Beyond Borders

When I first pitched this feature about poet and activist Margaret Randall, all I knew about her was that she’d coedited the bilingual “little mag” El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn in Mexico City during the 1960s. I also knew that she was coming to City Lights Books in San Francisco, where I work, for the launch of Time’s Language: Selected Poems (1959–2018), a 448-page tome issued by her publisher Wings Press. By the time I took the elevator to her suite at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, however, I was thoroughly intimidated. It wasn’t simply that her oeuvre—more than 100 books of poetry and prose—was impossible to circumscribe in the two months I’d had to prepare. It was that I felt ridiculous holding myself out as a poet before another poet whose work was inextricable from her life as a revolutionary. I felt much as I’d felt meeting Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, who’d survived imprisonment under the Pinochet dictatorship—unworthy of the designation “poet.”

These feelings dissipated on meeting Randall. She’s a writer, a pro in the sense that she’s made a living at it, and her familiarity with the mundane aspects of the poetry world immediately set me at ease. A youthful 81 when we met—now 82—Randall is impressive yet down to earth, “a strange combination of shyness and adventurousness,” as she puts it. While she knows how extraordinary her life has been, she doesn’t aggrandize herself or her work. Indeed, she admits to mild ambivalence over Time’s Language, whose selection she left in the hands of editors Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez.

“I was embarrassed by some of the early poems, but at the same time, I thought, ‘I have to own that work,’” she says. “You don’t come up totally the poet you want to be and I felt it’s important for younger poets to see a trajectory that’s at least pretending it’s not ashamed of those early poems.”

Nor is she content to rest on her laurels. Retired from teaching, at an age when she might justly coast, the prolific Randall maintains a rigorous pace. In addition to a full-length collection, The Morning After: Poetry and Prose in a Post-Truth World (2017), the year leading up to Time’s Language  saw the publication of Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity (2017)—a substantial study of Cuba’s influence in the Spanish-speaking world—by Duke University Press, which next year will also bring out her memoir, I Never Left Home. A new collection of poems, Against Atrocity, will appear from Wings this September. Her prodigious energy is evident; having just flown into town, she granted me two and a half hours in her rather deluxe, 14th floor suite, paid for by the Engaging the Senses Foundation, which sent a film crew to document her reading the next day. Her wife, the painter Barbara Byers, drifted in and out and we sat overlooking San Francisco as it runs down Nob Hill to the sea.

***

Randall was born in New York City on December 6, 1936. When she was 10, her assimilated Jewish family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she lives today. She married her boyfriend, Sam Jacobs, at age 18, partly as “a way to leave home,” she says, adding, “It was the only way a woman in my class and culture could do that at the time.” An overambitious plan to reach India on $400 landed the couple in Seville, Spain, where they lived and worked for more than a year while learning Spanish. The couple split on their return to Albuquerque, where Randall underwent two more pivotal experiences. The first was attending a party where a friend read aloud Allen Ginsberg’s just-published “Howl.”

“I was completely knocked out,” she says. “It was the first poem that really drew me to poetry. It wasn’t that my life was anything like Ginsberg’s; it was the rejection of social hypocrisy, everything coming off the ’50s. I wrote him a letter saying I’ll meet you at such-and-such a corner in San Francisco on such-a-such a date. I drove out to meet him convinced he was going to be there. Of course, he wasn’t.”

The second experience was encountering Elaine de Kooning, who was then a visiting art professor at the University of New Mexico.

“She was my first mentor,” Randall recalls, “the first woman I knew who completely broke all the bounds of what womanhood was supposed to be in those years. She was a tremendous influence and we became good friends. When she returned to New York, I followed her there.”

