The poetry of the Americas : from good neighbors to countercultures / Harris Feinsod.

"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."-- Provided by publisher.

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Cover; Series; The Poetry of the Americas; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Illustrations; Series Editors' Foreword; Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; A Note on the Text; Introduction; Hazarding the Poetry of the Americas; The Poetry of the Americas: A Genealogy; Integrationist Literary History; Cultural Diplomacy from Good Neighbors to Countercultures; Six Chapters in the Poetry of the Americas; 1. Hemispheric Solidarities: Wartime Poetry and the Limits of the Good Neighbor; The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-​American Poetry; Bridging the Hemisphere: Carrera Andrade's Hart Crane

Minority Islands: Hughes, Frank, de Moraes, and the Poem of Racial DemocracyBetween Dissidence and Diplomacy: Neruda, Bishop, Burgos; William Carlos Williams and the Ardor of Puerto Rico; Lysander Kemp and the Gunboat Good Neighbor; 2. A Xenoglossary for the Americas; Foreign Words and Bloc Politics; Stevens's "Lingua Franca et Jocundissima"; Post-​Symbolists; Lezama's Citations; Borges and the Dawn of English; 3. The Ruins of Inter-​Americanism; Privileged Observatories: A Midcentury Culture of Pre-​Columbian Ruins; Dead Mouths: Neruda at Machu Picchu

Repossessed Dynamics: Olson and Barlow among StonesMechano Hells and Mayan Isms: Ginsberg, Lamantia, Cardenal; Hidden Doors: Ferlinghetti and Adán at Machu Picchu; 4. The New Inter-​American Poetry; Beats and Barbudos; Cortázar, Blackburn, and All the Village Cronopios; The True Pan-​American Union: Margaret Randall and El Corno Emplumado; Transnational Martyrology: Heraud, Quena, Eshleman; Neruda, Deep Image, and the Politics of Translation; Manhattan Poems Beyond the New York School; 5. Questions of Anticommunism: Hemispheric Lyric in the 1960s; Bishop's First Anticommunist Shudder

Lowell's Imperial PhantasmagoriaWalcott in the Gulf; Padilla in Difficult Times; Stations in the Gulf; 6. Renga and Heteronymy: Cosmopolitan Poetics after 1967; Go Home, Octavio Paz!; La Renga de Occidente; Heteronyms and Literary History; Notes; Index.

Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on September 27, 2017).

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