The Spanish and Latin American Legacy in North American Poetry and Art

The many years in which I have studied and written about US poets in the effort to define a US poetic tradition led me to conclude that what is distinctive about US poetry is not a tradition to be followed but, on the contrary, the need—out of a sense of American individualism, out of a sense of alienation in a materialist, capitalist society—to make it new. Poets have needed to define for themselves and demonstrate in themselves the function of the poet and the form and language of the poem. This drive for innovation has made for strong and distinctive poems and artworks, but it has masked the influences from other cultures that have shaped the course of experimentation.

It is true that there is no precedent or model in the English tradition for Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, but in fact US poets and artists of the 19^th century were in constant dialogue with and response to English Romantic and Victorian poets and artists. English models were quite irrelevant to the Modernism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams. But Eliot and Wallace Stevens read and responded to the French Symbolists, and Pound’s Cantos are a collage of sources both European and Asian. For all that, the focus on American distinctiveness and innovation has resulted in a kind of provincialism that the poets and their critics have, for the most part, been reluctant to acknowledge.

There has been even less commentary on the Spanish and Latin American influence on American poetry and art—not surprisingly perhaps, since that influence only begins to be significantly felt in the mid-20^th century. Hence the importance and originality of this ground-breaking collection of essays by Spanish and American scholar-critics. Federico García Lorca, of course, provides a recurrent and crucial point of connection and influence, but the essays range broadly over the varied field of American poets—Williams, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Rexroth, Mark Strand, Frank O’Hara, Thomas Merton, Audre Lorde among them—as well as artists like dancer Martha Graham and sculptor David Smith. Taken together, this suite of essays presents a fresh and eye-opening way of seeing and understanding the diverse artists under discussion and, more broadly, begins the process, long overdue, of exploring the fertile and enlivening confluence of Spanish, Latin American, and North American culture.

Albert Gelpi

Stanford University

We would like to express our gratitude to the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MICIU) and to the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) for their support and funding of this project (GOB-ESP2019-19) in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Without the Ministry’s and the University’s unwavering support, it would surely have been much more difficult for us to bring this project to fruition.

We would also like to thank Albert Gelpi, Coe Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Stanford University, for his wonderful gift in the form of a Foreword and for having been a truly lifelong mentor to the editors of this volume.

Finally, our heartfelt thanks to Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera for giving us his full support and for enthusiastically accepting to contribute to this volume with an interview.

Anne Day Dewey, Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández, and José Manuel Rodríguez Herrera

The Spanish and Latin American Legacy in North American Poetry and Art is the outcome of years of scholarly collaboration among its editors, which started more than two decades ago around our common interests in international perspectives on 20^th-century US poetry. Some of the key activities we have shared during these years include a round table presented at AEDEAN 2012 in Málaga, and its ensuing publication in Hopes and Fears: English and American Studies in Spain (2013), to which we contributed with the chapter “Hispanic Influence in Denise Levertov’s Poetry;” and an invitation to organize a panel devoted to Denise Levertov, extended by the organizers of the Conference “The Poetry and Poetic Life of Denise Levertov: ‘This need to dance / this need to kneel,’” hosted by the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago in 2015. This ongoing collaboration finally materialized in a research project submitted to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation in 2019 and ultimately financed by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) in 2020. The research project¹ analyzed crosscurrents of influence among Latin American, Spanish, and US artists and poets and brought together scholars with research strengths in North American poetry and transatlantic cultural and artistic relations in the 20^th and 21^st century, many of whom have contributed to this volume. As most of the extant scholarship has focused on a one-directional axis of influence, we felt the need to approach this topic from a broader, multidirectional perspective. At a time when the Donald Trump Administration seemed obsessed with underrating—when not altogether dismissing—the Spanish and Latin American legacy in the US, we believed this project was worthwhile, not only for its rich multicultural, multiethnic heritage, but also for its ethical dimension. This collection bears the fruit of that committed research and gathers the work accomplished in the past few years under the umbrella of this project.

