M A R G I E  The American Journal of Poetry     www.margiereview.com

Published Annually in the Fall                                     MARGIE  P. O. BOX 250, CHESTERFIELD, MO 63006-0250

CHAUTAUQUA

(from Volume 5 of MARGIE)

DANA GIOIA

A preface by

DANA GIOIA

Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts

Líneas conectadas: nueva poesía de los Estados Unidos

Introduction

In the following preface to Líneas conectadas: nueva poesía de los Estados Unidos, acclaimed poet and NEA Chairman Dana Gioia reflects on trends in contemporary American poetry and addresses the fertile opportunity for artistic exchange between poets in the U.S. and Mexico.

            Líneas conectadas: nueva poesía de los Estados Unidos and its companion volume Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico were funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, and Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts. These poetry anthologies will be published in April 2006 by Sarabande books in paperback and hardback editions.

With definitive translations by leading poets and scholars in each country, Connecting Lines and Líneas conectadas offer bilingual samplings of 50 poets from each country to readers across the border. The NEA also plans to support literary readings from the collections in both countries.

With great pride and appreciation we are pleased to welcome Chairman Dana Gioia to the pages of Margie / The American Journal of Poetry. 

Sincerely,

           Robert Nazarene

Preface

Dana Gioia

Líneas Conectadas: Nueva Poesía de los Estados Unidos and its companion volume Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico constitute a unique literary enterprise. These twin anthologies present a diverse cross-section of new poetry from the United States and Mexico in a bilingual format. Fifty poets from each nation have been selected to display the best work of the postwar generation written in Spanish and English. These paired anthologies represent the first of several official literary collaborations between Mexico and the United States designed to foster artistic exchange between our two great nations.  

These comprehensive new books required an enormous investment of time, energy, and expertise. Hundreds of poets, translators, editors, and arts administrators have collaborated to make them possible. In particular, I would like to commend Professor Hernán Lara Zavala for his leadership and collegiality throughout this process. I also want to thank our program partners Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA), the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Ambassador Antonio O. Garza, Jr., and his staff at the Embassy of the United States in Mexico City. Chairman Adair Margo of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities also deserves credit for initially bringing together government leaders from the U.S. and Mexico to strengthen our cultural partnerships. This cultural summit led directly to this literary endeavor.  

As Líneas Conectadas demonstrates, it is impossible to characterize new poetic trends in the United States in any simple or monolithic way. There is no single stylistic or thematic direction that typifies the best work of the moment. Younger poets now write in a wide range of modes from traditional to experimental. Metered poetry and free verse coexist, as do lyrical, narrative, and discursive verse. Identity poetry, which puts the personal and cultural background of the writer at the center of the work, still flourishes, but so, too, do the less subjective styles of narrative verse and the deliberately objectified modes of postmodernist styles.  

As Modernism receded as an active literary force in the past forty years and became a historical early twentieth-century movement, its complex aftermath has opened up vast possibilities for the contemporary poet—in which all styles coexist as potential generative forces. Modernism has also changed the general perception of styles. What is now more traditional in English-language poetry than free verse? What is more academic at the moment than the avant-garde? What is more rebellious than an overtly regional author? All of these questions are both provocatively useful and ultimately unresolvable because there is now no identifiable mainstream for new poetry in the United States—only a multitude of possible alternatives. 

The importance of the poets in Líneas Conectadas, therefore, is not their possible collective allegiances, but rather their individual distinction. Their work matters because it deserves to be experienced and appreciated individually. The editor of this anthology, April Lindner, has excelled at presenting the enormous, imaginative variety of contemporary U.S. poetry. The reader will never be able to predict what the next poet will offer—except perhaps energy and surprise. 

Líneas Conectadas also offers a representative sampling of regional voices from across the United States. Not only poets from New England and the West Coast appear in the book but important voices from the South, Midwest, Southwest, Mountain states, and Pacific Northwest. Likewise the multicultural nature of our society emerges in the variety of backgrounds that these writers represent. Simply look at the poets born in a single year such as 1947, for example, and note the ethnic diversity—Ai, Yusef Komunyakka, Molly Peacock, Robert B. Shaw, Amy Uyematsu. Such an ethnic mixture typifies contemporary literary culture in the United States today. 

Mexico and the United States share a 2,000-mile border and a complex history. In the media, policy experts discuss daily the political, economic, social, and cultural forces that unite or divide the two nations. The topic is endlessly interesting with relevance to almost every aspect of public and private life in both nations. But it is more important to remember something obvious and essential. Although Mexico and the United States remain two independent sovereign nations, they are now deeply interrelated not only by economic interdependence, political cooperation, and cultural exchange but also by flesh and blood—especially the millions of Mexican-Americans who personally embody the merger of these two great and complex national cultures. 

It has taken politicians centuries to realize the vast and unbreakable human connections that unite our two nations, but ordinary individuals on both sides of the border have long recognized the special bonds. As a Mexican-American born and raised in a Southern California neighborhood where about half the population spoke Spanish, I observed, even as a child, the complex but essentially familial link being formed between Mexico and the United States.  

My mother, a Mestizo woman of no advanced education, recited poetry to me from memory throughout my youth and young adulthood. Through her example, I learned that poetry is an art—like painting or jazz, opera or drama—whose pleasures are generally open to any person with the inclination to savor them. As a poet and as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I am proud to support this unique literary collaboration to help current and future generations of readers make a similar discovery of the transformative power of art. 

Poets cannot resist metaphors, so let me suggest that Mexico and the United States are two neighboring families which have forged so many connections of marriage and friendship to be inexorably linked by the human bonds of love, mutual regard, common work, and kinship. These books are one small part of the now endless conversation between these two families.