The contemporary poet is a man between men

and his loneliness is the promiscuous loneliness

of the walker lost in the crowd

Octavio Paz.

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 Hispanic poetry in New York is born within the city. The metropolis we know today was envisioned and designed in 1811, when commissioners Gouverneur Morris, John Rutherfurd, and Simeon De Witt presented the development plan consisting of rectangular street grids and equal lots, stretching from The Battery to Upper Manhattan. This not only marked the birth of a new city, but also the beginning of a way of life, of coexistence that, ultimately, would trace the geography of new poetic paths.

The first publication in Spanish appeared in New York City in 1823 with the newspaper El Habanero, founded by Father Félix Varela. In this same year, José María Heredia went into exile in New York. He is, considered by many to be the first romantic poet of America and the initiator of Romanticismo Hispanoamericano. His poems appear regularly in the newspaper and in 1825 the Gray and Buye printing press, located at 129 Broadway, published the book Poesías by Heredia, thus initiating a Hispanic poetic tradition that continues to date.

After a few years, the struggles for independence in Cuba and Puerto Rico would unite these two countries within and beyond their borders. In New York, Eugenio María de Hostos joineds the Cuban Revolutionary Committee and became the editor of La Revolución magazine. Hostos (better known as the Citizen of the Americas) was among the most faithful supporters of Ramón Emeterio Betances’ proposal to create an Antillean Confederation between Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. This initiative would also catch the attention of writer José Martí, an active advocate of insular sovereignty. In this way, the voices of these poets and thinkers began to sound in unison off New York in different Spanish-speaking countries.

José Martí lived and wrote most of his work in this American city, presenting his vision of New York, its inhabitants and its poets to the Hispanic word. Martí’s influence was extensive he wrote for children, free women and men, slaves, the rich, the poor. Martí wrote for all of Our America. The Hispanic world met Walt Whitman when Martí published about the American poet in the Argentine newspaper La Nación. This letter of introduction set the standard for “the cult of Whitman” in Hispanic letters.This recognition will get writers together, from modernists to postmodernists, including avant-garde and social poets from all over the Spanish America. New York has Whitman, but it also has Martí his pedestal within the Hispanic literary world is as big and robust as the one that supports his statue at the main entrance to Central Park.

Likewise, the city also opened its doors to Rubén Darío, who was received by Martí on his first trip to New York in 1893. During this period, Darío met Charles A. Dana, editor of The New York Sun. By this time, Darío already had a presence in Spain and throughout the Americas, but his stay in New York served as a platform for his literary creation, which would leave an indelible mark on the Hispanic poets of subsequent generations. 

When the avant-garde decade of the twenties arose, other names joined the literary map of the city. Such is the case of José Juan Tablada, whose work led into a new poetry by this time, and it is considered by many to be the beginning of Spanish-American modernity. These are the times at which several of the poets of the Generation of ‘27 found comfort in New York. Some will only do so temporarily, as is the case of Federico García Lorca, who, despite his short stay in the city, would set a before and after within Hispanic literature in the metropolis and for the rest of the world, with his volumen of poems Poeta en Nueva York. Others, however, would remain in love with The Big Apple for a long time León Felipe, José Moreno Villa, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, all of whom would influence our city and allow themselves to be influenced by it. Another of the indelible signatures of these years is Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose ephemeral presence is more than enough to leave an eternal mark on the New York imaginary, through his volumen of poems Diario de un poeta recién casado.

From the 1930s on, the conflicts and lack of freedom in Hispanic countries have caused a constant exodus of poets to the United States, and to a great extent, to New York City. The dictatorships of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina, are just some of those wholead many writers into exile, and perhaps more importantly, their readers. While our countries were facing political, economic, and cultural chaos, New York continued to perpetuate itself, maintaining its shape and essence, offering its eternal refuge the newly arrived poet walked the same streets as previous poets did, and each one was welcomed individually by the permanent and unquestionable presence of the city that never sleeps.

The poets in this book arrived in New York by boat, train, plane, or car, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge or the Lincoln Tunnel, to become New Yorkers from day one. Some will return to their roots, staying New York -inevitably- in their work and life experiences. Others will understand that a return is impossible, like Lourdes Casal, who described herself as “Too much of a New Yorker to be, -even to be again- anything else.” Everyone, in some way, helped to describe with maternal sounds what was strange to us and populated the foreign landscape with accents: Broadway and the Hudson River, Upper and Lower Manhattan, opening the door of the corner coffee shop, where every morning we make an order in Spanish.

The city every day became increasingly more attractive to Hispanic writers. Authors from all over the continent found a shelter and an audience in New York. The cosmopolitan experience and a living language, includeng its different faces, enrich the poetic imagination of immigrants, who also count today on the academic support of various Hispanic American literature programs at renowned New York universities.

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This validation platform has made it possible for several anthologies of Hispanic poets in New York to come to light. These compilations, in general, have taken as their leitmotif the authors’ countries of origin, or specific time periods, such as Los Poetas Puertorriqueños, by Alfred Matilla and Iván Silén; Poetas Cubanos en Nueva York, by Felipe Lázaro; Papiros de Babel: antología de la poesía puertorriqueña en Nueva York, by Pedro López-Adorno; Los paraguas amarillos: los poetas latinos en New York, by Iván Silén; and Entre rascacielos: Doce poetas hispanos en Nueva York, by Marie Lise Gazarian Gautie, just to name a few titles.

This anthology was born to fill current gaps and to interconnect different narratives the city that has welcomed us, presenting the reader with a chronological journey through the work of the Hispanic poets who have left their mark on New York. This chronological journey addresses only the the poets’ birth dates, but does not differentiate authors by country or period, but rather connects and places them on a single stage full of lights and sounds that certainly becomes the quintessence of his poetic proposal. Much has been written since early 1823, and much remains to be written. Let this book be our humble way of honoring these first 200 years of Hispanic Poetry in New York City.

The authors included in these pages, in addition to their contributions to universal literature, have kept poetry in Spanish alive in New York. If it is essential to read Walt Whitman and Hart Crane in their allegories of New York within the American poetic tradition, it is also a must to visit the names of Hispanic literature who slept on the benche of the Hudson river if, we want to start understanding this vast city with the presumptuous eagerness of a child discovering the world.

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Henry Ballate M.F.A

New York, spring 2023