How to give a general overview of Margaret Randall’s immense output as a writer, editor, translator, and photographer? Her career spans roughly seven decades and her bibliography hovers above three hundred books, including at least one in 2026. A point of entry into her work might start with El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, which she edited with poet Sergio Mondragon in Mexico City in the 1960s. It might also include Margaret’s work as an oral historian, gathering testimonios in Cuba where she lived from the late 1960s until the late 1970s, or the volumes of oral history from the Sandinista revolution. These books, including Sandino’s Daughters, were compiled during that moment of revolutionary fervor and the Contra War from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Or you could start with her work from the later 1980s, including The Coming Home Poems, published as the Reagan administration attempted to deport her because of her poetry and political views when she returned to the United States. You could also survey her translations, beginning with those in El Corno Emplumado and stretching through the present, including in the fantastic Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry (2016). Or you could examine her memoirs, her critical writing, her volumes of correspondence, her photography, her involvement with the feminist journal Ikon, or her work as an educator and her frequent appearances at Naropa. In other words, there’s a lot to work with.

At the root of all these roles, Margaret is a poet—though with a life that has seen such a broad range of commitments and practices, her own poetic trajectory isn’t, to my mind, given its much warranted due. In this essay, I’ll illustrate a key period in Margaret’s life as a poet, between roughly 1965 and the mid-1980s, with a look towards the present as well. Margaret’s poetics shifted during this period as she expanded her conception of the literary in tandem with a widening of her political horizons. The poetry is exquisite, which is reason enough to engage in this conversation. But beyond Margaret’s craft, we can glean much from Margaret’s practice of the 1960s–1980s for our present conjuncture: she encourages us to view poetry as a hemispheric bridge and as a tool of political and social praxis.

I began thinking about this essay, and rereading Margaret’s immense oeuvre, in early January. I woke up on January 3rd in Lima, Peru to the news of the latest round of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean with all of its transactional cynicism and posturing of executive autarchy. At the bar with poet friends that night, the subject came to Margaret’s work. “She was here,” one of them said, “in the seventies. As part of the Velasco [reformist military] government.” Though I had known this from extensive conversations with Margaret (and a bit of doctoral research to boot!), there was something comforting about hearing her name at that precise moment. A reminder of the importance of internationalist solidarity that Margaret and others have modeled as we enter yet another period of U.S. gangsterism. Margaret’s work, and the impact it has made across the Américas are a reminder of what the stakes are now, and the role that writers can and, indeed, must take if the fascism of the present is to be defeated.

Margaret’s political commitments existed prior to her time in Mexico City, and certainly prior to El Corno Emplumado’s siding with the student movement after its brutal massacre by Mexican state forces in 1968. During her time in New York, before leaving in the early 1960s, there are poems that clearly demarcate a generalized left politics, but the poetics are largely focused on the body, and the self, in relation to music, to art. They are a young poet’s writing, a writing that begins to change during her time in Mexico. In a long interview, forthcoming from the CUNY Lost & Found series, Margaret noted to me that her poetics began to shift during her time attending salons at Philip Lamantia’s house in Mexico City, as she developed a poetics of her own.

Garrett Caples has noted that “a deliberate austerity characterizes her poetry during this period, in which Randall frequently strips away all capitals and most punctuation; her investigation of the medium of poetry leads her to grapple with words themselves, denuded of typographical luxuries, underscoring her place along the Williams-Creeley lineage of American poetry.” I would add that Margaret works out her poetic evolution in the textual double of the body. By 1965, Margaret’s writing had begun to test the container of the poem. As the 1960s wore on, we might say that her poetry became more “political,” though less for its overt statements or imagery than for its weaving of this lexical “austerity” and its social commitments.

“The Warning,” from the beginning of this transitional period, hints at the poem’s material conditions, even as it returns to its chimerical interrogation of form:

Margaret’s October (1968), however, represents a moment of passage. The subject in these poems grapples not only with the poem/body but more fully with their historical conditions. October’s composition was marked by the ramping up of the war in Vietnam and protest against it, as well as the 1965 invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic under the so-called Johnson Doctrine concurrent with the expansion of guerrilla efforts, stymied symbolically in the death of Che Guevara and others in Bolivia in 1967. Margaret’s poetry suddenly becomes far more crowded with proper nouns, with places, with names, with its material conditions, though without being severed from the body, the self.