While much research has traced the specific mobility of individuals, mobility among avant-garde artistic circles, and influences between specific artists and writers—an effort that this volume continues—most of this work has been local and piecemeal. Little work has recognized, synthesized, or theorized these influences to construct and explore the potential of a Pan-American-Spanish Atlantic. Significant effort has been made in Art History to trace multidirectional transatlantic influence, decentering the view that European art initiated avant-garde innovation and exported it to the Americas, as attested by significant exhibitions such as Mary Kate O’Hare’s (2010) Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s–50s and monographs such as Helen Delpar’s (1996) The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935, Anna Indych-López’s (2009) Muralism Without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States 1927–1940, Claire Fox’s (2013) Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War, Ellen G. Landau’s (2013) Mexico and American Modernism, and Paula Barreiro López’s (2019) Atlántico frío: Historias transnacionales del arte y la política en los tiempos del telón de acero. In addition to these publications, international Spanish-based research projects have promoted collaborations such as Barreiro López et al.’s (2015) Modernidad y vanguardia: rutas de intercambio entre España y Latinoamérica (1920–1970) and Modernidad(s) Descentralizadas (2017–2020), which sought to explore artistic, political, and countercultural forms of mediation to negotiate and challenge the ideologies characteristic of the Cold War.

Literary studies have adopted slightly different, complementary approaches. Julio Marzán (1994) began to theorize multicultural reality and context as integral to US poetic innovation, focusing on the figure of William Carlos Williams. From the perspective of linguistic and cultural translation, Jonathan Mayhew (2009) and Andrew Samuel Walsh (2021) develop the importance of translation in reception among nonnative speakers of Federico García Lorca. Still other studies explore similarities between themes of common interest across the continents. Christopher Maurer (2019) analyzes the importance of translation as a medium of influence, and the volume in which Maurer’s essay was published, Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing, explores thematic correspondences around urban culture, a significant focal point Mexican and Spanish society share as they attempt to process sharp contrasts between rural and urban culture during rapid urbanization in the early 20^th century.

Transatlantic studies has made significant changes in scholarship in almost every discipline. It has challenged the view that culture flows from colonizer to colony and that nations are the sole definers of cultural context. Much work has been done on the black Atlantic, but less effort has been devoted to the Pan-American-Spanish Atlantic triangle, opening tremendous opportunities for the insights to be gained from such study. Paul Gilroy’s (1993) ground-breaking The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness defines “the black Atlantic” as a “rhizomatic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation” whose creative strategies such as “creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity” constitute crucial alternatives to the limited “ethnic absolutis[t]” view of cultural mixing as “pollution and impurity.” In this multidirectional model of influence, cultural production is both fraught with and inspired by “the effort involved in trying to face (at least) two ways at once” (Gilroy 1993, 4, 2, and 3). Flows and borrowings exceed national boundaries, establishing alternative circuits of influence, and decentering, displacing, and challenging national culture as definitive context of cultural production.

Analyzing two-directional influence in immigration, Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996) develops this transnational dynamic further to counter dominant assimilationist national imaginaries:

By doing “cultural work that emerges from dislocation and disidentification” (9), transcontinental migration of people and ideas thus creates a sense of distance and difference within to redefine the context for regional, ethnic, and ultimately national narratives of identity. For Lowe, such flows and borrowings, often found in unexpected places due to their marginality, are essential to understanding identity formation on all levels.

