Review Essay on *The Poetry of the Americas*

The poems of Octavio Paz frequently involve manipulation of a conceptually dense, abstract if sensuously figured mixture of history, mythology, and philosophy.  He took language as an autonomous, pregiven realm that shaped emotion and action of those through whom words spoke.  Linguistic structures might represent, but they did not reflect or express pre-existing external realities.  Language as such was a force that contained consciousness.  Words had to be ripped from their usual contexts to reveal how their internal relations controlled the life of the community that used them.  Poems like “Himno entre ruinas” (Hymn among the ruins) responded to the western humanist values so central to the poet’s intellectual and personal formation as a fatal mixture of classical and Christian obsessions with death and domination that had accreted over the millenia like the imposing monuments dotting the European landscape.  The ruins of previous built environments were a record of the chaos and violence at the very core of European culture, all quite alive in the images and stories circulating in literature, art, and films.  His meditations on Mexican history explored a different type of patriarchal violence, also deforming and dangerously receptive to the violent idealism of the Spanish invaders.  The particular synthesis of cultural legacies, Paz imagined, sapped Mexico’s ability to exploit its wealth and provide a decent standard of living for its people.  Patterns of domination and subservience defined all relationships in the country, political and personal.  Paz’s questionable historical interpretations inspired a large critical literature from experts who knew the sources he so freely interpreted, but also from others, less erudite, but who resisted what he had to say about lo mexicano.

His work would seem an unlikely inspiration for protestors in the 1960s working to democratize and radicalize Mexican society.  Yet in 1968, as student protests against government suppression of political opponents and overly independent trade union leaders, became a daily occurrence, tens of thousands of students marched through the streets of Mexico City chanting lines from Octavio Paz’s poem “El cántaro roto” (The broken jug), a difficult and indeed depressing poem, that demonstrators nonetheless embraced as an accurate articulation of their understanding of Mexico’s history and their concerns for its future:

Dime, sequía, dime, tierra quemada, tierra de huesos remolidos, dime, luna agónica,

¿No hay agua,

hay sólo sangre, sólo hay polvo, sólo pisadas de pies desnudos sobre la espina…?

¿Sólo está vivo el sapo,

sólo reluce y brilla en la noche de México

el sapo verduzco,

sólo el cacique gordo de Cempoala es inmortal?

[Tell me, drought, tell me, burnt earth, earth of ground bones, tell me, dying moon,

Is there no water?

Is there only blood, only dust, only naked feet walking on spines…?

Is only the toad alive?

The gray-green toad

Alone shimmers and shines in the Mexican night?

Only the fat prince of Cermpoala is immortal?^[1]]

Paz resigned as Mexico’s ambassador to India to protest the massacre on October 2, 1968, of over 3000 students that the military gunned down in Mexico City’s Plaza of Three Cultures.  He became a national hero for a left, but he was not a poet who could ever serve as a tribune of the people.  None of his writing, not even his many essays, offers solutions for his nation’s problems beyond advising his readers they begin a lengthy process of detachment and contemplation that must occur both individually and collectively.  He believed that critical engagement with tradition, if successful, a contemplation that must begin specifically with poetry, reveals the particular repertory of images and stories that define a culture, that shape unconscious desires and the habitual reflexes constituting most practical activity.

In Mexico, paternalistic authoritarianism manipulated national myths to extract compliance, therefore, returning to myth and history intermingling and contaminating each other turned the most important tools of dictatorship against it and undermined its ability to shape how citizens think.  Advocating policies was not part of the province of poetry, a practice of negativity, Paz argued, based in imagination.  Language as an autonomous realm was like a well reaching down into hidden reservoirs of feelings and responses to a world deeper than cultural repertories.  As a disciplined practice, poetry might transform the raw materials imagination retrieved from everything a society repressed and despised into visible alternatives that become the basis for innovation and radical disruption of established ways of feeling.  To the degree that poets (anybody who allowed dream to speak through language) felt coerced into expressing existing ideas it became a moral aberration contributing to the exercise of power, which inevitably culminated in violence.  Poetry has to remain a spiritual vocation of understanding and a pure expression of imagination as negation of whatever appears or it ceases to be an exercise in world-making.