Randall became part of New York’s abstract expressionist milieu, through which she met numerous Beat, Deep Image, New York School, and Black Mountain poets. Suddenly Ginsberg was her neighbor and friend, as were writers including Jerome Rothenberg, Hettie Jones, and Diane di Prima. During this period she worked for Spanish Refugee Aid and also produced her first, self-published poetry collections, Giant of Tears (1959) and Ecstasy Is a Number (1961), the latter with a cover and drawings by de Kooning. If some of the early work in Time’s Language—“Of Sevilla Now as It Is,” for example, with its alternating choruses in Spanish and English—exhibits a faint air of juvenilia, of striving after poetic effect, it exists alongside poems, such as “Number 5,” that point to the unadorned style of her mature work:

Here we can listen
to nightfall
and blow in
the ears of
sunsets
while the
earth
staggers
through
an open
door.

Such a spare poem—devoid of rhetorical flourish—might suggest the influence of Robert Creeley, another longtime friend, but it also points to their mutual inspiration William Carlos Williams, whom Randall visited in Rutherford, New Jersey.

“I saw him a few times, but that first visit had a tremendous impact on me,” she says. “He’d had a stroke several years before and had difficulty speaking, so he had me read some of his new poems to him and read some of mine and he critiqued them in a way I’d never had before. Williams was able to pick out things about those very bad poems that would allow me to take a next step in my work.”

Randall’s New York years were formative. In early 1960, she became pregnant after a casual fling with the poet Joel Oppenheimer. Already a father, Oppenheimer was reluctant to have another child, unlike Randall, who decided to go it alone. Their son Gregory was born in October of that year. His birth was part of what precipitated her decision to leave New York for Mexico City.

“I thought in Mexico I’ll be able to have help around the house,” she says. “I’ll be able to figure out ways to spend more time with Gregory and still earn a living. But it also was probably because something about Mexico lured me, excited me, attracted me.”

***

Before leaving, Randall had one more fateful encounter, when she gave her first reading—at a Village coffeehouse series run by Paul Blackburn—on a bill that included Philip Lamantia. Visiting from Mexico City, where he’d spent much of the 1950s, Lamantia gave her his phone number and told her to “look [him] up” when she arrived, in September 1961.

“It was another very fortuitous moment that changed my life,” she says. “Philip at that point was married to a woman named Lucille Dujardin, and they lived in this lovely apartment in the Zona Rosa, in the middle of Mexico City. They had this salon where poets would come every night and read to one another. We were all young kids, but some of them would become among the great poets of my generation, like [Nicaraguan poet] Ernesto Cardenal, who was not yet a priest, and Homero Aridjis.”

In this bilingual milieu, Randall met a Mexican poet, Sergio Mondragón, whom she married in 1962. Here, too, the pair conceived the idea for a dual-language literary magazine, El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, as a way to further this direct encounter between North and South American poetry.

“Most of the North Americans spoke much worse Spanish than I did, and a lot of the Latin Americans barely spoke English,” Randall recalls. “They had never read Williams or Pound and we’d never read Vallejo or Neruda or any of their important poets. There was this sense that developed at Philip’s apartment that we needed some kind of venue to bridge that gap, so that’s how El Corno was born.”

Published quarterly from January 1962 through July 1969, for a total of 31 issues, in addition to some dozen books, El Corno Emplumado is one of the major achievements among 20th-century literary magazines. (Scans of all 31 issues are available at Northwestern University’s Open Door Archive.) Its bilingual contents—along with the assistance of farflung poets serving as local agents—garnered each issue’s 3,000 copies international circulation throughout North and South America and even Europe, including such unlikely corners as Finland and Holland. Its special regional features—notably issue 23’s focus on Cuban writers—showcased the work of Latin American poets, as well as Canadian, indigenous Mexican, and European writers, giving it a reach and impact far beyond most little mags. The curation of Anglophone poets, largely Randall’s responsibility while Mondragón handled the Spanish, is impressive, encompassing not just famous figures such as Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but also emerging writers as diverse as Tom Raworth, Larry Eigner, and Kathleen Fraser. Even internationally established authors including André Breton, Herman Hesse, and Henry Miller contributed.

