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  • Diplomat-Poets and the Pan-American Dream
  • Gayle Rogers (bio)
Harris Feinsod, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxiii + 413 pp. $65.00.

A Pan-American cultural union: it has been a dream of everyone from dispossessed poets to corporate titans for over a century now. It has been claimed as a living reality dozens of times and it has been lamented as a “geographical hallucination” (as the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman put it in 1939) equally as many times, if not more (28). The battles over this internally divergent, always controversial, and constantly retheorized space remain visible in our present moment, whether in border politics or in the debates over “gringpo” that circulate among poets. When we examine these battles, a question recurs: what would make such a union, in the words of Kendrick Lamar, “really, really real”?1 What kinds of poetry, for instance, would compose this space as an actuality, and how would we know it if they did? Would such poetry operate primarily through form, through translation, through networks of circulation, or through something altogether different? What would distinguish such a union, in any moment, from the false starts and failed pronouncements that litter the poetic-historical past?

The central concern of Harris Feinsod’s remarkable first book, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures, is less [End Page 585] the ontological character or facticity of a Pan-American poetic space and more “the idea of a poetry of the Americas” (2). This “idea” existed intermittently in many shapes between 1938 and 1973, when intersecting lyric practices, diplomatic agendas, poets’ lives, and international congresses gave it the rough contours that Feinsod recovers through the mostly Spanish- and English-language poetry that it motivated. Sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, and sometimes unconsciously, poets across the Americas created “an expression of geopolitical desire, a vision of an alternate world order, and the manifestation of a network of writers and institutions that stand behind poems” (2). They did so in the variously charged political environments of Good Neighbor policies, communist ferment, anti communist witch hunts, and protracted revaluations of the pre-World War II generation of modernist poets. Thus we find a number of intellectual, often self-reflexive and personal poets skirting the line between employing and critiquing caricatures of Yankee dominance and South American communist vitriol, all in an effort to rethink the relationship between poetic form and history. In this book, writers attempt first and foremost “to make poetic forms into cultural-diplomatic bulwarks against the perceived blunders of political inter-Americanism”; their mixed, misread, or even malicious efforts are Feinsod’s point of departure (4).

Rather than offering a neatly delineated geo-poetic map of belonging, Feinsod masterfully tells an overarching story of the entwined development of the poetry of the Americas and the “modern inter-American political system” through poems and their archives―a story that is impressively wide-ranging in its geography, contents, forms, protagonists, and antagonists (2). Granular detail and precision bolster this story’s narrative force. The efforts to create a Pan-American cultural union were a shifting but coherent generator that alternately inspired and impeded poetry, Feinsod shows: the idea of the poetry of the Americas “is revealed in the very form of verbal art, where it arises as a matter of polygenesis, or proliferates along ambiguous lines of causation, structured by the hemispheric situation in which poetic language transforms imaginings of the Americas from a scene of uneven modernization into a supranational venue of verbal creativity” (6). The book’s story, therefore, follows and reflects these asymmetries, gaps, and [End Page 586] multiplicities of unevenness, for in reality, “the historical rhythm of inter-Americanism’s political and poetic coevolution is neither linear nor progressive: it is full of flashpoints and lacunae, peaks and gullies, false promises and shallow fulfillments” (7).

Poetry of the Americas treats dozens of figures, from household names like Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Octavio Paz, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson, to some invaluable voices whom Feinsod amplifies―in particular, Margaret Randall, Dudley Fitts, Julia de Burgos, Jorge...

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