A radically different conception of poetry is found in the work of Paz’s contemporary Pablo Neruda.  His humanism was less abstract than Paz’s, more grounded in his identification, as the son of a railroad worker, with the Chilean working class.  Responding to the brutality he witnessed in Spain as fascists overthrew a democratically elected republic, Neruda joined the Chilean Communist Party.  He rose to the party’s central committee and during a period when his party was legal, a northern mining district elected him to sit in the national Senate.  When Neruda gave public readings, tens of thousands came to hear him.  Not only in Chile, but everywhere in the Americas.  Feinsod writes of a reading in São Paulo, Brazil,

in 1945, with 130,000 in attendance to listen to a poet whose work had to be translated into Portuguese for the content to be fully comprehended.  Originally famous for the sensuous love poetry he wrote as a young surrealist, as a communist activist, he stood in the public arena as the public voice for the impoverished and disenfranchised majority.  His poem “Los enemigos” (The enemies) was (and remains) among his most quoted works, a powerful statement of rage at the massacre of striking workers and the use of death squads to hunt down communist organizers, in a country that congratulated itself on its tradition of rule of law and democratically elected government.

Por esos muertos, nuestros muertos,
pido castigo.

Para los que de sangre salpicaron la patria,
pido castigo.

Para el verdugo que mandó esta muerte,
pido castigo.

Para el traidor que ascendió sobre el crimen,
pido castigo.

Para el que dio la orden de agonía,
pido castigo.

Para los que defendieron este crimen,
pido castigo.

No quiero que me den la mano
empapada con nuestra sangre.
Pido castigo.

[For these deaths, our dead,

I demand punishment.

For those who poured blood on the country,

I demand punishment.

For the executioner who ordered the killings,

I demand punishment.

For the traitor promoted for his role in the crime,

I demand punishment.

For he who gave the order to shoot,

I demand punishment.

For those who defended the crime,

I demand punishment.

I refuse to accept extended hands

Drenched with our blood.

I demand punishment.]

Speaking for the victims and their survivors, Neruda’s poem is no window for self-examination.  His statement is theirs, as blunt, straightforward, and brutal as the experience of the Chilean people.  His audience already knew what had to be done.  What they needed was affirmation, provided in the insistent heartbeat of “pido castigo” (I demand punishment).  For those who had questions about the facts or about what should be done, the poem served as a slap in the face asking simply, Which side are you on?  Neruda gave his nation a poem declaring war on the enemies of the people, who by definition were enemies of the nation.  There is nothing subtle here, only the simplicity of an assured and determined conviction, prepared even to take up arms if necessary to secure justice, equality, and national self-determination.

Harris Feinsod’s excellent, felicitously written exploration of two generations of poets in the United States and Spanish-speaking America has much to say about the contrasts between Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda as poets and as public figures.  Both won the Nobel Prize for Literature, their awards signaling shifting priorities in the global Republic of Letters.  Neruda’s prize in 1971 affirmed international support for, in the words of the prize committee’s citation, “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams” in the face of the brutality of U.S. domination.  For the committee, awarding the prize signaled their opposition to the war in Vietnam and their hope that Salvador Allende’s tragically short-lived administration in Chile would provide a model for a genuinely democratic socialism.  Two decades later, the award citation for Octavio Paz’s prize in 1990 saluted his “intelligence and humanistic integrity” and his reputation as a voice opposing authoritarianism, whether of the right or left. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the concurrent restoration of democracy in Chile and other Latin American countries, Paz’s body of work suggested a redemptive, but still critical model for literature to assist a supposedly unifying world confront the historical traumas that had made the twentieth century so deadly.