Take the poem “Being Eight When Those Things Happened,” which speaks to the experience of war at a distance—of childhood understanding, of war’s allowances for death, and the concurrence of her childhood with her father’s family being killed in the death camps of Europe. “Later one / does not wonder in the same way, knows, / stops wondering and wonders,” the speaker notes at the poem’s close. This is where October indicates a decisive shift: Margaret’s writing begins to approach the corporeal not in itself and for its own sake, but as the locus of an expanding political and social analysis.

October’s long poem “Just a Note, Mr. Johnson”—Mr. Johnson being U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson—complicates authorial standpoint indictment of the act of protest, on its own, in its ultimately insufficient place within an anti-war movement.

The immensity of the violence perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam develops in repeated images—the poem returns to the picture of a girl in Vietnam “her head half blown off”—while noting the failure of protest that takes as its ends the immediacy of political change. Margaret writes,

And yet the epistolary mode, the titular address to LBJ, would be hard to identify in this poem, except toward its close where the second person creeps back into the writing. Thus, if the “note” to LBJ is one that demands accountability, it also sees the limitation of the poem in the poem itself. The second person, the “Mr. Johnson” of the title, is almost entirely absent from the writing, a distractedness in the horror of seeing, seething, and reeling from the disaster. A familiar feeling, I must admit, washes over me as I reread these verses.

Where October is marked by a temporary return to the United States and horror at its blithe imperialism, Margaret’s work would increasingly look south in her politics and poetry. 1968’s So Many Rooms Has a House but One Roof, by contrast, offers some hint of a utopian horizon, punctuated by a new lyricism and openness of poetic comradeship. It is, in its seriality, one of the best examples of that sudden shift in writing that sees a poet enter not only a major new phase of her life, but a sudden leap in a sense of the world. It is not unlike that other great serial poem of the late 1960s, Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” in which the themes developed over the previous decade suddenly solidify. It is worth quoting section 10 from So Many Rooms in its entirety as it acts as a kind of ars poetica, and a key to much of her subsequent work.

Where in 1963’s “The Joining of the Sign,” Margaret had thought of the self joined in love and poetry as

Here the reflection of time in the poem is a shattered mirror with a collective reflection, and a reflection that is necessarily a point of breakage, an opening up, rather than an exit from.

Margaret and others had been invited to Cuba to take part in the Encuentro Ruben Darío in January 1967, her first visit to the island. Over the course of this trip, she met people who would come to be longtime acquaintances and close friends, among them Haydée Santamaría, head of Casa de las Americas, and Roberto Fernández Retamar, one of the great poets and essayists of revolutionary Cuba, known in the US mostly for his essay “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America.” In 1968, forced to go underground and then flee Mexico City faced with state repression in the wake of the Tlatelolco massacre, Margaret returned to Cuba where she would live for the next decade.

Margaret experimented with several methods upon touching down in Cuba: collage, short stories, and character sketches, related to the beginnings of her involvement in oral history, as in her Cuban Women Now! (1974). One of the first poems from her time in Cuba, however, is a largely sui generis prose poem “THE REAL AMERICAN FLAG UNFURLS WITH THE HELP OF A WIRE,” with the subtitle “Moon landing, July 22nd, 1969….” While sampling from several discursive modes, it closes:

Vaguely religious references (“a crown on his head pain or thorn”) are paratactically threaded with image of the guerrillero family. I cannot help but think of the Uruguayan writer Carlos María Gutiérrez’s Diario del Cuartel, which won the Casa de las Americas prize in 1970. (Margaret translated and, as part of the Casa de las Américas jury, helped award Gutiérrez’s poem during this period, though the manuscript is lost). Gutiérrez’s book substitutes the name of God for that of the dictator who had him imprisoned as a way of getting the writing out of prison; its poetics of clandestinity are familiar in Margaret’s poem. The capacity for detection, and the potential for the subversion of language, are both front and center in “The Real American Flag Unfurls With the Help of a Wire,” in the way that the embeddedness of both dominant American ideologies and of their contradictions may be detected at a distance, but inverting the surveillance technologies that promise “guerrilla detection.” The poem demonstrates that the guerrilla exists hidden in the moon landing, itself,

While living in Cuba, Margaret also worked with the Velasco government in Peru, and visited Vietnam to work on a book of testimonials of women revolutionaries there. Back at home in Havana, Margaret cultivated friendships with a variety of figures in Cuba, which was a hub for writers, artists, and revolutionaries from across the Americas, even after the greater Stalinization of culture after 1971. These included the musicians involved in the Nueva Trova movement but also a veritable who’s who of writers such as the Argentine writers Juan Gelman and Rodolfo Walsh. Margaret, who was already a friend of Ernesto Cardenal, is present in his book In Cuba where we get an outsider’s perspective on her life of that period. Cardenal reports that her home was very much a hub for visitors; she was one of the few major American poets who was able to bridge the immense gulf between Cuba and the US. She also became friendly with several of the exiled Sandinistas, many of whom were youthful poets, and Nicaragua in 1979 just after the revolution’s success, taking part in the Nicaragua post-revolutionary transition at Cardenal’s invitation.