During this period, Randall and Mondragón had two daughters, Sarah (b. 1963) and Ximena (b. 1964). The mid-’60s also saw the rapid maturation of Randall’s poetry, achieved at first through a minimalism of which the last two stanzas of “The Playback” afford an example:

i shut the door erase these recent days
and lean against a wall a month ago
where someone spoke
 
i didn’t quite hear the end of that story
my hands still waiting for the words to fall
to catch them

A deliberate austerity characterizes her poetry during this period, in which Randall frequently strips away all capitals and most punctuation; her investigation of the medium of poetry leads her to grapple with words themselves, denuded of typographical luxuries, underscoring her place along the Williams-Creeley lineage of American poetry. To be sure, she relaxed this rigor over time, allowing capitals and punctuation back in, but the severity of her approach during this period endured. Much of her artistry is near-invisible, the way, for example, the grammatical unit “erase these recent days”—apart from its evocative sense—holds together visually and audially through its disposition of vowels (three pairs of e’s and a couple of lone a’s). Also characteristic here is her tendency to end her poems on a decisive note, the last line or two frequently providing a climax or drawing a line under all that precedes them. These days such an approach has gone out of fashion—rejected as “overdetermined” under various postmodern theories—but I dare say that’s because it’s so hard to achieve. But Randall has an almost Yeatsian facility in ending her poems with their most striking lines and images.

In 1967, the same year “The Playback” was published in Water I Slip into at Night (El Corno Emplumado), Randall visited Cuba for the first time and took on her husband’s Mexican citizenship to make it easier to gain employment, only to be informed by the US consulate that she’d relinquished her American citizenship as a result. At the same time, both their marriage and their editorial partnership grew strained.

“Sergio and I began going in different directions in our lives,” Randall says. “I was moving towards socialist revolution and the guerrilla struggles that were emerging in Latin America and he was going towards mystic, Zen, and other Buddhist practices. As we grew apart, our taste in poetry also diverged and El Corno became like two different magazines under the same cover.”

Their differences came to a head in 1968, when the couple separated and Mondragón resigned as coeditor. Randall and her three children moved in with her new partner, Robert Cohen, an American poet who assumed coeditorship of El Corno. But the magazine’s days were numbered.

The year 1968 was marked by a worldwide paroxysm of student-led revolutionary movements, from Prague Spring and the French general strike to the revolution in Pakistan to the civil rights and antiwar protests in the United States. Having declared “solidarity with the student uprisings all over the world” in its July issue, El Corno opened its October number with a condemnation of violence against the Mexican student movement. This issue immediately preceded the October 2 Tlatelolco Massacre, when government forces under President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz fired on a peaceful demonstration in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas for several hours.

“The official death toll was 26,” Randall says. “I think the Mexican government has since admitted it was upwards of 300, but most of us think it was around 1,000, because of all the people missing after.”

The consequences for El Corno were immediate; government and university stipends, which Randall estimates accounted for 75 percent of the magazine’s production costs, were cancelled, and print shops feared to print it. Randall and Cohen persisted for another three issues funded by donations, including one from Samuel Beckett, and assistance from Mexican publisher Movimiento Editores. But a harrowing series of incidents, in which covert operatives stole Randall’s passport at gunpoint and the Mexican government refused to issue her a new one, forced the family—which now included newborn Ana—into hiding in 1969, as well as into issuing an announcement of the magazine’s demise in a vain attempt to ward off persecution.

***

Sending her children and her partner ahead, Randall made a daring escape from Mexico to Cuba via the United States and Czechoslovakia, a three-month ordeal she chronicled in such books as To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (2009) and the upcoming I Never Left Home. She spent the next 11 years in Cuba, where she worked for the Cuban Book Institute and the Ministry of Culture and embraced the ideals of the burgeoning second-wave feminist movement.

“That was where I began to do my first oral history,” she recalls, “starting with one about Cuban women. I worked as a translator and a book editor, my kids went to school, and I did volunteer work.” Refusing the special ration book to which skilled foreigners were entitled, Randall says she “lived as much like a Cuban as I could.”