Feinsod examines how poets in both Spanish- and English-speaking America negotiated the tension between contrasting conceptions of literature exemplified in the work of Paz and Neruda, which intersected through most of the twentieth century with two competing political approaches to continental unity: liberal pan-Americanism connecting the sovereign republics of the western hemisphere through bureaucratic exchange programs organized and financed by the United States versus revolutionary socialist nationalism, which after 1959 required uncompromising commitment to the Cuban revolution and identification with popular resistance to oppression wherever people took up the struggle against corrupt local elites who sold their peoples’ wealth to foreign exploiters.  Needing to trace the intersection of political and aesthetic commitments in poetry, Feinsod gives equal attention to both historical and formal questions.  He analyzes a wide range of archival sources to reconstruct the conditions shaping the writing, publication, dissemination, and reception of poems in the United States, Spanish-speaking America, and to a lesser degree the Anglophone Caribbean.  He also engages in extensive close readings of major works, for as he puts it,“the structure of relations between poets of the Americas and inter-American politics … is revealed in the very form of verbal art” (6).

The political story begins with the antifascist alliance of liberals and communists formed in the late 1930s.  For poets, the key moment when writers of different opposing political tendencies came together was the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers, held in Madrid in 1937, a meeting that both Paz and Neruda attended.  The defeat of the republican cause in Spain in 1939 followed by the collapse of France in 1940 solidified the antifascist front, led in the western hemisphere by the United States whose cultural affairs experts relied on “humanitarian sentiment” and vague ideas of critical humanism to provide a positive, if superficial cultural façade for the alliance.  With the defeat of Germany in 1945, the United States government made anticommunism the bedrock of both foreign and domestic policy.  Paz and many others, aware of Stalin’s crimes and suspicious of how democratic their countries’ communists actually were, went along.  Neruda and many others said no, America must free itself from its ever-present legacies of slavery and exploitation!

As Feinsod tells the story, postwar anti-communism isolated U.S. and Latin American poets from each other until 1959, when enthusiasm for the Cuban revolution brought many writers to Havana.  Revolutionary hopes and illusions spread across the continent.^[2]  Anticommunism is a central theme in the book, deployed to interpret work not typically understood within the political contests of the mid-twentieth century. Feinsod states that his goals were, “to recover the spectacle of anticommunist maneuverings behind beloved volumes of poetry such as [Robert] Lowell’s For the Union Dead, [Elizabeth] Bishop’s Questions of Travel, and [Derek] Walcott’s The Gulf; to explore the chimerical and contradictory international careers of poets…; and to highlight the wide array of abortive associations between ‘New American’ poets, their Latin American contemporaries, and institutions of cultural diplomacy” (324).

Feinsod’s treatment of U.S. poets contrasts the pan-Americanism of interwar modernists with the “countercultural” ambitions of the postwar generation, whose intersection of political and aesthetic ideas long involved sympathy for Latin American struggles.  Feinsod deftly situates Donald Allen’s landmark anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960, published by Grove Press in 1960, in a hemispheric context.  Fully one-third of the poets represented in the volume were living in Latin America when Allen’s anthology appeared.  The representations of the United States in these poets’ work grew from interaction with literary movements in other American countries, and they learned to be more violent in their condemnation of the greed they increasingly held as characteristic of modern capitalism and consumerism.  Feinsod provides a Latin American context for Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl.” After leaving New York, but before arriving in California, Ginsberg had an extended stay in Mexico, where he studied Maya ruins and glyphs.  Recurrent references in “Howl” invoke ancient Mexican religion, providing him a set of figures for representing the destruction of “the best minds of my generation.” Doctors at a psychiatric hospital performing lobotomies in effect replicated priests of ancient America officiating at ritual human sacrifice.  In the process of his studies, Ginsberg confronted the poems Octavio Paz had written on Mexican and European ruins, as well as Pablo Neruda’s Las alturas de Macchu Picchu,^[3] a seminal work reimagining the future of the Americas as a return to the creativity cut short in the European invasion.

