, and many others, Feinsod reveals how poets of many nations imagined a "poetry of the Americas" that linked multiple cultures, even as it reflected the inequities of the inter-American political system. This account offers a rich contextual study of the state-sponsored institutions and the countercultural networks that sustained this poetry, from Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs to the mid-1960s avant-garde scene in Mexico City. This innovative literary-historical project enables new readings of such canonical poems as Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and Neruda's "The Heights of Macchu Picchu," but it positions these alongside lesser known poetry, translations, anthologies, literary journals and private correspondences culled from library archives across the Americas. The Poetry of the Americas thus broadens the horizons of reception and mutual influence--and of formal, historical, and political possibility--through which we encounter midcentury American poetry, recasting traditional categories of "U.S." or "Latin American" literature within a truly hemispheric vision. "-- "This book narrates exchanges between English- and Spanish-language poets in the American hemisphere from the late 1930s through the rise of the 1960s. It doing so, it contributes to a crucial current of humanistic inquiry: the effort to write a cosmopolitan literary history adequate to the age of globalization. Building on correspondence and manuscripts from collections in Europe and the Americas, the book first traces the material contours of an evolving literary network that exceeds the conventional model of "the two Americas." These relations depend on changing contexts: an era of state-sponsored transnationalism, from the wartime intensification of Good Neighbor diplomacy, to the Cold War cultural policy programs of the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s; a prosperous market for translations of Latin American poetry in the US; and a growing alternative print sphere of bilingual vanguard journals such as El Corno Emplumado (Mexico City, 1962-1969). As the book articulates these histories of exchange, it also theorizes how poets employ the resources of language to transform popular images of the hemisphere from a locus of political conflict into a venue of supranational cultural citizenship. Feinsod describes how inter-Americanism was enacted through diplomatic structures of literary address, multilingual writing, and appeals to a shared indigenous heritage through the genre of the meditation on ruins. By tracing the coevolution of midcentury poetry with the geopolitics of the hemisphere, the book expands existing literary histories of the period through revelatory comparative readings supported by archival findings"--