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El corno emplumado and Transnational Domestic Space

by Zane Koss Back to landing Jump to page


In October 1965, Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón published the Canadian poet George Bowering’s third book of poetry, The Man in Yellow Boots / El hombre de las botas amarillas, as the sixteenth issue of El corno emplumado.[1] This publication represented the culmination of two years of correspondence including month-long visits to Mexico City by Bowering and his wife Angela in the summers of 1964 and 1965. I am interested in the relationship between Bowering and Randall for the alternative configuration of the sixties poetic avant-garde that it allows me to sketch. Re-writing accounts of avant-garde poetry in Mexico and Canada through the peripheral affiliation between Mexico City and Vancouver dislocates established accounts of transnational influence and exchange in either country, and accepted circuits of the literary avant-garde more broadly. In order to make visible this overlooked affiliation, my account relies on marginal materials, in particular the correspondence carried out by George Bowering and Margaret Randall during the 1960s. This correspondence is exceptional in both of their archives, occupying more space than almost any other either author carried out with any other interlocutor in the era. Though this volume is at least partially explained by the fact of two capacious letter writers each finding their match in the other, it should surprise scholars of either poet that they were among each other’s most frequent interlocutors during these years. Such correspondence was crucial to El corno’s mission during its run, as scholars like Alan Davison and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda have argued, while Eva-Marie Kröller foregrounds Bowering’s participation in epistolary circuits in her 1992 monograph on his work.[2] As the Bowering-Randall correspondence transited back and forth between Mexico City and Canada, the airmail letters that overleaped the United States provide an image for the type of affiliative contact I hope to trace—one capable of undoing standard spatialities of affiliative contact, confined by neither urban geography nor national borders, and importantly eluding the United States as a site of transnational connection or cachet. As Bowering and Randall planned The Man in Yellow Boots, Bowering enthused about the project, saying “What a good thing this will be for me, allow me to move myself away from trap of being a Canadian Poet!!!! This means a lot, and you cant [sic] imagine what.”[3]

 

 




[1] George Bowering, The Man in Yellow Boots / El hombre de las botas amarillas, ed. Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón, trans. Sergio Mondragón. (Mexico City: Special Issue of El corno emplumado, no 16, (1965)).

[2] Alan Davison, El Corno Emplumado The Plumed Horn: A Voice of the Sixties (Toledo, OH: Textos toledanos, 1994); Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, “Artists’ Networks in the 1960s: the Case of El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn (Mexico City, 1962-1969),” in The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest and Counterculture, ed. Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney (New York: Routledge, 2017): pgs; Eva-Marie Kröller, George Bowering: Bright Circles of Colour (Toronto: Talonbooks, 1992).  

[3] George Bowering to Margaret Randall, 26 January 1965, The El Corno Emplumado Papers, the Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

[4] Aceves-Sepúlveda, “Artists’ Networks in the 1960s,” 203.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Margaret Randall to George Bowering, 3 December 1964, The El Corno Emplumado Papers, the Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

[8] Margaret Randall to George Bowering, 2 August 1965, The El Corno Emplumado Papers, the Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

[9] Margaret Randall to George Bowering, 4 August 1965, The El Corno EmplumadoPapers, Ransom Center, University of Texas Austin.

[10] George Bowering to Margaret Randall, 11 August 1965, The El Corno Emplumado Papers, the Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

[11] George Bowering to Margaret Randall, 8 November 1964, The El Corno Emplumado Papers, the Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

[12] Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[13] Here I borrow from Rita Felski’s tripartite definition of “the everyday” as founded on the spatiality of the “home,” the temporality of “routine,” and the attitude of “habit.” Rita Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations, 39 (1999): 15-31.

[14] George Bowering, Sitting in Mexico (Imago, 12 (1969)): 34.

[15] Ibid. Emphasis added.

[16] Ibid. Emphasis added.