With the Cuban revolution, after 1959, all paths led to Havana, which Feinsod argues needs to be seen as important as San Francisco and New York City for the formation of the 1960s counterculture in the United States.  Beat poet LeRoi Jones traveled to Cuba in 1960 to attend an international conference on African diasporic culture.  It proved to be the first step in the politicization of his writing and his dramatic rebirth as Amiri Baraka, black nationalist poet and community organizer in Newark, New Jersey.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti returned from his visits to Cuba having met a wide range of younger, revolutionary poets that he had his City Lights Press publish in English.  Feinsod retells the oft-told story of Allen Ginsberg’s attraction to Cuba and the culture its young revolutionary artists and writers were developing, until, after he wrote about making love to Che Guevara, the Cuban government expelled him for his impolitic and impolite protest of the government’s sending gays to labor camps.  Even Robert Lowell was briefly attracted to Cuba because he experienced a country where writers were actively engaged with every aspect of their country’s independence struggle, a dramatic contrast to the United States, whose writers were trapped inside the superficial commercialism of the publishing industry or secluded into universities where literature was a subject for study in seminar rooms rather than a vocation to be lived.  Ultimately, all, even Amiri Baraka, whose disillusionment centered on the new Cuba’s (mis)understanding of race, proved to be “anticommunist.”

Given divergent understandings of poetry and the work it can do in a society, U.S. countercultural poets and Cuban revolutionary poets did not see eye to eye on much that was specific despite genuinely mutual enthusiasm and attraction.  Underlying an increasingly widening disjunction between U.S. and Latin American poets were epistemological differences that were possibly more important than ideological constructs like anticommunism.  Feinsod’s discussion of William Carlos Williams, for example, focuses on this singularly important domestic influence on the counterculture in his performance as a “cultural diplomat” whose contributions to inter-American relations were effectively “anticommunist,” a conclusion that makes sense only if poetry as an autonomous institution was inherently incompatible with Third International Marxism.  Williams translated contemporary Spanish-language writers he admired, including both Paz and Neruda.  Many of his translations first appeared in left-wing journals in the United States, periodicals like New Masses and Blast that were also important venues for his fiction and poetry, in large part because leftist editors were more interested than editors of more traditional literary journals in Williams’s representations of everyday life in the factory town of Paterson, New Jersey, where he had lived all his life and had a busy practice as a pediatrician.  Williams’s translations were important for the introduction of contemporary Spanish-language poetry into the United States, but if he was a “cultural diplomat” why did Williams turn down every invitation to participate in pan-American or Good Neighbor Policy tours, except for a single inter-American writers conference he attended in Puerto Rico in 1941, and that primarily because his mother had come to the United States from Puerto Rico and he wanted to visit his family remaining on the island.  Williams seldom attended either literary or political events.  As a busy doctor who was chief of pediatric service at two hospitals, he preferred to use his spare time to write.

Williams’s political and literary views centered on an assumption that old world customs brought to the Americas by European invaders, African slaves, and working-class immigrants had only superficially established themselves in their new homes.  They often tried to maintain familiar ways, but their everyday lives were in conflict with institutions based on extraction and exploitation.  Americans rebelled and looked for ways to escape controls that business and government imposed.  A perpetual, but unrealizable search for “freedom” he thought made American societies violent and unpredictable.  “Writing” was the conceptual tool he used to explore the conflict between the social and the instinctual, between ideological predispositions and experiential discoveries.  Writing and speech were never to be confused with “literature.”  Williams denied that there was or ever could be anything interesting in the concept of “American literature” or “American studies” as it developed in his lifetime.  Books taught and marketed as the classics of his nation’s literature were worthless because they reinforced the chasm separating everyday life from regulatory norms. Literature constructs imitations of experience that enshroud humans in a “fog of words,” effectively preventing them confronting each other or anything else they can touch. “Americans have never recognized themselves,” he wrote.  “How can they?  It is impossible until someone invent the original terms.  As long as we are content to be called by somebody else’s terms, we are incapable of being anything but our own dupes.”^[4]  How people struggle to express experience using words that are inadequate reveals a lived world that the classics of literature with their affirmations of well-known truths are intended to keep invisible.  Williams frequently used the term “new world” to describe the Americas, but the scope of the term can be gleaned from this short excerpt from his book Spring and All, published in 1923:

They enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all

save that they enter. All about them

the cold, familiar wind—

Williams was speaking in this passage of plants reappearing at the beginning of spring, while winter weather still blows, but the image pointed to larger processes uniting a variety of phenomena.  In any “new world,” instincts do their work with less interference. In human life, new situations lead to intensified conflict between the social and the instinctual. Society responds by inventing new types of controls on people and their environments; the effort is never truly successful. A continuing tug of war between society and nature leads to violence and resentment becoming normal parts of everyday life. Official language atrophies. Poetry, meaning in Williams’s framework language that expresses immediate experience, however confused it might be, might reopen the locks Americans have created for themselves by overpowering the thinness of official language with new words that circulate widely because they refresh people’s sense of wonder and contact. Williams listened for interesting turns of phrase from his patients, neighbors, friends, or strangers on the street, all struggling in an everyday way to make the language given them say more than it usually does. A poet interested in understanding the “new world” within which every generation lived should dig into and enjoy the stereotypes, clichés, and neologisms populating popular language and customs. The people might have no inherent wisdom, but their inventive if awkward ways of expressing themselves illuminate experiences that official culture ignored.

Williams’s position was distinct from, and in fundamental ways, antagonistic to the autonomy of literature that motivated Paz and many other writers on both sides of the Atlantic.  His idea of writing as a tool for symptomatic diagnosis did not fit well with Neruda’s conception of the poet as returning to working people their own thoughts and feelings in forms that help them act to create a new world based on their interests if only because his practical experience as a doctor taught him that very few people can describe their problems adequately, much less explain them.  The therapeutic underpinnings in Williams’s conception of writing separated his conception of poetry from both humanist and Marxist traditions.  For the beats and other post-World War II countercultural poets in the United States central to Feinsod’s story, Williams was an important—for many in the younger generation the paradigmatic—poet of the modernist generation, the misunderstood, previously secondary figure whose work and ideas about poetry authorized rebellion against the reactionary erudition of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.  His writing offered a stirring example of a poet working with the many varieties of spoken American English to reveal the chasms separating language and body.  Younger poets who formed the postwar counterculture embraced Williams and authorized his importance to American literature, as might be added did dozens of Latin American poets, which why I say “American” instead of U.S. poetry.  He helped them promote an idea of poetry as making manifest the instinctual rebellion against the murderous political and economic system governing the United States and the so-called “free world.”

These constructions were necessary to think of poetry as “counterculture” and contributed to the enthusiasm that the post-World War II generation of poets had for the Cuban revolution.  The term counterculture originated with Italian communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who deployed it in a larger argument that revolutionary movements need to create spaces where revolutionary subjects step forward in a process of reimagining humanity, society, and the cosmos, independently of the hegemonic ruling establishment that the revolution must destroy.  Every successful revolution requires autonomous institutions for expressing ideas and for trying out new ways of thinking.  As these institutions grow, they foster talent.  New cultural leaders emerge; some move into dominant institutions and use them to publicize countercultural (proto-revolutionary) values. The movement of the counterculture into cultural institutions that turned the interests of ruling elites into self-evident common sense was an important signal of the transition of the revolutionary movement from guerrilla to positional combat, turning established institutions into instruments of popular struggle. For Gramsci, and for the revolutionary leadership of Cuba, it was self-evident that a revolutionary political party guided all aspects of the struggle towards a common goal.  In the United States, where in the 1960s there were explosive “movements” but no revolutionary party, the counterculture became all about creating “community.”  Underneath that wispy, aspirational word was an unmet need for institutions and organizations able to unite fractious and diverse developments into a practical program for taking power and administering society.