Samantha Pinto (2013) builds on Gilroy’s and Lowe’s approaches to elaborate further on transnational—in her terms, “diasporic”—methodology. While reinforcing their ideas that diaspora dislocates and decenters—“diaspora as a site of disorder” (Pinto 2013, 5)—Pinto specifies the need for more precise analysis of dislocation, arguing that the kind of mobility in which people engage conditions the way they appropriate and reconfigure cultural objects and forms. Diasporic methodology must therefore examine who is moving and how, together with the way cultural forms are selected and applied as they change setting. Understanding the migration of ideas requires interpreting “textual moments of aesthetic alliance across axes of difference. […] Diaspora becomes not only a set of physical movements, then, but also a set of aesthetic and interpretive strategies” (Pinto 2013, 4). Pinto (2013, 4) and Giles (2004, 39) use the metaphor of the doorway or trapdoor to describe openings between cultures, envisioning national borders as permeable, cultural traditions open to “cosmopolitan networks” (Pinto 2013, 9). Pinto’s analysis demonstrates the power of these flows to redefine categories and identities as fundamental as race or gender by dislodging individuals’ sense of their location or bodies from the context of dominant national culture.

Networks of influence circulate through Pan-American-Spanish corridors throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries. A multidirectional transatlantic triangle of exchange plays a crucial role in innovation among Modernist and Cold War avant-gardes. Pre-Columbian art is a significant source of solidarity and innovation for Pan-American anti-colonial, countercultural, and avant-garde production during these periods and in the formation of Chicano ethnicity in the US. Another major focus is the Spanish Civil War, whose inspiration of politically engaged art resonates powerfully across the following century. Beginning with a generation of eye-witness writers from the Americas who traveled to Spain to help the Republicans fight against Franco (e.g., W.H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway), report on the war (e.g., Josephine Herbst, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser), and/or show solidarity with the Republican cause (e.g., Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Dorothy Parker, Octavio Paz), this influence continues in Spain’s presence as an enduring symbol and reference for anti-fascist and leftist causes, coalitional activism, and radical aesthetics. Robert Duncan leaves Black Mountain College after an argument with a colleague about the Spanish Civil War. Spanish influences in his work extend to Francisco Goya, to whose representation of the body and light Duncan alludes in “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (1960). Finally, Federico García Lorca as poetic innovator and sexual and political martyr is a key figure in this tradition.

Latin American leftist politics also inspire both mobility and aesthetic innovation. Following the Mexican Revolution, Mexico attracts writers and artists for its revolutionary art (e.g., Kenneth Rexroth) and subsequently becomes a haven and source of inspiration for writers fleeing McCarthyism during the Cold War (e.g., William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Audre Lorde, and George Oppen). Glenn Sheldon’s (2004) South of Our Selves: Mexico in the Poems of Williams, Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, Levertov and Hayden argues that Mexico serves as both a geographical/cultural and a psychological border in the work of poets throughout the 20^th century. Solidarity with leftist causes in Latin America extends to considerable activism and protest poetry throughout the century. Ferlinghetti, for example, followed the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico, and his visits to Central and South American countries led to contacts and influences, such as Julio Cortázar’s citation of a Ferlinghetti poem in Chapter 121 of his famous novel Rayuela, itself a transatlantic work, written in Paris by an Argentinian author and set in Paris and Buenos Aires (1963).

The lower cost of living in Mexico and Spain attracted the Cold War generation as well, further stimulating exchange of influences among Mexican, Beat, and other New American poets (Allen 1960). Robert Creeley lived in Mallorca from 1951 to 1955, during which time he published several issues of the influential small arts magazines Origin and Black Mountain Review. English-US writer Denise Levertov not only lived in Mexico 1957–58 but absorbed Latin American and Spanish influences by translating writers as varied as García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Nicanor Parra, Ernesto Cardenal, César Vallejo, and Mario Benedetti. She also engaged in artistic and activist collaborations such as her El Salvador: Requiem & Invocation (1983). Mobility, translation, and political solidarity open channels of inspiration and influence, as in the mutual influence of Pablo Neruda and Mark Strand, and the influence of García Lorca’s plays on writers from Amy Lowell, Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch to Jerome Rothenberg and Philip Levine.

