Event Type
What constitutes the Latin American neo-avant-garde and what challenges and opportunities arise when translating and publishing the poetry of this influential generation? This panel examines a pioneering yet frequently overlooked generation of Latin American poets who began publishing in the late 1950s. Their relative invisibility stems, in part, from having worked alongside the fiction writers of the so-called Latin American “boom,” whose prominence often overshadowed contemporaneous poetic innovation. Known as conversacionalistas, these poets forged a distinctive language grounded in orality and shaped by the vocabularies of the social sciences and mass media. Their work broke new ground by bringing socially engaged content into dialogue with experimental forms, embracing elements of popular culture, and imagining the reader as an active collaborator rather than a passive recipient. Such approaches resisted the dominant aesthetic expectation in Latin American poetry that poets align themselves with one pole of an apparent binary—revolutionary commitment or formal conservatism.