Feinsod’s story strongly suggests that the struggle to craft a vanguard poetry movement responsible to revolutionary ideals might have been impossible, despite the example that Pablo Neruda provided.  The penultimate chapter of the book, analyzes anticommunism as an irrepressible contradiction within the project of inter-American solidarity.  The analysis pivots around a lengthy discussion of what has come to be called the Padilla Affair.  Heberto Padilla was prominent younger Cuban poet, who lived in New York City for much of the 1950s, developing his craft and poetic outlook in tandem with the beat movement.  After Fidel Castro’s triumphant entry into Havana in January 1959,  Padilla returned to his homeland with enthusiasm to support the revolution.  He went to work the new cultural organizations that the revolutionary government founded.  His publications won prizes, and the revolutionary government sent Padilla to Europe to reach out to vanguard cultural movements there.  He was a difficult, egotistical personality, writing work that was both abstruse and irreverent.  No doubt, leaders in the organizations where he worked had trouble with him from the beginning, but after 1965, as Cuba’s revolution consolidated and institutionalized, Padilla’s ideas of revolutionary counterculture were increasingly at odds with government priorities.  A leading journal invited him to review a new book by one of the revolution’s favored novelists.  Instead of demonstrating humility and loyalty by praising the novel, Padilla dismissed it as mediocre and unworthy of publication.  Demonstrating how little he understood the dynamics at play within Cuba at the time, Padilla then praised Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s now classic novel Tres tristes tigres (translated into English as Three Trapped Tigers) as a model for what revolutionary publishers should be producing, a book that the government had already suppressed as counterrevolutionary.  Cabrera Infante had fled Cuba, turning overnight from revolutionary to gusano (worm), an enemy of the nation.  In 1967, an international jury awarded Cuba’s most distinguished poetry prize to Padilla.  The government reluctantly accepted the honor out of respect for the principle of freedom of expression and even allowed a book that it disliked to be published, but the ministry in charge of culture released a statement dissecting the counterrevolutionary nature of Padilla’s work.  Padilla was officially labeled a potential enemy.  In 1971, the political police arrested Padilla and prosecuted him for anti-revolutionary activities.  The specific acts cited in the charges were writings intended to demoralize the Cuban people and frequent contacts with antisocialist eastern Europeans when Padilla was working in Europe. The second accusation was true.  The first depended on an understanding of poetry as a social activity.  On that issue, Padilla and his accusers existed in separate conceptual universes.  Understanding at last the danger facing him, Padilla admitted to anything his interrogators suggested.

Padilla’s humiliating televised confession divided, in several cases ripping apart, many cultural groups around the world that had previously been uncompromising in their support for Cuba.  Writers and artists around the world protested.  The government dismissed all complaints and attacked in deeply personal terms anyone who criticized their treatment of Padilla.  Feinsod’s complex analysis examines the ideology of “expressive autonomy” to suggest that Octavio Paz was correct in saying that Padilla’s case confirmed that poetry and communism were incompatible.  “Los poetas cubanos ya no sueñan” (Cuban poets no longer dream), a poem in Padilla’s prize-winning volume could arguably be read as articulating disillusionment with the revolution:

unas manos los cojen por los hombros

los voltean

los ponen frente a frente a otras caras

(hundidas en pantanos, ardiendo en el napalm)

y el mundo encima de sus bocas fluye

y está obligado el ojo a ver, a ver, a ver

[hands take them by the shoulders,

spin them around,

shove them in front of other faces

(drowning in swamps, burning in napalm)

and the world flows over their mouths,

and eyes are obliged to see, to see, to see]

For the Europeans poets and critics on the jury, however, the poem described with rhetorical power a general theme they knew well: the compulsive alienation characteristic of modernity.  The line in parentheses would in 1967 necessarily read as a reference to the Vietnam War.  Are not the faces one is forced to look at among the million-plus casualties of a colonial war?  Power in the twentieth century exhibited itself by invading countries at will and destroying them.  Power in motion determined what must be seen, said, thought.  The target of the poem easily could be U.S. imperialism, Cuba’s greatest threat and therefore the most dangerous force threatening Cuba’s poets and their ability to dream.  Cuban officials did not read the poem that way.  They imagined their power had to be Padilla’s target.