Building on this foundation in transatlantic and immigration studies, The Spanish and Latin American Legacy in North American Poetry and Art seeks to advance consolidation of a Pan-American-Spanish field of study and understanding of the crisscrossing cultural dialogue in Spanish, Latin American, and US literature and visual art from the Modernist period to the 21^st century. In contrast to the focus on borderlands culture in Latinx scholarship, this volume examines transcontinental circulation of influence and mutual reflection among artists and writers on different continents. The essays reveal these cultures as sounding boards for each other and networks through which cosmopolitan flows of ideas circulate. Influence is multidirectional. Allusion continually appropriates, renegotiates, and transforms power structures of colony and empire that often underlie the topics of common interest that initiate or nurture contact between writers, artists, or communities. The individual essays examine the mobility of individuals and groups as significant “doorways” or thresholds between cultures that open as a result of such movement. As a whole, the collection reveals a triangular intercontinental Pan-American-Spanish imaginary as a fertile site for innovation among Spanish, Latin American, and US writers and artists. Challenging one-directional and vertical models of influence based on metropolitan hegemony, the volume reveals horizontal patterns of blending and transculturation.

The volume’s two-part structure traces a roughly chronological development of transatlantic and Pan-American influences during the 20^th and into the 21^st century, from the Modernist avant-gardes, Generación del 27, and formation of Chicano consciousness through the Cold War period and beyond. Among transatlantic modes of influence, García Lorca is a fundamental nexus. The impact of his stay in New York and his reception by Spanish speakers in the US extends his influence significantly beyond the Beat Generation’s image of García Lorca as a poet of duende and a sexual and political martyr. As mentioned above, the Spanish Civil War is another critical source of influence, spanning generations from eye-witnesses present in Spain during the war to subsequent generations for whom Spain becomes a reference for anti-fascist and/or leftist politics. Patterns of Pan-American transculturation and mutual influence ripple into other avant-gardes and across generations in the US in unexpected ways. Mexican painters in 1930s New York shape the emergence of a Primitivist strand of US Modernism that remains a vital element of Chicano poetry and theory today. Not only the US-Mexico border, but also Spanish language and translation, take on rich symbolic significance as foreign or familiar, inter- or intracultural sites of difference that vary with the writer’s ethnicity. Such sites, as well as personal affinities and friendships between North and Latin American poets and artists, spark formal and political exchanges and innovation whose importance this volume aspires to develop.

Part I, entitled “Transatlantic Axis of Influence,” which includes five chapters, is inaugurated by Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez. Adopting the typography of the slashed o (ø) characteristic of Northern European languages—Danish and Norwegian, among others—in the term Chicanø, Martín-Rodríguez traces extensively and analyzes the legacy of García Lorca’s works and poetics in contemporary Chicano literature, especially in the literature produced during what was known as the Chicano Movement, 1960–80. Straddling two vast poetic cosmographies on both sides of the Atlantic, García Lorca becomes a magnet of attraction for Chicano writers. The first references to García Lorca in Spanish-speaking newspapers published in the US can be traced as far back as the late 1920s. The 1970s saw a notable increase in all kinds of intertextual references to García Lorca in Chicano literary works. Ultimately, what this essay attempts to prove is that García Lorca’s presence in the US was not restricted to New York City or to the strict boundaries of one single community, but rather migrated across the US to multicultural audiences, very prominently among them the Chicano community.

In the next chapter, José Manuel Rodríguez Herrera contributes to understanding García Lorca’s underexplored legacy among Spanish speakers in the US by analyzing the poet’s influence on William Carlos Williams. After tracing exoticized distortions of García Lorca’s image as the “gypsy” poet (Scaramella 2017, 418) through error- and agenda-ridden English translations, the essay identifies Williams’ significant formal and intercultural borrowings from García Lorca’s work. Rodríguez Herrera’s argument builds on Marzán (1994), who establishes the predominance of Spanish in Williams’ childhood home environment, translation activities from Spanish in which Williams engaged both with his parents and in his poetic career, and Williams’ interest in Spanish popular and vernacular traditions in his prose. Rodríguez Herrera then draws on Williams’ allusions to García Lorca to argue the latter’s formal and intercultural significance to Williams’ aesthetic development. Williams’ subtle allusions to García Lorca’s use of popular genres, such as the romance and formal variations on that tradition, reveal García Lorca’s significant influence on Williams. More importantly, such influence is not limited to Williams’ use of the vernacular, syncretism, and play with images and musicality; it also shapes his sense of his identity as an intercultural poet bridging cultures and exploring in-between spaces.

