El Corno Emplumado: Hemispheric Poetry Networks, 1962-1969

This exhibit supplements Open Door Archive's El corno emplumado / The Plumed Horn collection. The collection brings back into wide circulation--for the first time since its publication (1962-1969)--a full run of this bilingual quarterly of vanguard writing in the Americas. In its day, El corno forged an expansive, hemispheric view of the new poetries, connecting multiple generations of writers from Latin America, the US, and Canada, as well as Europe and India. As the editors wrote in issue seven, the magazine served "to tune the world in on a network" of little magazines across the Americas. With 3,000 copies per issue and a savvy, do-it-yourself hemispheric distribution network, El corno was one of the biggest of the littles.

Here, we are pleased to feature two retrospective essays on El corno, both of them entitled "Remembering El Corno Emplumado," written by founding editors Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón, and illustrated with archival photographs and other ephemera. Curators Julio García Murillo and Regina Tattersfield contribute an account of the exhibit El Corno Emplumado, A Magazine from Mexico City, which was organized by Giuliana Prevedello and Lorena Botello and which was on view at the siete.de.catorce series at the Centro Cultural Tlatelolco in Mexico City in early 2015.

These are living collections and exhibits. Several other remembrances, archival materials, and essays on the magazine's many dimensions will follow.

--Harris Feinsod