Randall was able to travel internationally with Cuban diplomatic papers, allowing her to research women’s lives in Peru in 1973 and in North Vietnam in 1974–75. She left a mere three months before the end of the US-Vietnam War. In 1975, she separated from Cohen and began a four-year relationship with Colombian/Venezuelan poet Antonio Castro. During this period, she published a steady stream of books, notably the still-in-print selection of poetry and prose Part of the Solution (1972) with New Directions, and learned photography, an art she has practiced ever since. But this exhilarating period came to end in the late ’70s, when Randall was part of a broader repression of artists and writers and lost her job, though, unusually, she still drew her salary.

“I think it was because these young Cubans would come to the house every night and would meet revolutionaries, poets, writers, and artists from all over Latin America and the US,” she says. “These people had different ideologies, not necessarily the Cuban line. I think I was seen first of all as a feminist—which was a dirty word at that point in Cuba—and second of all, they might have thought I was a Trotskyist or a Maoist. I wasn’t, but I was interested in all these points of view.”

Facing this marginalization, Randall accepted a job in Nicaragua (following the successful Sandinista revolution in 1979) to work in the Ministry of Culture under her old friend Ernesto Cardenal. Fortunately, political repression against those involved in the ’68 student movement in Mexico had eased in the dozen years since and she was at last issued a new passport, courtesy of Mexico’s new Left-leaning ambassador to Cuba, Gonzalo Martínez Corvalán.

“He had several of my books, which he wanted me to sign,” she recalls. “He said, ‘You’re a Mexican treasure.’ He was very complimentary. I came back the next day and he gave me my real Mexican passport so I was able to go to Nicaragua.”

Randall lived and worked in Nicaragua from the end of 1980 through the beginning of 1984. It was a dangerous time, as the CIA under President Reagan attempted to overthrow the Sandinista government by funneling money and weapons to the counterrevolutionary or “Contra” guerrillas. Like many Nicaraguans, Randall took regular night shifts guarding her neighborhood, armed with a pistol.

“As the Contra war heated up, I sort of had a nervous breakdown,” she says. “I think I had a kind of PTSD which has made me forget a lot of details.” With the help of a psychologist, Randall began processing her quarter century of participation in Latin American revolutionary struggle and made the difficult decision to return to the United States.

***

In 1984, at age 50, Randall returned to her hometown of Albuquerque, where her parents and brother still lived. She married an American poet, Floyce Alexander, and applied for a green card as the first step toward regaining her US citizenship. But the expected 90-day application process dragged on for more than a year, until she was summoned to the local INS office for an interview. In a cruel reversal of her earlier encounter with Ambassador Martínez Corvalán, an INS officer brandished several of her books not to request an autograph but to question her over various highlighted passages. A year later she found herself in a courthouse in El Paso, Texas, being cross-examined over her writing. Agitated by the poet’s associations with Latin American communists, the INS’s district counsel, Guadeloupe González (now an immigration judge in El Paso), demanded to know whether Randall had ever written “a poem in praise of free enterprise,” a moment commemorated in her poem of that title included in Time’s Language:

Free
enterprise, the
enterprise of freedom
or
enter here: a prize to empower our own
our own enterprise
of freedom
which is anything but
that bawdy concept
pressing dry
the juices of our lives.

I admire the tack Randall takes here. While most poets would be tempted to aggrandize their revolutionary cred, Randall playfully interrogates the threadbare phraseology itself. She teases out its contradictions in a way that alludes to her own immigration dilemma (“enter here”) before landing on the more austere characterization of “free enterprise” in the final three lines, turning the focus away from herself toward the systemic effect of capitalist thought suppression. This is a splendid maneuver of poetic economy made in defiance of a very personal threat. The INS sought to deport Randall under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, a.k.a. the McCarran-Walter Act, a McCarthy-era law forbidding naturalization to “undesirable” classes of immigrants such as communists and homosexuals. McCarran-Walter was part of the legal underpinning for President Trump’s 2017 Executive Order 13769, the so-called Muslim ban. More recently, Trump’s insistence that the 2018 caravan of Latin American migrants had been infiltrated by terrorists was an attempt to provide McCarran-Walter legal cover to deny asylum claims. In her case, Randall says, she was “excluded under the ideological exclusion clause, for writing stuff against ‘the good order and happiness of the United States.’”