The third chapter offers a contrastive reading of García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. Jessica Q. Stark sheds new light on the ways these poets negotiate their shifting identities within the urban landscape of New York City. The iconic mutability of New York serves as a paradigm for and site of identity, enabling both poets to articulate a poetry of resistance to any form of reductionist identification and carve out new spaces for the emergence of complex, unstable identities. In comparing these poets’ development of gay identity in oppressive societies against the backdrop of a common and highly dynamic urban scenario, this study invites readers to reflect on how these two dissimilar poets, of different national origins and separated by more than three decades, used the voluble iconography and landscape of the city as a correlative for their own social estrangement and site for formation of fluid, non-conforming identities.

In Chapter 4, Ángeles Alemán Gómez analyzes the relationship, unexplored to date, between García Lorca and Gregorio Toledo. Toledo, a painter from La Palma, signed his original and somewhat mysterious portrait of García Lorca dressed in a yellow kimono in December 1931. This essay explores the iconography and sociohistorical background of the portrait. García Lorca appears attired in a yellow kimono or bathrobe whose radiance contrasts with the serious and pensive mood of his expression, as well as with the cheerfulness he usually expresses in photographs of the time. That the poet and the painter were on close terms is clearly shown in this choice of dress, which García Lorca wore only in very intimate spaces. The effervescent atmosphere of the time—the Second Republic had just been declared in April 1931—most likely propelled the poet to commission a portrait in which to reveal himself more openly to the public, without censoring his true identity.

Laura Hartmann-Villalta closes Part I by documenting the enduring legacy of the Spanish Civil War in US poetry and other arts, from those who formed part of the international coalition opposing Franco to the war’s reemergence as a powerful symbol of oppression in subsequent political struggles against Nazi Germany, Vietnam, and other forces. Poets respond to the technologically-produced terror of aerial bombing at Guernica with new poetic forms of rupture, and Picasso’s Cubist representation of the massacre becomes an icon of the atrocities caused by modern weapons and total warfare. García Lorca, in contrast, becomes a symbol of loss whose silence and melancholy cast a long shadow, with whom poets suffering cultural oppression under McCarthyism feel special affinity. In documenting the consistent contribution of women (often feminist) artists like Muriel Rukeyser to this transnational legacy, Hartmann-Villalta concludes that their marginalization is emblematic of attempts to silence a radical political tradition in US poetry that nonetheless persists as an “open wound” in the culture.

The second section of the volume examines a “Pan-American Axis of Influence” and includes four chapters that explore the verticality—with movements ascending and descending along the vast American territory—that characterizes such cultural phenomena. It opens with Chapter 6, in which Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez analyzes this vertical geographical axis of influence by tracing the artistic endeavors of Mexican artists Marius de Zayas, Miguel Covarrubias, and Rufino Tamayo to distance avant-garde art from the cultural inheritance of European and US traditions, perceived as embedded in colonial, racialist, and imperialist discourses. In their aesthetic and creative search, these artists turned to what they considered the pre-Columbian roots that would sustain their visions of a purely original creative force. This chapter explores how such effort led these artists to turn to Native American Primitivism and to negotiate and shape it anew. In aspiring to ideals of Pan-Americanism that forge aboriginal North-South solidarities to counter or decenter European legacies, they fundamentally altered the Modernist avant-garde as its center shifted from Paris to New York, forming a new focus of innovation in the 1940s and 1950s. Martínez Rodríguez’s detailed archival scrutiny and sharp eye reveal an artistic process of appropriation that would begin in Mexico at the turn of the 20^th century but peak in the New York avant-garde.