Tobias Huttner reviews The Poetry of the Americas

Harris Feinsod. The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 440 pp.

Review by Tobias Huttner

28 March 2018

In a 1960 interview with Cuban poet Oscar Hurtado on the relative merits of US beat poetry, Pablo Neruda commends the misremembered poem “Cinco maneras de matar al Presidente Eisenhower” [Five Ways of Killing President Eisenhower], offering a wonderfully erroneous elision between Wallace Stevens’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower” (p. 203). This ephemeral scene of poetic slippage—from cubism to hipsterism to revolutionary assassination—offers a quick index of the currents of poetic and political feeling that occupy Harris Feinsod’s attention in his remarkable book The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures. If US poetry necessarily looks different from the vantage of a conversation in postrevolutionary Cuba between a young Cuban poet and the world-famous veteran of popular front internationalism, Feinsod makes a strong case for placing such a vantage at the center of our understanding of twentieth-century poetry. By tracing the geographically and historically portable dream of an inter-American poetic culture, one by turns attendant and rival to hemispheric US cultural diplomacy, Feinsod recovers much of what slips by in the translational crosscurrents of Neruda’s imaginary title: not least the vital interrelations between US high modernism, Latin American Marxist surrealism, Haight-Ashbury cool, and mid-century state liberalism.

Feinsod’s book takes shape across six ranging multiauthor chapters, each one ordered by the intersection of geopolitics and poetic form from the late 1930s to the late 1960s—such as that between apostrophe and Popular Front solidarity at the height of the Good Neighbor policy, for instance, or between the “ruin poem” and frustration with US-led hemispherism at the onset of the Cold War. In those two chapters, respectively, Feinsod constellates overlooked and major poems alike by figures such as Langston Hughes, Carrera Andrade, Julia de Burgos, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Neruda, among others. The only thing more impressive than the scope and extent of Feinsod’s research, in this regard, is its readerly agility. Feinsod manages to comfortably and convincingly collate a veritably encyclopedic range of poets, poems, and archival materials, all magnetized by the institutional circuits of cultural diplomacy and a polyvocal set of aspirations for what American poetry might be and do.

His chapter on “xenoglossia” in the poetry of Stevens, José Lezama Lima, and Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, shows how the use of foreign words in poetry at the close of the Good Neighbor policies internalized in poetic language shifting currents in the projection of hemispheric cultural and economic coordination. As Stevens turns away from the hemispheric thought of his “fluent mundo” across his late essays and speeches, Borges can be seen consolidating a youthful poetic project that invests hope for translinguistic poetic community in the imagination of distant etymological relays between Spanish and English, which Feinsod insightfully locates in Borges’s deployment of the alba, or dawn-song. In this chapter, Feinsod proves in part the flexibility of his argument, which keeps turning back and forth between institutional history, the archive, and matters generally walled off under the seal of lyric autonomy. Pace Adorno, poetry’s relation to the social erupts in these readings not so much in the silences of aesthetic form as in the opaque spots of “xenoglossic” diction. This chapter does a remarkable triple duty, then, offering fresh and corrective readings of individual poetic tendencies—Stevens’s poetics of fluency and Borges’s noted Anglophilia—while developing a robust description of American “post-symbolists” (p. 94), and enacting a method of reading that leans on affinity rather than influence or filiation—what Feinsod files under the heading of “tropological history” (p. 7).

A chapter on the resurgence of poetic hemispherism in the wake of the Cuban revolution, on the other hand, reorients our understanding of such major postwar poetic coordinates as beat counterculture, the New American poetry, and the so-called mimeo revolution, all while reintroducing the neglected poetries of Central and South American “guerrilleros” and their polyvalent receptions among aspiring North American cultural revolutionaries. Feinsod is able to rely here on the travels and translations of the poets and poems in question, charting the directly overlapping imaginaries of Cuban barbudos and US beats, between whom stood the institutional apparatuses of American anticommunism. The work of this chapter is nothing short of transformative. In the contexts of conversations around the New American poetry, which still tend to combine an understandably fetishistic interest in coteries and ephemera with heroic national narratives about the poets who made it all new again in the 1950s, Feinsod’s careful recovery of the North-South circuits that shaped such poetic activity from the start serves not only to “provincialize” US poetics, but also to offer a better understanding of its formal, political, and social contradictions in a geopolitical context shaped by revolutionary struggle.

In these and other ways, Feinsod’s book makes a series of timely, indelible interventions into fields both overlapping and adjacent. Readers interested in the institutional histories of Cold War literature and culture, the history and politics of avant-garde poetry and poetics, the sociology of translation, and the burgeoning possibilities of transnational literary history will all find much to think with in this book. Feinsod’s work should also serve to productively shift a set of ongoing debates around the relationship between history and poetic form, literary periodization, and the framework of multiple modernisms. From the perspective of poetry and poetics scholarship, Feinsod’s lightly theorized but expertly achieved readings in “tropological history” offer powerful models for engaging with these questions through the lens of comparative poetics.

Indeed, Feinsod’s reading practice crucially emphasizes the simultaneity, or “coeval[ity]” of different poetic and political tendencies spanning diverse landscapes of language, culture, and geography. In a fascinating and provocative turn, Feinsod motivates this approach by highlighting an attention to poems, or, better, to poems “in relation to other poems” (p. 16), rather than to second-order categories such as “lyric” or “New World poetics.” By tracking the itineraries of tropes, devices, and mini-genres across networks of poems both “major” and “minor,” Feinsod traces in turn the very imagination—stretching from Walt Whitman to Octavio Paz—of “the poem of the Americas” (p. 12). This approach makes available new comparative constellations, certainly. But it also, perhaps unexpectedly, opens up more supple ways of narrating the historical and material coordinates of structures of feeling that crisscross the “expanded geohistoric horizon” of the Americas (p. 15). In this regard, Feinsod’s methodological emphasis on how poems relate to one another also bears broader polemic consequences. It subtly disavows rigid models of cultural diffusion or antagonism between structurally discrete cores and peripheries. Instead, it draws a complex range of continuities and discontinuities, reciprocities and asymmetries, among “coeval” poetic activities, whose divergent conditions come to appear as nonetheless articulated within a single geopolitical-economic totality.

That much is, indeed, hinted at in the book’s title, which names the aspirational contours of a hemispheric “poetry” hung up in the midst of translations both literal and figurative. If Neruda’s imaginary, cubist-beat-insurrectionist poem gives us the apocryphal image of a US poetry we want but might not deserve, in other words, Feinsod’s book goes a long way toward reconstructing the actuality of that image in the forking itineraries of poets, poems, and poetic tropes. The result is a groundbreaking and immediately indispensable work at the intersection of poetic and cultural history.