Diplomat-Poets and the Pan-American Dream

The central concern of Harris Feinsod's remarkable first book, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures, is less the ontological character or facticity of a Pan-American poetic space and more "the idea of a poetry of the Americas". This "idea" existed intermittently in many shapes between 1938 and 1973, when intersecting lyric practices, diplomatic agendas, poets' lives, and international congresses gave it the rough contours that Feinsod recovers through the mostly Spanish- and English-language poetry that it motivated. Sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, and sometimes unconsciously, poets across the Americas created "an expression of geopolitical desire, a vision of an alternate world order, and the manifestation of a network of writers and institutions that stand behind poems".