Letters That Breathe Fire

Arguably one of the most important independent literary magazines of the 1960s, El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn made new work from the South available in the North and vice versa. Its scope exceeded that of any clique or group, publishing the most exciting new work of the time along with texts by established writers, its only criterion being quality. Each bilingual quarterly issue included a Letter Section, which reproduced correspondence from contributors and readers—among them: Thomas Merton, Ernesto Cardenal, Julio Cortázar, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Raquel Jodorowsky, Clayton Eshleman, and Cecilia Vicuña. They wrote to us about their lives and communities, ideas and aspirations. In these letters, arguments about important issues of the day also took place. Personal and political stories offer a sense of how creative people lived and worked, and those stories continue to have relevance in today’s very different world.