Carlos Oquendo de Amat was part of an extensive and urgent vanguardist poetry world in Lima, Peru in the second two decades of the 20th century. Oquendo de Amat’s only book of poems, 5 Metros de Poemas, is simultaneously one of the most celebrated and unknown examples of the diversity of the poetry of this cultural moment. He was the son of a Sorbonne-educated progressive newspaper publisher, who was both a prominent member of the elite of Puno, a highland provincial capital on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and an irascible enemy of Peru’s Catholic-conservative establishment. Upon the death of his father in 1918, the teenage Oquendo de Amat and his mother moved from provincial genteel comfort to Lima where they lived in poverty. He was often lucky to have enough money for just one meal a day. Friends say he would regularly skip that one meal to have enough to go to the cinema, a guiding obsession evidenced in his work. Lima in this moment was in a state of rapid, at times violent, growth and transformation as it filled with the members of the new working and professional classes. All social relations were being torn apart and rebuilt and the poets of this strange new old city turned to the works of the various European vanguards for guidance in how to respond to this sudden outbreak of modernity. Oquendo de Amat embodied many of the contradictions of this vanguard. After being imprisoned a number of times, during various crackdowns on dissent, he emphatically embraced Marxism and renounced poetry. During one of his stints in prison he contracted tuberculosis, which worsened rapidly during subsequent prison terms. Released from his last prison term in his homeland, he was deported to Panama from where he barely managed to reach Republican Spain in time to expire at the age of 32.

Joshua Beckman is a poet, translator and editor. His recent books include The Inside of an Apple (Wave Books, 2013) and Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners, co-edited with CAConrad and Robert Dewhurst (Wave Books, 2015).

Alejandro de Acosta is a teacher, writer, and translator based in Olympia, Washington. He founded mufa::poema, a micropress that freely distributed a dozen poetry and prose chapbooks. His poetry translations include Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade and Five Meters of Poems by Carlos Oquendo de Amat. He alsorntranslated Fabián Ludueña’s philosophical treatise H.P. Lovecraft: ThernDisjunction in Being and “Notes to Complicate Cardenal’s Epigrams”rnin the journal Black Box. In 2014 he published two books of essays, and has recently given talks and readings on kinship, the poetics of translation, AntoniornPorchia, and Francis Ponge.