Poetic Encounters In The Americas

Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge examines the ways in which U.S. and Latin American modernist canons have been in cross-cultural, mutually enabling conversation, especially through the act of literary translation. Examining eighteen U.S. and Latin American poets, my book is one of the few works of criticism to present case studies in U.S. and Latin American poetries in dialogues that highlight the social life and imaginative encounters obtained through methodologies of translation and innovations in poetic technique.

When Columbus arrived in the Americas there were, it is believed, as many as 2,000 distinct, mutually unintelligible tongues spoken in the western hemisphere, encompassing the entire area from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. This astonishing fact has generally escaped the attention of historians, in part because many of these indigenous languages have since become extinct. And yet the burden of overcoming America's language barriers was perhaps the one problem faced by all peoples of the New World in the early modern era: African slaves and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley; Jesuit missionaries and Huron-speaking peoples in New France; Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec rulers. All of these groups confronted America's complex linguistic environment, and all of them had to devise ways of transcending that environment - a problem that arose often with life or death implications. For the first time, historians, anthropologists, literature specialists, and linguists have come together to reflect, in the fifteen original essays presented in this volume, on the various modes of contact and communication that took place between the Europeans and the "Natives." A particularly important aspect of this fascinating collection is the way it demonstrates the interactive nature of the encounter and how Native peoples found ways to shape and adapt imported systems of spoken and written communication to their own spiritual and material needs.

American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounteroffers a framework for understanding the variety of imagined encounters by eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese' subject. The method is historical and materialist, insofar as the contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between 1911 and 1979. Even where specific poems are found to be erroneous, the contributors to the volume suggest that each of the poets attempted to engage their 'Chinese' subject with a degree of commitment that presaged imaginatively China's subsequent dominance. The poems stand as unique artifacts, via proxy and in the English language, for the rise of China in the American imagination. The audience of the volume is international, including the growing number of scholars and graduate students in Chinese universities working on American literature and comparative cultural studies, as well as already established commentators and students in the west.

"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"--

Exploring the proliferation of polyphonic texts following the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, this book is an important advance in the study of early American literature and writings of colonial encounter.

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.

Anglo-German Dramatic and Poetic Encounters contains essays focusing on the roles of drama and poetry in Anglo-German exchange in the Sattelzeit. It offers new perspectives on the movement of texts and ideas across genres and cultures, the formation and reception of poetic personae, and the place of illustration in cross-cultural, textual exchange.