Margaret’s involvement in the burgeoning genre of testimonio peaked during the late 1970s-1980s, reflected by her poetry in We (1978), a series of nine “portraits” of people she knew or had met. Among these is her portrait of Lillian Apotheker and her husband Walter Lowenfels. Lowenfels was a longtime activist, poet, and Communist Party USA member, who was arrested under the Smith Act and prosecuted for his alleged attempt to “overthrow the federal government.” In one of the recent volumes of her Letters From the Edge, we see the framing of this portrait. Lillian, Margaret, and Walter exchanged letters, with great mentoring tenderness; Lillian even takes to correcting Margaret’s spelling. These portraits are one of the first looks, in her poetry, at the setbacks and extreme sacrifices and repressions that the almost two decades since the Cuban Revolution had meant for writers, activists, and revolutionaries across the hemisphere and beyond, though from the intimate standpoint of a friend, a colleague, a comrade. In “Another Layer of Pain,” a portrait of Brazilian revolutionary Liszt Veira, Margaret writes,

Here the prose block acts as an aid to memory, to grief, and the will to persist beyond the deaths of Apotheker and Lowenfels, the rise of dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere, and beyond the immense loss of life in Vietnam despite the defeat of the U.S. armed forces. These layers of pain, which the poet recalls in 1978, run parallel to her own, it seems, and to the poetics of what feel like near-automatic writing, or one that begins to return to the psyche and to the need to bear witness.

The urge to bear witness brought Margaret to Nicaragua in 1979-1980. After the 1979 revolution, Ernesto Cardenal reached out to her, asking if she would like to come work for the ministry of culture, which he headed. The expanding US-based movement in solidarity with the Sandinistas relied on her photography and oral histories in making its case against Reagan’s murderous policies across the Americas in the early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, Margaret, who had been away from her parents for more than two decades, and who had witnessed the brutal violence and deprivation of the Contra War decided to move back to New Mexico. This would prove complicated.

During her time in Mexico in the 1960s, Margaret needed to obtain permission to work, and had to secure residency and citizenship in Mexico to be able to take care of her family. Though she should have been able to hold onto her US citizenship, she was instructed by the US embassy in Mexico City to give it up. Though she was aware of having resigned her American citizenship, she believed, given her connection and former citizenship in the United States, that she would be granted legal residency in the US, which she applied for. After, as she writes in the introduction to The Coming Home Poems,

The case went on for years, with Margaret eventually winning her right to stay in the US and the restoration of her citizenship. Because of the heightened attention to the case and its perceived political implications, universities declined to offer Margaret an adequately paid teaching position. She even endured verbal and physical attacks. In 1986, Margaret published The Coming Home Poems, a short collection with proceeds going to help her legal defense, which was championed by friends and allies including Adrienne Rich, Pat Parker, Toni Morisson, and others.

The poems in this slim volume, however, remain true to form and refuse what would be an understandable focus on the self. Consider, for instance, the poem “Under Attack”: “Listen. These voices are under attack,” the poet begins. What follows are the voices of several women who have been silenced by patriarchy, the forces of the state, the forces of empire. The poem ends:

The outrage and disgust of twenty years prior in “Just a Note, Mr. Johnson” returns, this time with the second person addressing not the absent president, but the reader as comrade, as listener. The need to remedy historical injustice does not just come with a demand for the cessation of violence or for the revolutionary ethos. Instead, the politics of the poem asks you to weave these threads together.

During her deportation proceedings, Margaret met Barbara Byers, who has been her partner since the 1980s. In her book Dancing With the Doe, in which the poet works through sexual violence suffered in early childhood, she also writes one of the great autobiographical poems of this era of her writing, “The Colors of My Language.” The poem responds to “Being Eight When Those Things Happened” in some ways, as in the lines:

To read Margaret’s work as she heads toward 90 in December of this year is an immense privilege because we learn what it is to remain responsible to the world. We see, and can follow, the many paths that have been opened up by her writing, by her undaunted desire to be in the world as a poet. We see, in effect, what it means to live a life, only barely slowed, in which a better world is modeled in poetry and because of poetry. Already eight years ago, Margaret wrote these lines, which put it more clearly than I can: