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Home > Writings and Books > El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn
El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn
Latest addition : 19 May 2008.
From January, 1962 through July, 1969, El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn was on the cutting edge of independent publishing. The bilingual quarterly, which ran from 100 to almost 300 pages per issue, published some of the best new work to come out of Latin and North America—with occasional sections from Canada, Finland, France, and other countries. Its 3,000 copies were distributed worldwide. The journal was founded and co-edited by Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragon. In its last year Robert Cohen replaced Mondragon on the masthead. Because it took a stand in defense of Mexico’s 1968 Student Movement, in mid-1969 the journal was forced to close. It had published 31 issues and a dozen books.
EL CORNO EMPLUMADO - A STORY OF THE SIXTIES, a film available in English and Spanish versions, is available at El Corno Emplumado
This section's articles
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El Corno Emplumado 1
El Corno Emplumado 1 was the first issue of a new bilingual quarterly out of Mexico City. Sergio Mondragon, Harvey Wolin (who left the project shortly after this issue), and Margaret walked Mexico City’s Streets looking for poetry and patronage. Support came from Jose Goroztiza, Mexico’s Secretary of State and himself a fine poet, Arnaldo Orfila, and Jesus Silva Herzog—as well as Kurt Stavenhagen, Sol Arguedas, Jacobo Glantz, James Merill, Bellas Artes, the British Book Store and Gerbers (...) -
El Corno Emplumado 2
El Corno’s first issue quickly established its authenticity—the promise that we would publish quarterly and that the journal’s pages would serve poetry rather than the other way around. Now, instead of our trying to convince people we were serious about producing a literary journal, they began to seek us out.
El Corno #2 featured work by Agusti Bartra, Robert Creeley, Clayton Eshleman, Sergio Mondragon, Paul Blackburn, Juan Banuelos, Margaret Randall, Allen Ginsberg, Rosario Castellonos, (...) -
El Corno Emplumado 3
Now the journal was making a name for itself. The typographical covers, with the publication’s name in continuous script across the top and the issue’s contributor’s names in continuous script along the bottom, each in its own bright color, began to be familiar to readers far and wide.
El Corno #3 featured portfolios of new poetry from Guatemala and Nicaragua, as well as poems by Hermann Hesse, Daisy Aldan, Anselm Hollo, Kenneth Patchen, Charles Bukowski, Thelma Nava, Paul Blackburn, (...) -
El Corno Emplumado 4
As we approached the end of our first year, we decided to devote the entire last issue of each year to a book by a single poet—in bilingual, facing text format. This would require a great deal of work, but we were enthusiastic about embarking on this tradition, making a good body of work by one poet available in both languages. We decided we would alternate years, choosing a Spanish language poet one year and an English language poet the next. El Corno would honor this tradition throughout (...) -
El Corno Emplumado 5
We begin our second year! To cut costs, with El Corno #5 we experimented with a different quality paper. It was an experiment we would not repeat. (El Corno was printed back in the days of linotype and letterpress. Small independent print shops produced our press runs. We were always looking for ways to reduce the printer’s bill, but tried to maintain a decent quality at the same time.)
This issue featured "En busca de la cultura perdida," a long essay by French/Mexican anthropologist (...) -
El Corno Emplumado 6
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk at Gethsemani, Kentucky, read El Corno and wrote to us. He was a featured contributor to El Corno #5. It also had work by Diane Wakoski, Andre Breton, Ernesto Cardenal, Carol Berge, Theodore Enslin, Paul Blackburn, Robert Nichols, Octavio Paz, Marguerite Harris, Jerome Rothenberg, Raquel Jodorowsky, George Hitchcock, Gary Snyder, Otto-Raul Gonzalez, and anthologies of poetry from Ecuador and Uruguay.
Many visual artists graced this issue’s pages, among them (...) -
El Corno Emplumado 7
El Corno #7 featured work by William Carlos Williams, Raquel Jodorowsky, Edmundo Valadez, Clayton Eshleman, Kenji Matsumoto, Robert Kelly, Barbara Moraff, William Wroth, Fielding Dawson, Eugenio Montale, Leonore Kendal, Homero Aridjis, Ezequial Saad, David Ray, and many others.
In this issue we published our first anthology of new Cuban poetry, thus breaking through the U.S.-imposed cultural blockade against that nation. This marked the beginning of an intense and important communication (...) -
El Corno Emplumado 8
Following in the tradition we had established of making our last issue of each year a bilingual book by an individual poet, this time it would be one who wrote in English. El Corno 8 was a book by Robert Kelly: Her Body Against Time / Su cuerpo contra el tiempo. The collection was illustrated by Mexican artist Carlos Coffeen Serpas. -
El Corno Emplumado 9
Our first issue of 1964 featured a section of poetry written by painters: Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Francis Picabia, Jean Arb, Oskar Kokoshka, and Salvador Dali.
El Corno #9 also featured a small anthology of poetry from Peru, and work by Juan Martinez, Theodore Enslin, Thelma Nava, Efrain Huerta, Allen Katzman, Agusti Bartra, Anselm Hollo, Ulises Carrion, and Jack Hirschman.
The journal had received an enthusiastic letter from Henry Miller, and Sergio Mondragon and (...) -
El Corno Emplumado 10
El Corno #10 featured primitive poetry from around the world: from the Comanche, Arapaho, Paiute, and Ojibwa of the lower United States; the Tlingites and Eskimos of Alaska; the Ba-iles and Pigmies of Africa; and the native inhabitants of Easter Island. To illustrate these poems, we invited Cirilo Salgado (age 22) and Juan Martinez (age 12), two young artists from the state of Guerrero, Mexico, to make drawings specially for the issue. As they sat at our kitchen table, with their brushes (...)
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