In a U.S. Latina/o context, poetry can be thought of in terms of both literary texts and expressive cultural practices, and the tension between these two understandings of poetry has been integral to the evolution of Latina/o literary and cultural studies. In the context of literary studies, we tend to think of poems as more or less stable texts whose relative formal difficulty requires certain modes of formal analysis, such as the “close reading” advocated by the New Critics, who found poetry central to their project of institutionalizing literary study as a field demanding a quasi-scientific rigor. In cultural studies, by contrast, we eschew the hermeticism of close reading, and we seek instead to understand poetry in and along a broader textual field and in the context of everyday practices and evolving Latina/o histories. Poets and poetry were at the forefront of the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements of the 1960s and 1970s that helped shape the interdisciplinary academic field of Latina/o studies, with epic poems such as Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s “Yo soy Joaquín” (1967) and Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” (1969) epitomizing this socially engaged and oppositional _movimiento_ poetics. Such poems were at once blueprints for a movement, extensions...