“Poesía Libre: Revista de Poesía” & the Documentary Poetry of Revolutionary Nicaragua

Whitney DeVos
Literature
UC Santa Cruz

This project is a chapter-length study of Poesía Libre: Revista de Poesía, the literary magazine of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, an excerpt from my dissertation, “Documentary Poetry of the Americas: 1945-1995.” UCHRI funding supported the purchase of the magazine’s twenty issues, a complete collection of which was almost impossible to find in any archive or library in the United States and even more difficult to access during the period of COVID-19 restrictions. These physical copies facilitated the completion of my dissertation chapter, the first sustained scholarly inquiry into the magazine. I have arranged to digitize the entire collection for public access: Harris Feinsod, Associate Professor at Northwestern and co-director of the Open Door Archive, a “digital repository and exhibition space dedicated to the print worlds and multimedia archives of multiethnic poetry in the Americas and beyond,” has agreed to host Poesía Libre online. Following digitization, hard copies will be donated to the Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México (UNAM), Ernesto Cardenal’s alma mater, which currently only has issues #1-2 in their collection.