The Mexican idea of a "poetry school", I think, has more to do with politics, cliques and mafias than with stylistic influences or tendencies. In that sense my perception of Mexican poetry is that there is no proper way to group it into distinct categories. Of course there are those poets who write and publish poetry in independent magazines but are completely isolated from the mainstream, what is known around here ("here" meaning "Mexico", even though I write this now from London) as "la Republica de las Letras", legitimized by historically (and politically) important magazines such as Octavio Paz's Plural (later Vuelta, what would become Letras Libres). So, more than stylistic categories that could organize Mexican poets by their influences or tendencies, I think we have been stuck, for more than 50 years at least, in a bipolar division between "lesser" poets and mainstream, officially legitimized ones.

I still don't know very well how to apply the adjectives "experimental" or "innovative" to poetry, even though I have the slight idea that in the US there seems to be a highly localized conception of how to use them. I was, for instance, completely unaware of the l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets until I started blogging, and I still find a bit annoying, to be honest, their use of the label. Even now it is easier for me to find mentions of the name than actual poems that could be labeled as such.

(I think the last paragraph was not clear at all. I guess what I mean is that even though I had read some of the L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets, I had never perceived them as clearly distinct from any other groups or tendencies. In our courses of North American Literature at the university the term was never mentioned. Not even the magazine. I suppose what I was also trying to say in the previous paragraph is that it was until I started blogging that I realized the importance of the term and the political implications of using it. This needs further discussion, of course, but probably the USAmerican perception is that this has been discussed enough. I don't think that is the case in other countries, though. What is the relevance of labels in poetry? This is an important question, I think).

From a Mexican point of view, there is a fascination with the Beats not only because they travelled around and wrote in Mexico but because they represent a slightly different, more liberal idea of the US. City Lights published non-USAmerican poets and the bay area scene itself was (and I guess still is) contaminated by Spanish poetries. But other than that, only a very, very few know and read living USAmerican poets.

As someone who has been there, at the heart of the storm so to speak, I still perceive most of my fellow "living" Mexican poets (with the only exception of Heriberto Yepez) very alienated from USAmerican poetry (other than the Beats or Walt Whitman). There is a cultural and linguistic resistance to read them, as well as an impossibility of finding the material in Mexican book shops or reading it in translations (other than some random translations on magazines or blogs, or some institutionally-sponsored anthologies). (Ernesto Priego)

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