SOURCE: Grossman, Edith. “The Trajectory of Antipoetry.” In The Antipoetry of Nicanor Parra, pp. 1-43. New York: New York University Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Grossman presents an overview of the notion of antipoetry and Parra's use of the concept in his work.

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Nicanor Parra has been a poet for most of his life and a confessed antipoet since 1954, when he rocked the Latin American literary world with Poemas y antipoemas. The book definitively established him as a significant and influential writer, one who had, according to Pablo Neruda, “vanquished the sigh and was quite capable of supervising the decapitation of the sigher.”¹ Parra's own semiserious version of the origins of antipoetry focuses on what he calls his three moments of “poetic illumination.” The first inspired him at the age of eleven to compose an epic trilogy that recounted the history of the Araucano Indians, the Spaniards and...