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At turns elusive and monumental, ephemeral and robust, diminishing and expanding in the shadow of the hard power of American empire, the soft power of "cultural diplomacy" programs, and the influence of nation-based literary-historical paradigms, "the poetry of the Americas" is an unusual literary formation in that its formidable history lacks a historical account. This absence is a function of disciplinary boundaries, but it is at bottom a problem of labor and scale. Articulating the far-flung hemispheric coordinates of the poetry of the Americas has, until Harris Feinsod's highly anticipated book, proved too challenging. As Feinsod writes, in his exceptional literary history The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures, "this story is scattered in archives on three continents," often in correspondence and ephemera (5). Appropriately, Feinsod's methodology is defined by travel and discovery—that watchword of conquest and colonization—for he finds the story within the institutions (libraries, foundations, archives)that have formalized enlightenment models of modernity. Some of his archival finds are indeed world-reshaping, for the poetry world, but also for cultural histories of World War II, the Cold War, and the Sixties. This scholarly process, Feinsod notes, required illuminating the inter-American cultural formations that gave rise to the field "the poetry of the Americas." At least since José Martí's dispatches from New York, this field has enfolded a political project, a set of aesthetic practices and cultural relations, a projection into the future, a retrojection into the past, a utopian imaginary alternately advanced and resisted. To invert Gertrude Stein's declaration: there are many theres there. Feinsod's great achievement is to map the complex relations of these coordinates.
The question "which poets?" underlies his introductory genealogy of the category "the poetry of the Americas." Complementing Charles Bernstein's use of aesthetics over poems and poets to theorize a "poetics of the Americas," Feinsod presents an abundance of poems, poets, and poetic sites and practices.1 Moving fluidly between formalist and historicist concerns, he foregrounds anxiety over the question. He was often asked, when describing his project, "so which poets do you write about?" His response, "Lots of them," would inevitably disappoint, his interlocutors wanting names (15). On this conundrum I side with Feinsod, even as the productive contradictions of his rationale underscore his...