Even though I consider myself an unusual case of a Mexican writer who moves freely from Spanish to English and back and who has had a close relationship to the US, I find, in general, an "insular" attitude in recent "American" poetry. It's all in the language, you see. If USAmerican poets keep referring to themselves as "American", it means there are still some remains of an insular, colonial psyche: maybe an unconscious, unperceived and unquestioned, even if sometimes "harmless" or "benign" cyst in their use of English language. This may sound like passé or anal political correctness, but it's not: the term "American Poetry" should cover from Alaska to the Patagonia. Latin America is perhaps less insular in that sense: poets from south of the US border, not only from Mexico but from countries like Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Colombia, even Brazil (and I write "even" because they write in Portuguese and therefore there could be a language barrier, as in the case of English), seem to have a greater connection amongst ourselves than with contemporary (i.e. "living") USAmerican poets. (Ernesto Priego)

I am in full agreement over the unfortunate usage of the rather slippage-term of "American". As a Canadian occupying the northern section of the continent we know as North America, I am more than just a bit leery and jangled when I hear the word to connote primarily those who live in the between the brackets of our respective nations (Canada, Mexico). I cannot fully account for the atmosphere of inclusion you speak of in Latin American countries, but I am told it is not only more inclusive, but with a sense of differential cohesion. Of course, in my case, I do not have the firmer connections to my country as constitutive of my identity as one who writes poetry and prose given that I enjoy participating with writers on an international basis. There are some merits and drawbacks to the more isolationist mode of poetry communities in some nations like mine. To be honest, I fancy being unmoored from State and to work in either solitude or collaborate over the virtual ether of the web.

-Kane

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