"In 1962, SERGIO MONDRAGON AND MARGARET RANDALL, an expatriate American in Mexico City, founded El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn ('the jazz horn of the U.S. and the plumes of Quetzal-coatl'), an international magazine that in its heart intended to help heal the break between the Americas, North and South. Randall wanted to provide 'a showcase (outside politics) for the fact that WE ARE ALL BROTHERS.' About this use of gender, she later commented: 'We really thought we could all be brothers. (We didn't think, then, about being sisters. We were a few women, a minority among mostly men. Our intellectual pretensions took care of that ratio—women's consciousness was not part of us then.)' In its thirty-one issues, El Corno Emplumado introduced Latin American literature to the North, printing English translations of work by Vallejo, Neruda, and Gabriel García Márquez, among many others (a generation of new Cuban writers in issue 7, for instance). Conversely, the magazine, under the direction of coeditor Sergio Mondragon, printed translations into Spanish of work by Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Paul Blackburn. Increasingly political as the decade wore on, the magazine was vociferously opposed to US intervention in Vietnam and just as vociferously positive about the Cuban revolution. Supported for its first seven years by various departments of the Mexican government as well as by private contributions from many Americans, the magazine was eventually harassed out of existence by the repressions of 1968–69, which culminated in the massacre of nearly a thousand students in Mexico City. In an eloquent description of her own magazine, Randall could well have been describing any number of other American little magazines of the period: 'El Corno Emplumado was never just a magazine; it was never just a collection of words and images on paper, put together by two people (it was always only two people: editing, raising money, supervising the printing, handling the secretarial work and distribution). El Corno was a network—letters going back and forth between poets, between people. It was a meeting of poets like spontaneous combustion….' ..."
from a secret location
Jacket2: 'El corno emplumado' and poetry's hemispheric sixties
EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN: POETRY, LIFE AND RESISTANCE
El Corno Emplumado: Hemispheric Poetry Networks, 1962-1969
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