Letters That Breathe Fire: El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn by Margaret Randall
New Village Press. 2026. 384 pages.
Despite my immersion first in the poetry of the San Francisco renaissance and later of the avant-garde scene in New York, I was woefully ignorant as a young poet of writers outside the confines of the United States and Europe. I was far from alone in having no conception of the rich cultural and political tradition of those countries closest to me in Latin America and the Caribbean. That is, until I opened the pages of El Corno Emplumado.
In Letters That Breathe Fire, Margaret Randall’s selection of correspondence from El Corno Emplumado mirrors the dynamism and passion of young writers and activists around the world creating and struggling in the midst of the turbulent 1960s. El Corno Emplumado, partly printed bilingually in Spanish and English, was originally created by co-founders and editors Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragón to act as a conduit through which information could flow freely between writers and artists hitherto separated by the boundaries of countries and language. Starting with its second issue, El Corno created a special section that in its almost eight years of publication from 1962 to its final issue in 1969 would publish over two hundred letters culled from the thousands they received.
Selections from every letter published in the thirty-one issues that comprised the run of El Corno are included in this collection. Browsing its pages, one encounters Ernesto Cardenal’s excitement that poets are creating a “real Pan American Union . . . Poets of various languages but all writing in a common language like Pentecost.”
Denise Levertov, in a lengthy letter, challenges her dear friend poet Ted Enslin’s declaration that politics “has absolutely no place in poetry or art of any kind, no didactic cant has.” Levertov champions the validity of art as protest, emphasizing that “the poet has no exclusive area of concern, and that poets or nonpoets, we are ‘members, one of another’; and that there is no danger, no shame, and no hope in which we are not all involved.” Then there is Thomas Merton celebrating that for the poet “there is only life in all its unpredictability and all its freedom. . . . Come, Dervishes: here is the water of life. Dance in it.”
There are also letters by Julio Cortázar, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Bly, Cecilia Vicuña, John Sinclair, Raquel Jodorowsky, and even by an anonymous political prisoner and an angry British subject. Documents of length and substance, these are an example of the diversity and heft of the hundreds of letters in the collection.
El Corno issues are presented in chronological order. At the beginning of each section, Randall contextualizes the historical aspect of that particular issue by locating it in a political and cultural context and by adding extensive informational footnotes about the letter writers where needed. There is also an ample index at the end of the book.
The correspondence in El Corno is the best kind of history, written from the pens of the individuals who lived and witnessed it, as relevant today as it was more than five decades ago. Letters That Breathe Fire is not only an invaluable resource, it is compelling reading. This is a book to be kept close at hand, to find inspiration from, to actively engage with, because it comes directly from the lived experiences of individuals who, communicating with one another across borders and boundaries, strove to make sense out of the world they inhabited, of the art they were in the process of creating.
Susan Sherman
New York City