“I was very lucky,” she continues, “because the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York took my case as a First Amendment case, which cost a quarter of a million dollars which I wouldn’t have been able to pay. I had the support of PEN America. I had this incredible support, unlike now when all these people are being unceremoniously put in camps or sent back across the border.”

In 1989, after years of defeats and appeals, Randall prevailed at the INS’s Board of Immigration Appeals, which, in a 3–2 decision, ruled that her original loss of citizenship was a mistake. While the decision mooted the CCR’s First Amendment arguments, public opinion in support of Randall and other high-profile cases likely led to mitigation of some of the more stringent aspects of McCarran-Walter with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990.

***

Randall’s life bristles with incident, and space precludes a full rehearsal of all its significant aspects. But two developments after her return to the United States must be mentioned. The first was her realization, in 1985, that she is a lesbian, attendant on meeting and falling in love with Barbara Byers during a class she taught at the University of New Mexico. The INS battle put pressure on their relationship. Because homosexuality remained grounds for exclusion and the CCR had built its challenge on the First Amendment issue, Randall had to remain “closeted” in a technical sense until the case resolved. Not that the couple went to great lengths to hide their love, and one of the small ironies here is that the 1990 Act eliminated McCarran-Walter’s homosexuality exclusion while its exclusions based on political beliefs remain intact.

This self-discovery was followed in 1986 by recovered memories of being an incest victim as a toddler at the hands of her maternal grandfather, resulting in the hybrid book of poetry, prose, and photographs This Is About Incest (1987). Randall’s exploration of this subject has yielded some of her most powerful work, as was evident at City Lights the day after our interview, when she read a poem from this book included in Time’s Language, “The Green Clothes Hamper.” Seldom have I felt the air so completely sucked out of a room as when she reached the mid-poem lines “This is the green lucite top / of a clothes hamper where rape impaled diapers.” I knew this last dependent clause was coming and observed its effect on the room: a roaring silence, followed by an audible creak of chairs as the packed audience collectively recrossed its legs. A lifetime of writing poetry undergirds this clause. It’s entirely abstract—rape is an act, so cannot be said to act; the poem doesn’t speak of vaginal penetration, as the metonymic diapers being metaphorically impaled would seem to suggest—yet it could be no more concrete in conveying an inappropriate sexual relation. Yet too the phrase derives considerable power from purely formal features, two iambs brought up short by a trochee, for example, or the subliminal echo of the ordinary phrase diaper pail undergirding “impaled diapers.” Then there’s the anagrammatic presence of rape in the word diapers and the letters ape in impaled. The clause has a structural soundness quite apart from considerations of meaning that nonetheless amplifies those considerations.

According to Randall, her embrace of the recovery movement, particularly her insistence that “the invasion of a child’s body by a man (or woman) is strikingly similar to the invasion of a small country by a larger more powerful one” hasn’t been well received by “parts of the Left.”

“When you’re in the middle of a war,” she says, “you don’t think about yourself and your own issues; that’s probably why I didn’t realize I was a lesbian and I didn’t remember the incest. It was seen as self-centered to be thinking about yourself when you were in the midst of this big collective effort. I think it’s been a huge mistake of the Left. I mean, the Left always used to say, ‘Women’s rights? We’ll worry about that later.’”

As we concluded our interview, I suggested perhaps she’s allowed her poetry to get more personal in later life, to delve further into her own psyche alongside her continued commitment to political activism. She seemed half-inclined to agree, though she ultimately rejected a dichotomy between the personal and political in poetry.

“I think a poem is good or it’s bad,” she says. “It takes you someplace or it doesn’t, and everything is political to me and nothing is, but I’m not speaking of politics in the narrow partisan sense. It’s political because it’s about how you see life and what your values are and you write out of that. To me it’s all of a piece. I wanted it to be personal. I want it to be political. I want it to be social. I want it to be landscape and wind and I want to speak to all of those things in the same poem. I don’t want those separations anymore and that’s what I’m working towards.”