Reading Silliman's summary of an essay by Heriberto that I have not myself read. I have the impression, reading Mexican blogs in Spanish, that the actual reality is much messier, the terms like mainstream and avant-garde do not necessarily mean the same thing in Mexico that they do here. Paz, basically, is a "high-modernist" poet. What if T.S Eliot had been a quasi-surrealist poet and had lived until 1990, maintaining his privileged position until the very end? Mexico never had its New American Poetry in the 1960s, which may be why Heriberto is translating American poetry and poetics into Spanish. There are prominent poets after Paz, of course, like David Huerta and Coral Bracho, but these are not really avant-garde writers. There is now quite a bit going on under the surface; I'm reading a good dissertation on Mexican poetry as we speak, which has taught me quite a bit. For me, Mexican poetry seems too self-contained, too cut off from the rest of Latin America. I hope I'm wrong about that.

When Yépez writes in English, I feel he is writing for "us." While he says very similar things in his Spanish blog, the sense of audience is completely different. I get much more of a sense of his daily life in Spanish, whereas in English he gives a more "sanitized" version of himself.

There is also micronationalism, a conflict between the traditional center of power (Mexico D.F) and regional writers, especially from the border states. The fact that poets have traditionally relied on the government to fund their books means poetry has traditionally been in bed with political power. Until recently, of course, one political party, the PRI, had a complete lock on power.