El Corno Emplumado. Mexico City, nos. 13-15, 17-21. (1965-1967)
In 1962, Margaret Randall, an expatriate American in Mexico City founded El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn (“the jazz horn of the U. S. and the plumes of Quetzal-coatl), an international magazine the in its heart intended to help heal the break between the Americas, North and South. In its thirty one issues the magazine introduced Latin American literature to the North, printing English translations of work by César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among many others. Conversely, the magazine under the direction of co-editor Sergio Mondragon, printed translations into Spanish of work by Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and others. Increasingly political as the decade wore on, the magazine was vociferously opposed to U.S. intervention in Vietnam and just as vociferously positive about the Cuban Revolution.
Retrieved from Storage: Three Little Magazines from the Past
Poetry Magazine. Chicago, February 1931
This issue of Poetry has come to be known as the “Objectivist Issue” and is one of the most famous issues of the magazine’s history. The indefatigable Ezra Pound was eager to involve his friend poet Louis Zukofsky in the magazine and talked editor Harriet Monroe into allowing Zukofsky to guest edit an issue of her magazine. Zukofksy gathered together a loose confederation of his friends and acquaintances, including William Carlos Williams and George Oppen. Williams commented on the Objectivist stance: “The poem being an object (like a symphony or a cubist painting) it must be the purpose of the poet to make of his words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day. This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse.” For more information on Zukofksy and Poetry magazine, visit www.poetrymagazine.org/webexclusive/fromthearchive.zukofsky.html.
Kulchur Magazine. New York, Nos. 1-4, 6-14, 16-20 (1960-1966)
Throughout its twenty issues, Kulchur magazine was a vibrant part of the literary scene in the sixties. It was issued from the spring of 1960 to the winter of 1965 and featured Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Creeley on deep image poetry, Paul Blackburn on the Black Mountain Review, Ed Dorn on Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, Clayton Eshelman’s translation of Peruvian poet César Vallejo, and a good number of Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets. Covers were contributed by a variety of artists, including Franz Kline, Robert Indiana and Joe Brainard. Gilbert Sorrentino, who was associated with the magazine for two years, commented: “Kulchur evolved a review style that, for better or worse, has persisted in little-magazine writing to this day. It was personal, colloquial, wry, mocking, and precisely vulgar when vulgarity seemed called for…nothing was ever explained, the writing was elliptical, casual and obsessively conversational. We had wanted a flashing, brilliant magazine that had nothing to do with the academic world and we got one.”
