The New Inter-American Poetry

This chapter shows how revolutionary enthusiasms, experimental magazines, and translation fueled inter-American relations in the 1960s on the countercultural left. Previous critics note the Boom, but most US accounts of the period’s poetry center on the intra-national polarities (“margin versus mainstream” or “raw versus cooked”) inflamed by Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960). The chapter instead describes a larger formation called “the new inter-American poetry,” recovering dialogues best emblematized by the hemispheric little magazine El Corno Emplumado, and the reciprocations engendered between the works of rebellious Beats and revolutionary Cuban barbudos, Paul Blackburn and Julio Cortázar, Clayton Eshleman and Javier Heraud, Pablo Neruda among his English translators, and others. These exchanges were not without their blind spots, and the chapter concludes by comparing the communities imagined by Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964) to poems by contemporaneous visitors to Manhattan such as Mario Benedetti (Uruguay) and Alcides Iznaga (Cuba).