Along the past two centuries, while a certain identity of Latin-American poetry was in construction, then claimed its place, exported, and inscribed its tradition in contemporary lyrics, New York has undeniably occupied a prominent position. Contemporary Latin American poetry sometimes makes its way towards its northern counterpart. The present essay is a first attempt at examining what happens at the contact point between the two poetic traditions, especially when Manhattan is at the center of the poem . While this article will refer to many poets in whose creation New York was an important step, the analysis will focus on three Andean poets whose voices have marked the Latin-American lyrics over the past half-century: Peruvian poetess Blanca Varela (Lima, 1926-2009), Chilean poet Enrique Lihn (Santiago de Chili, 1929-1988), and Bolivian poet Eduardo Mitre (Oruro, 1943). All three are acknowledged well beyond the borders of their motherlands and all three are among the leaders of contemporary poetry in Spanish. Significantly, passing through Manhattan was a decisive step in their work, whether they defined a new poetic line or gave theirs a new dimension there. This essay will not examine whole collections but will analyze poems that represent, in the biographies of the three poets, significant steps in a cosmopolitan journey. The poems are respectively Varela's "Valzes," the long opening poem of Valses y otras falsas confesiones (1971), several poems extracted from Lihn's A partir de Manhattan (1979) and Pena de extranamiento (1986), and Mitre's complete collection El paraguas de Manhattan (2004). These texts, spread over four decades, constitute, in successive touches, poetic and plastic perceptions of New York, and they represent part of the contemporaneous imaginary of the Latin-American "voyage." The present essay will follow the poets' walk in the city, which sometimes takes the form of a loss in the labyrinth and sometimes that of the new consciousness of a foreignness or strangeness, when the urban landscape by antonomasia, Manhattan, affected both by gravity and grace, metamorphoses into a space questioning the poetic making.
crimination was their goal, black expatriate American writers have been more sensitive to European prejudices against people of color than their white expatriate counterparts. Earlier American white writ ers sometimes employed these very stereotypes, using their travel writ ing to differentiate world's people into distinctive racial and ethnic groups, or national groups as Edith Wharton did in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919). Some African-American expatriates like Langston Hughes negotiated these stereotypes and lived out the myth of being poor, American, and happy in by joining a pan-African expatriate community. Others, like James Baldwin, were skeptical of pan-African bond assumed by Du Bois, Hughes, and Wright. Baldwin pointed to difference between African colonials and African-Americans 300 years removed from their African homeland, with result that he felt more isolated in Paris than earlier African