His arrest demonstrated the government’s confusion (aporia is Feinsod’s term) that it could foster revolutionary unity through honest debate open to all ctizens except active enemies of the nation.  They did not know how to classify Padilla because his poetry was in fact incompatible with any popular revolutionary movement that required unqualified support.  The negativity inherent to imagination was the foundation of how Padilla used poetry to confront the world.  Padilla’s method broke up and dispersed voices, as Feinsod puts it, into “several dialectical stances” that cumulatively reveal the inadequacy of ideology before the complexity of lived experience.  This was a method that William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka used to dissect the contradictions of life in the United States. Applied to Cuba’s struggling revolution, Padilla’s aesthetic strategies operated as a negation revealing the limits of all positions.  The poetic voice in general, and not simply Padilla’s idiosyncratic, untactful, smart-ass execution is both for and against everything and everyone, not simply those who should be mocked like corrupt elites and imperialists, or those who could be mocked like poets, but even those deemed essential for national survival—workers, peasants, revolutionary cadre, freedom fighters, the international communist movement.  To keep negativity alive, Padilla had to refuse to exempt anything from critique or to alight eventually and say, This is where I stand.  His attachment to radical open-endedness prevented him from saying to his fellow Cubans, I am on your side.  As a byproduct, Feinsod notes that Padilla’s process “deauthenticates revolutionary discourse’s ability to contain” imagination (310).

Padilla may well have expressed the dilemmas of late twentieth-century radicalism as poetry revealed itself as a voice for the inherent diversity and even radical queerness of experience rather than its unity.  The Cuban revolutionary movement, facing an implacable enemy and needing to mobilize a people around the intersection of class interests and national determination, felt it had no choice but discipline joker figures, whether they be potentially sympathetic foreigners like Allen Ginsberg or potentially unreliable citizens like Heberto Padilla.  To be free, poets who lived and worked inside negativity, and did not simply like Octavio Paz work as a humanist artisan with the tools imagination offered to produce a refined product, had to explore and celebrate everything that made them different from the norms their societies established.

Anticommunism is an anachronistic analytic category for understanding cultural conflict during the second half of the twentieth century.  The term directs attention to the battles and contradictions of the cold war, and tends to replicate the contentions of fifty years ago rather than examining the complexity of the social forces shaping the goals, fears, and expectations of cultural workers after 1945.  The context for poets who identified as radicals and/or revolutionaries included the intensification and radicalization of movements for racial justice, the rise of feminism, the emergence of gay and lesbian demands for equality, postcolonial movements seeking a world order decentered from Europe and North America, the reemergence of indigenous movements challenging European conceptions of ethnicity and the nation, as well as movements for defense of the environment and the enfranchisement of people marginalized because of disabilities.  Most of the new social movements were unexpected. They shattered a binary world, with political struggle revolving around the contests of “right” and “left.”  The new movements challenged conservatives, liberals, and revolutionaries alike, but were particularly difficult for the socialist states. The socialist conception of democracy aimed to eradicate existing differences in order to arrive at a society without inequality. The new social movements accepted difference as a permanent aspect of social life allowing citizens to value attachments that both left and right had previously ignored and often disparaged or persecuted. Artists and writers were often participants in one or more of new social movements.  Feinsod proposes the term “integration” poetry for work exploring what must happen for poets from different cultural traditions to interact on a fully equal basis, precisely what the anticommunist, geopolitical underpinnings of pan-Americanism prevented.  The term “intergration” culture may be useful for work inspired by the new social movements, work that often went beyond critique to imagine how diversity and equality replaces exclusion and hierarchy as the foundation of social relations.  The trans-national story Feinsod tells of poetry as a practice for social reimagination shows the difficulty of such a dramatic and extensive transformation, but also visions of a life radically different from the present shimmering unexpectedly into view.

^[1] Xicomecóatl, the “fat prince of Cempoala,” was leader of the Totonac people, tributary vassals of the Aztecs.  He was the first Native leader to ally with Hernán Cortés and contribute a large army of experienced fighters to the Spanish campaign.  He has become synonymous with leaders who sell out the homeland to foreigners.  Long before the arrival of the Spanish invaders, Xicomecóatl had already become notorious for extreme cruelty and personal venality.

^[2] The Spanish word ilusión can translate into English, depending on context, as hope or illusion. Ilusión signifies a spectrum of response and anticipation that English divides with two distinct, ostensibly opposing words, a practical example of cognitive realities that poets can illuminate.

^[3] Neruda preferred pronouncing Machu Picchu as Macchu Picchu and kept that misspelling when he published the work.

^[4]William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1939; originally published 1925), 226.